So, OK, sticking with pragmatist’s example, can you summarize the conditions under which “All bachelors are unmarried” becomes false while the words retain their ordinary meaning? (I recognize that we might just turn out to disagree on what their ordinary meaning is, which I think would be uninteresting, but I’m hoping it won’t come to that.)
According to Quine’s meaning holism, explained by pragmatist here, the concepts of “bachelor” and “marriage” are embedded in a wider network of concepts like “human”, society”, “legal relation”, etc, and their use presupposes an amount of “truisms” such like that there exists humans, that humans can get involved in socially-endorsed legal relations, etc.
I find it conceivable that some of this truisms turn out to be false (e.g. imagine you are a brain in a vat) and that the entities you think of as humans are better described with a vastly different network of concepts, inexpressible with our currently existent ones. It may be that after you become aware of this and you acquire the better set of concepts, you will find your old concepts of “bachelor” and “married” confused to several degrees, and in a way such that the best way to make them survive implies that not all bachelors are unmarried.
One motivating example often used by Quineans is the law of excluded middle (“all meaningful propositions are either true or false”). It might seem analytic based on the meaning of “proposition”, “true” and “false”, but there are interpretations of quantum mechanics in which it is false. Whether those interpretations are the best ones is beside the point; the point is that there are several philosophers of physics who find the negation of the law of excluded middle conceivable in a new conceptual structure more appropriate to describe the new facts of quantum mechanics. The Quinean claim is that all propositions are revisable in this way.
It may be that after you become aware of this and you acquire the better set of concepts, you will find your old concepts of “bachelor” and “married” confused to several degrees, and in a way such that the best way to make them survive implies that not all bachelors are unmarried.
Sure, I can believe that. I mean, I can’t imagine it, but I believe it’s possible in some way that I can’t imagine. I certainly agree that meaning is holistic in the sense pragmatist explains, such that the meaning of such a sentence can change based on systemic effects.
But to believe that, and believe that “bachelor” and “marriage” have their ordinary meanings at the same time, is beyond me.
But to believe that, and believe that “bachelor” and “marriage” have their ordinary meanings at the same time, is beyond me.
The contention is that “the ordinary meaning” of a word is a fuzzy and ill-defined concept, once holism creeps in.
Consider another example (used by Putnam, I think). Physicists first introduced the concept of “momentum” as the product of mass and velocity. A central fact that made the concept useful was that momentum is conserved in an isolated system. Later, with relativity, it became clear that the conserved quantity is not really the product of mass and velocity, but includes a speed-of-light dependent factor as well. Physicists started then calling this quantity “momentum”.
Now, was this a change in the meaning of the word “momentum”, or a new fact discovered about the same physical entity momentum? This would seem to depend on whether the first early modern physicist who used the word intended “momentum” to have a fixed meaning as the product of mass and velocity, or as the quantity conserved in an isolated system. But he probably didn’t make his intention clear, and in any case his private intention does not matter if meaning is social and holistic. Even if most pre-Einstein physicists would have (if questioned, which they weren’t) agreed that “momentum” meant definitionally mass times velocity, post-Einstein physicists may be perfectly justified in saying they would have been wrong, that Einstein made a new physical discovery about the same quantity they were trying to talk about and not merely changed the meaning of words. What is “the ordinary meaning” (pre-Einstein) of “momentum” is not a question with a well-defined answer; the relevant unit of meaning was the whole physical theory, which was replaced by a new one, and we cannot make a clean distinction between which were changes in meaning and which were changes in factual beliefs.
It is more difficult to imagine something like this happening for “bachelor”, but according to Quineans, the difference is only of degree.
It is more difficult to imagine something like this happening for “bachelor”, but according to Quineans, the difference is only of degree.
Considering the present controversy over “the definition of marriage”, I think we can imagine many such cases.
Is a man who has lived with the same woman for ten years — but has never had a wedding — a “bachelor”? How about a man who has had a commitment ceremony with another man? (Does it matter if the invitations said “marriage” or “commitment ceremony”?) A man who has a marriage of convenience to a woman he has never slept with, for purposes of immigration? A man from a culture where he was, as a young boy, married by his family to a young girl, but who has left that setting and never seen her since? A man who believes he is married to a particular woman, but subsequent careful inspection of family history reveals that she is his long-lost sister and thus the marriage is invalid for incest? A Catholic priest?
Just as subsequent physics discoveries can problematize the definition of “momentum”, subsequent social and personal-history discoveries can problematize the definition of “bachelor”. The “ordinary meaning” is only had by choosing to ignore problems.
For my own part, I would say that if we take the relevant unit of meaning to be the whole physical theory (a position I find compelling in principle, if unwieldy in practice), it follows that changing the physical theory does not preserve preexisting meanings. I would not say that the meaning of “momentum” changed, precisely, but that “momentum” acquired a new meaning in addition to its old one, and anyone talking about momentum in a relativistic context is using the new meaning, even though people talking about momentum in a non-relativistic context can go on using the old meaning. (I would also say that the intent of the first physicist to use the term is effectively irrelevant.)
This also implies that people who try to copy over assertions about momentum from non-relativistic contexts to relativistic ones are essentially confusing homophones… similar in principle to what happens if I try to copy over assertions about monarchs from lepidopterological contexts to governmental ones.
But, OK, I can understand how someone could sensibly argue that no, the meaning is preserved, because the meaning was always fuzzy in the first place, we just became aware of the fuzziness late in the game. (This seems to in turn depend on a strongly externalist account of meaning.)
Huh. Well, I’m willing to be convinced.
So, OK, sticking with pragmatist’s example, can you summarize the conditions under which “All bachelors are unmarried” becomes false while the words retain their ordinary meaning? (I recognize that we might just turn out to disagree on what their ordinary meaning is, which I think would be uninteresting, but I’m hoping it won’t come to that.)
According to Quine’s meaning holism, explained by pragmatist here, the concepts of “bachelor” and “marriage” are embedded in a wider network of concepts like “human”, society”, “legal relation”, etc, and their use presupposes an amount of “truisms” such like that there exists humans, that humans can get involved in socially-endorsed legal relations, etc.
I find it conceivable that some of this truisms turn out to be false (e.g. imagine you are a brain in a vat) and that the entities you think of as humans are better described with a vastly different network of concepts, inexpressible with our currently existent ones. It may be that after you become aware of this and you acquire the better set of concepts, you will find your old concepts of “bachelor” and “married” confused to several degrees, and in a way such that the best way to make them survive implies that not all bachelors are unmarried.
One motivating example often used by Quineans is the law of excluded middle (“all meaningful propositions are either true or false”). It might seem analytic based on the meaning of “proposition”, “true” and “false”, but there are interpretations of quantum mechanics in which it is false. Whether those interpretations are the best ones is beside the point; the point is that there are several philosophers of physics who find the negation of the law of excluded middle conceivable in a new conceptual structure more appropriate to describe the new facts of quantum mechanics. The Quinean claim is that all propositions are revisable in this way.
Sure, I can believe that. I mean, I can’t imagine it, but I believe it’s possible in some way that I can’t imagine. I certainly agree that meaning is holistic in the sense pragmatist explains, such that the meaning of such a sentence can change based on systemic effects.
But to believe that, and believe that “bachelor” and “marriage” have their ordinary meanings at the same time, is beyond me.
The contention is that “the ordinary meaning” of a word is a fuzzy and ill-defined concept, once holism creeps in.
Consider another example (used by Putnam, I think). Physicists first introduced the concept of “momentum” as the product of mass and velocity. A central fact that made the concept useful was that momentum is conserved in an isolated system. Later, with relativity, it became clear that the conserved quantity is not really the product of mass and velocity, but includes a speed-of-light dependent factor as well. Physicists started then calling this quantity “momentum”.
Now, was this a change in the meaning of the word “momentum”, or a new fact discovered about the same physical entity momentum? This would seem to depend on whether the first early modern physicist who used the word intended “momentum” to have a fixed meaning as the product of mass and velocity, or as the quantity conserved in an isolated system. But he probably didn’t make his intention clear, and in any case his private intention does not matter if meaning is social and holistic. Even if most pre-Einstein physicists would have (if questioned, which they weren’t) agreed that “momentum” meant definitionally mass times velocity, post-Einstein physicists may be perfectly justified in saying they would have been wrong, that Einstein made a new physical discovery about the same quantity they were trying to talk about and not merely changed the meaning of words. What is “the ordinary meaning” (pre-Einstein) of “momentum” is not a question with a well-defined answer; the relevant unit of meaning was the whole physical theory, which was replaced by a new one, and we cannot make a clean distinction between which were changes in meaning and which were changes in factual beliefs.
It is more difficult to imagine something like this happening for “bachelor”, but according to Quineans, the difference is only of degree.
Considering the present controversy over “the definition of marriage”, I think we can imagine many such cases.
Is a man who has lived with the same woman for ten years — but has never had a wedding — a “bachelor”? How about a man who has had a commitment ceremony with another man? (Does it matter if the invitations said “marriage” or “commitment ceremony”?) A man who has a marriage of convenience to a woman he has never slept with, for purposes of immigration? A man from a culture where he was, as a young boy, married by his family to a young girl, but who has left that setting and never seen her since? A man who believes he is married to a particular woman, but subsequent careful inspection of family history reveals that she is his long-lost sister and thus the marriage is invalid for incest? A Catholic priest?
Just as subsequent physics discoveries can problematize the definition of “momentum”, subsequent social and personal-history discoveries can problematize the definition of “bachelor”. The “ordinary meaning” is only had by choosing to ignore problems.
OK, I think I follow.
For my own part, I would say that if we take the relevant unit of meaning to be the whole physical theory (a position I find compelling in principle, if unwieldy in practice), it follows that changing the physical theory does not preserve preexisting meanings. I would not say that the meaning of “momentum” changed, precisely, but that “momentum” acquired a new meaning in addition to its old one, and anyone talking about momentum in a relativistic context is using the new meaning, even though people talking about momentum in a non-relativistic context can go on using the old meaning. (I would also say that the intent of the first physicist to use the term is effectively irrelevant.)
This also implies that people who try to copy over assertions about momentum from non-relativistic contexts to relativistic ones are essentially confusing homophones… similar in principle to what happens if I try to copy over assertions about monarchs from lepidopterological contexts to governmental ones.
But, OK, I can understand how someone could sensibly argue that no, the meaning is preserved, because the meaning was always fuzzy in the first place, we just became aware of the fuzziness late in the game. (This seems to in turn depend on a strongly externalist account of meaning.)
Not the source of my surprise.
Thanks for priming everyone who reads this thread before voting, though.
If you are interested in exploring this issue, Quine’s Two Dogmas is probably the best place to start.
http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html