Donald Davidson is generally supposed to have offered an argument for the principle of compositionality in “Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages”. Peter Pagin, however, has argued that Davidson offers no such argument. Indeed, Pagin claims that Davidson explicitly rejects any demand that compositionality should be justified and, moreover, claims that the argument in question is unsound. I argue here that the first claim is mistaken and that the latter, though it offers a helpful corrective to the usual interpretation, does not apply to the argument Davidson actually gives. But there is a deep tension in Davidson’s work here, to which Pagin may well be responding, and it is a tension that Davidson himself cannot resolve.
During a conversation about skepticism at a closed 1986 Stanford Conference, Donald Davidson remarks that an envatted brain might correctly be interpreted as talking about the world outside its vat, to which it could have access via an “indirect causal chain.” In this paper, I examine this puzzling suggestion in the context of Davidson’s theory of triangulation, which would seem to preclude the interpreter being a mediate cause in the chain stemming from objects to the subject of interpretation. By prying apart a range of scenarios that the conference participants discuss, I distinguish Davidson’s antiskeptical argument from others in the semantic externalist family to which it belongs, and argue that his approach to language and mind may provide particular consolation to a person made anxious by the threat of solipsism.
Suppose we were to encounter an overall scientific theory as equally warranted as the overall theory we believe is true. W. V. Quine thinks that there is a dilemma about whether to believe this additional theory. Whether there is a dilemma in any case, I argue, depends upon how we understand equivalence of warrant in the first-personal context of deliberating about what to believe. On one understanding, equal warrant of two theories implies that I have enough reason to believe one theory if and only if I have enough reason to believe the other. But here, there is no dilemma: I ought to believe both theories given I should believe one. There is more plausibly a dilemma if equal warrant implies that, if I have enough reason to believe one theory, I lack enough reason to reject the other, and vice versa. But I argue that Quine’s views have some awkward consequences if equal warrant is understood in this latter sense. My paper draws on the transcript of a colloquium at Stanford University in 1986 with Quine, Donald Davidson, Burton Dreben, and Dagfinn Føllesdal.
Modal logic is widely used in computer science, linguistics, and other disciplines. But how could this have happened? Didn’t W. V. Quine destroy modal logic halfway through the twentieth century—at least as something that any naturalist or empiricist could take seriously? Quine’s work was quite influential. It seemed for a while that modal logic, if not given a death blow, had been gravely injured. But in the Transcript, Dreben points out that this seems to have been a Pyrrhic Victory. In this paper, we briefly discuss Quine’s problems with modal logic and Føllesdal’s answer. We then argue that Føllesdal’s proposal has all the tools necessary to deal with modal concepts and terms. Finally, after a discussion of their reluctance towards reference and the uses both Davidson and Quine make, in the Transcript, of the expressions “necessary,’’”necessarily,’’ and “necessity,’’ we outline our own proposal for necessity. We sketch an account of modal properties that, assuming Føllesdal’s two-sorted semantics and, therefore, a benign form of Aristotelian Essentialism, lacks metaphysical implications grave enough to discard modal logic and, in particular, has no need of possible worlds.
The Transcript of the 1986 Stanford Conversation records how Quine grapples with the inconsistencies he seeks and finds in his own views. Why was Quine so reluctant and ambivalent concerning propositional attitudes— “the mental”—including the propositional attitudes of empathy? The hypothesis explored in this article is that Quine’s acceptance of the mental effected central, deep changes to his theory, so that we witness him being torn between simplicity and conservation as he continued to improve on his web of belief. Quine’s pragmatism and commitment to the hypothetico-deductive method required him to adjust his existing web of belief in light of new findings and systematic thinking, including the aims of science construed—“Wissenschaft”, the epistemic virtues, the role of prediction, and his preference for physical objects. Section 2 considers Quine’s acceptance of mental notions; Section 3 focuses on the propositional attitudes of empathy in particular. Section 4 sketches some of the ramifications of this change for the aims of science broadly construed—“Wissenschaft”—and hence of epistemic virtues, and for the role of prediction.
This focusses on a certain theme of the 1986 closed conference at Stanford featuring Quine, Davidson, Føllesdal and Dreben, a transcript entitled the ‘Stanford Conversation’ having just been released: the contrast between traditional epistemology and Quine’s naturalized epistemology. A central fixture of the latter is the notion of stimulus meaning. Davidson objects to the notion repeatedly and vehemently, finding it unacceptably private or at least idiosyncratic, and indeed urging that it is of no epistemic or semantic relevance. On the contrary, Davidson contends, what is needed for both epistemology and semantics are simply the ordinary, public objects of reference, at least in typical cases. In opposition to Davidson, Føllesdal makes an interesting counter-suggestion to Quine’s stimulus meaning. It construes observation sentences as having meaning-like properties which are publicly available, yet, unlike the distal items insisted on by Davidson, they are still proximate. I generalize and sharpen Føllesdal’s suggestion, in such a way as to answer the reservations that Quine himself expressed. Meanwhile Dreben and Quine urge that, so far as one has naturalized epistemology firmly in mind, Davidson’s alternative is simply not available, not least because it seems for all the world to presuppose reference. I stress this.
Burton Dreben, Quine’s colleague and closest collaborator down the decades, took it upon himself to make Quine’s thinking as strong as possible. Without broadcasting the fact, he was at pains to pinpoint Quine’s philosophical achievement and combat misunderstandings of what Quine was about. In this paper I discuss Dreben’s contributions to the 1986 closed Stanford conference, in particular the interventions in which he pushed back against Donald Davidson’s reservations about central themes in Quine’s philosophy. My primary purpose is to underscore Dreben’s support for Quine at the conference and indicate how he thought Quine’s writings are best understood.
Quine’s conjecture that there are multiple correct though mutually incompatible translation manuals for alien languages (the indeterminacy of translation) and his related thesis that there is no fact of the matter as to what our terms refer to (the indeterminacy of reference) are two of the most notorious ideas in the history of analytic philosophy. Yet little is known about the genesis and development of Quine’s indeterminacy theses. In this paper, I reconstruct the evolution of Quine’s views on radical translation and argue that they can be traced back to two unpublished papers on logic and ontology, which he wrote but eventually abandoned in 1937 and 1949. Next, I analyze the evolution of his ideas up until the late 1980s, showing how Quine gradually changed the, in his own words, “foggy” position he introduced in Word and Object (1960) and “Ontological Relativity” (1968a). This reconstruction, I argue, does not only contribute to a better understanding of Quine’s philosophical development. It will also help to contextualize his views and to identify and resolve some unclarities in his most-read writings on the topic.
A central theme in Davidson’s and Quine’s philosophical disagreement over many decades concerns the relationship between meaning and evidence and its basic role in the theory of knowledge. Using the recently discovered 1986 Stanford conversations, I revisit their debate over these issues, focusing on the question of their role in Davidson’s development. The conversations highlight an important transition in Davidson’s criticisms of Quine’s naturalized epistemology, where he more explicitly favors the distal stimulus over the proximal stimulus in translation and interpretation. I argue that this proximal-distal analysis serves to clarify his critical stance towards Quine’s view and helps to further his own externalist approach to epistemology. A brief overview of Davidson’s more explicit commitment to externalism and his appeal to the device known as triangulation is provided in order to highlight their central role in his alternative ‘epistemology externalized’. Using further exchanges from the conversations I conclude by wondering to what extent this view can been seen as a contribution to naturalized epistemology, suggesting that it points to a more fundamental break with Quine than Davidson seems to allow.
W. V. Quine developed two naturalistic clarifications of the idea that observation sentences are intersubjective—the clarification he first proposed in Word and Object (1960) and the one he first proposed in “Three Indeterminacies” (1990b) and Pursuit of Truth (1990a). My goals in this paper are to examine both clarifications and to develop a consistent and defensible version of the second one. To shed light on these issues I examine Quine’s and Davidson’s extended discussion of the intersubjectivity of observation sentences at the 1986 Stanford Quine Conference. During this discussion Davidson argues at length that we have no idea how to specify, in physiological or physical terms, resemblances between events of neural stimulation, or facts about physical forces at or close to a person’s body, that are present when and only when we judge, by our ordinary criteria, that two speakers jointly witness the same event. Davidson’s arguments convinced Quine to abandon his first main account of observation sentences and seek to develop a new one. Combining Davidson’s arguments with others that Quine had voiced himself as early as 1965, I reconstruct and defend of the account of observation sentences that Quine develops in “Three Indeterminacies,” Pursuit of Truth, and later works.
Quine’s stance towards mathematical entities is usually divided into two phases. Until 1948 he sympathised with nominalism and the rejection of abstract objects, but then concluded that they are indispensable and accepted mathematical Platonism. It has rarely been noticed, however, that Quine’s Platonist phase can itself be divided into two stages: a grudging phase that lasts until the mid-1980s, during which Quine still regards nominalism as desirable, and a relaxed phase in which he has stopped regretting the acceptance of mathematical objects. Why did Quine make the latter switch? Archival evidence suggests that the 1986 Stanford discussion led Quine to reflect anew on his own philosophy of mathematics. I will reconstruct this development by focussing on Quine’s own remark that the indeterminacy of reference reconciled him with Platonism. Special attention will be paid to Burton Dreben’s influence.
A lively debate has arisen as to whether we should interpret Sellars as an individualist or a collectivist about we-intentions. Individualism holds that an agent’s we-intending does not depend on the we-intending of the larger group. The collectivist holds, by contrast, that an individual’s we-attitude presupposes the corresponding group attitude. Sellars’s view of we-intentions, and his view on reasoning among intentions, underwent significant shifts during his career. Most recent interpretation of Sellars reads him as an individualist. However, I will argue for a moderate collectivism, one that offers a reconciliation between stronger versions of collectivism and individualism while at the same time insisting on the priority of collectivism. On this account, the paradigm or “reference” case—the case most revealing of the nature of we-intentionality—requires actually shared intentions. Individual unshared intentions are possible, but necessarily exceptional, and parasitic on the paradigm case. Thus, the shared intentions of a group have explanatory priority over an individual’s we-intention, and the latter is dependent on the former. I will conclude that moderate collectivism is not only textually supported by Sellars’s late articles, but that it is the most philosophically sound position as well.
We offer a novel interpretation of Frank Ramsey’s talk, “On There Being No Discussable Subject,” delivered to the Cambridge Apostles Society in 1925. We suggest that Ramsey aimed to present a reductio ad absurdum argument. His argument was that if the prevailing philosophical outlook among the Apostles were true, then we would conclude that there is nothing to discuss in the Society. Ramsey believed that this conclusion is absurd. His point was to challenge the Apostles by telling them that their theoretical philosophical commitments fail to explain why, indeed, there is much to discuss in the Society in practice. Exploring Ramsey’s reductio argument motivates a new historical explanation for the pragmatist philosophy he developed in the second half of the 1920s. It also facilitates a new reading of his pragmatism and its significance. More specifically, we argue that Ramsey developed his pragmatism partly due to his concern that the prevailing philosophical outlook within Cambridge-based intellectual circles, such as the Apostles Society, seemed to fail to account for the epistemic value of their members’ non-expert conversations with each other. His pragmatism left us hints about how to make sense of the epistemology of disagreements in our daily social lives.
I offer a contribution to studies into the role played by women in the history of analytic philosophy through an examination of the way in which Dorothy Wrinch rejected idealism in the early 1920s. I show that Wrinch viewed certain idealist interpretations of Einsteinian physics as literally not significant, through an application of Russell’s notion of ‘logical construction’ to scientific concepts. I show, though, that Wrinch’s view departed from Russell’s in certain crucial respects and constitutes an original and radical empiricism rooted in an understanding of scientific language. I briefly compare Wrinch’s empiricism with that of the Aufbau and show that her rejection of metaphysics pre-dates that of Carnap by several years.
This paper argues that Gottlob Frege has two distinct views toward psychology. The first view is underappreciated. It consists in his dual claim that psychological and logical elements in thought are naturally intertwined and, furthermore, that his conceptual notation can be “scientifically justified” in terms of a psychological origin story. These claims are supported with evidence provided by an analysis of key elements of his logic in the Begriffsschrift, by a summary of the major psychological mechanisms presented in his first published defense of the Begriffsschrift: “On the Scientific Justification of a Conceptual Notation,” and by an appeal to textual evidence from his unpublished “Logic” (1879–1991). The second view is well known. It is his claim that there is a methodological imperative to isolate logic from psychological influences. This claim is developed in two ways: he proposes a contextualist semantics to reject any psychologistic dependence on ideas and also narrows the notion of content, with its reliance on ideas, to the notion of conceptual content which focuses on logical relations. Finally, it is argued that this narrowing provides the key elements of the framework for his criticisms of psychology in the Grundlagen.
