Tõe otsing

by Willard Van Orman Quine, Lauri Pilter (Translator), Jaan Kangilaski (Editor)

Olen neil lehekülgedel võtnud eesmärgiks ajakohastada, kokku võtta ja selgitada oma mitmeti põimuvaid vaateid kognitiivsele tähendusele, objektiivsele osutusele ning teadmise alustele. Osa edasiminekust on seletav ja osa sisuline. See sisu on esile kerkinud hooti viimase kümne aasta jooksul, osalt loengutel, vabas arutelus ja juhuartiklites. Neid mõtteid omavahel seostades olen vahetevahel leidnud vigaseid ühenduspunkte ning olen nüüd andnud neile kuju, mis mind rahuldab.

Adresseerin selle raamatukese niihästi oma vanadele kui uutele lugejatele ning seetõttu esitan lühemalt neid teemasid, mida olen teistes raamatutes juba käsitlenud. Siiski kordan tuttavat mõttekäiku kohtades, kus näen idees või tema esitusviisis edasiminekut, ja ka seal, kus uus lugeja vajab kaasatulekuks lühikest eelkokkuvõtet.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Linguistics, Logic, Science

125 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

"Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25, 1908 Akron, Ohio – December 25, 2000) (known to intimates as "Van"), was an American analytic philosopher and logician. From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was affiliated in some way with Harvard University, first as a student, then as a professor of philosophy and a teacher of mathematics, and finally as an emeritus elder statesman who published or revised seven books in retirement. He filled the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard, 1956-78. Quine falls squarely into the analytic philosophy tradition while also being the main proponent of the view that philosophy is not conceptual analysis. His major writings include "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", which attacked the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions and advocated a form of semantic holism, and Word and Object which further developed these positions and introduced the notorious indeterminacy of translation thesis." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_...

Reviews

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 3 out of 5]

An exceedingly difficult book, more or less summing up Quine's lifework, of which I'd known little. Discusses the possibility of scientific knowledge, the way sense data is reified into facts about the world, language and the impossibility of translation (if a speaker of an unknown language points at a rabbit and says "gavagai!", what exactly are they referring to?), throwing around the word "holophrastic" a lot, which seems to mean "in the sense of the language as a whole, not one word or phrase in isolation". The Bose-Einstein statistics (in which bosons, unlike fermions, are able to be in the same place at the same time) imply that our mental models of how things look might be fundamentally inappropriate. There's a lot more that I failed to get - a reread (or several) is in order.

[Jared Martin]

Wow, an epistemology birthed from naturalism. Honestly, my engagement of the book began as ambitious and optimistic, but steadily deteriorated as the semantic tedium caused all vitality to leak out of my soul.
Ok, that was dramatic, but since it is an academic book, I found it to be cumbersome and fairly boring. I also relied heavily on a detailed outline I found on the internet to help me even understand what he was saying. Hardly a book for the average reader and I am definitely average it would seem.
I’m glad I don’t need to represent this body of work in any way. The redeeming characteristic for me was Quine’s wit.

[Zarathustra Goertzel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amusing book on Quine's epistemology, framing the pursuit of truth in empiricism. I like the indeterminacy of translation perspective.

[Bry Willis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dense and academic, but content rich. I may have to reread it several more times.

I happened upon this work in support of my thesis that the only Truth is rhetoric, rhetoric being purely a function of language.

[Emanuel Landeholm]

"dog-facing and is bristling"

[Ondrej Havlicek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Behaviorism's not dead!

[John C. Duff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read it twice. Pretty technical but well worth the read.

[Peter Reczek · Rating 3 out of 5]

A restatement of other philosophers on the same subject. Chapter 1 on evidence is the best part.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quine is taking the analytical and logical positivism a little bit further by adding some American behaviorism, holism, and pragmatism to them. In doing so, Quine is moving in an academic and restricted circle (i.e., Carnap, Tarski, Russell, and similar) and thus trying to take further and to solve some of their logical problems. After reading a lot of Heidegger lately - this short book seems to me quite colorless, without depths, formal, free-floating, boring, lifeless, and an endless collection of metaphysical pronouncements (about truth, reality, subjectivity, objectivity, epistemology, logic, mathematics, language, ontology, theories, sciences, and similar).

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliant and concise rendering of Quine's most important ideas—some of the most important ideas in the 20th century. This book requires slow, careful reading and is somewhat technical, but rewards the reader with profoundly original ideas.

[East Avenue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dense. It covers material that spans his entire career; in about 100 pages. There are some technical terms and subtle concepts, but he provides clear examples. Basically, he gives a materialist and behaviorist account of meaning and truth and presents two surprising results; the indeterminacy of translation and under-determination of global science. It's excellent. This is about as good as a small book of analytic philosophy can get.

[Matt Gold]

Audiobook was a mistake... making large technical sections more or less unintelligible, I might reread this in physical form after learning more about Quine. The best parts of reading this for me were the videos I watched on Quine's ideas as side-research :D

[Yekta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Man, I really don't like analytics.

[Mason]

"Man proposes; the world disposes, but only by holophrastic yes-or-no verdicts on the observation sentences that embody man's predictions."

Amen, Willard 🙏

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

QUINE PROPOSES TO “UPDATE” A NUMBER OF HIS IDEAS

Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) was an American philosopher and logician who taught at Harvard University, and wrote many books.

He wrote in the Preface to the first (1990) edition, “In these pages I have undertaken to update, sum up, and clarify my variously intersecting views on cognitive meaning, objective reference, and the grounds of knowledge. Some of the progress is expository and some substantive. The substance has been precipitating sporadically over the past ten years, and some of it has surfaced in lectures, informal discussions, and scattered paragraphs… I intend this little book no less for my past readers then for my new ones, so I have curbed my exposition of things already belabored in my other books. I do retrace familiar ground where I see an improvement in the idea of the presentation …”

He says in the first essay, “What brought us to an examination of observation was our quest of the link between observation and theory. The observation sentence is the means of verbalizing the prediction that checks a theory. The requirement that it command a verdict outright is what makes it a final checkpoint. The requirement of intersubjectivity is what makes science objective.” (Pg. 4-5)

He admits, “I am of that [group] who repudiate the Cartesian dream of a foundation for scientific certainty firmer than scientific method itself. But I remain occupied, we see, with what has been central to traditional epistemology, namely the relation of science to sensory data.” (Pg. 19)

He concludes the second essay, “The objectivity of our knowledge of the external world remains rooted in our contact with the external world, hence in our neural intake and the observation sentences that respond to it. We begin with the monolithic sentence, not the term. A lesson of proxy functions is that our ontology, like grammar, is part of our own conceptual contribution to our theory of the world. Man proposes; the world disposes, but only by … yes-or-no verdicts on the observation sentences that embody man’s predictions.” (Pg. 36)

In the third essay, he asserts, “my thought experiment of radical translation… led to a negative conclusion, a thesis of indeterminacy of translation. Critics have said that the thesis is a consequence of my behaviorism… I agree ... I hold further that the behaviorist approach is mandatory. In psychology one may or may not be a behaviorist, but in linguistics one has no choice.” (Pg. 37-38)

In a later essay, he states, “Perceptions are neural realities, and so are the individual instances of beliefs and other propositional attitudes insofar as these do not fade out into irreality altogether. Physicalist explanation of neural events and states goes blithely forward with no intrusion of mental laws or intensional concepts. What are irreducibly mental are ways of grouping them… I acquiesce in what [Donald] Davidson calls anomalous monism, also known as token physicalism: there is no mental substance, but there are irreducibly mental ways of grouping physical states, and events.” (Pg. 71-72)

I’m rather doubtful that this book would be a meaningful “introduction” to Quine for “new readers.” But for persons wanting a thoughtful reconsideration and reformulation of some of his key ideas, this book will be of significant interest.

[Kye Sonne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is funny without meaning to be (though maybe he meant to be because he was a humorous character). He’s such an intelligent guy, and keeps bringing up all these philosophical arguments and then ends with ambivalence about the topic. This was written later when psychological behaviorism was getting torn apart and Quine didn’t have any scientific basis to his positions anymore. He gets excited about advances in science, especially cognitive science, but it was still new at the time to make any strong claims about what it demonstrated.
He stuck to his guns: logic. With logic he spelled out his ontological relativism. This was the stage that was set for Saul Kripke when he walked on as a teen and began making further contributions to logic climaxing with his modal logic for rigid designators.

[Errol Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am looking for and epistemology that supports phenomenography. Although I accept his coherence argument for truth, it does not help resolve the different conceptions that people have of a phenomenon. Trying to reconcile theories is helpful but in phenomenography, we are talking of differences in experience or awareness. This is not something Quine discusses.

[Tijmen Lansdaal · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well-written, in his typical style. Very informative on his thinking.