2

In this interview with Bryan Magee in 1978, W. V. O. Quine mentions that some philosophers believed that (1) philosophy is separate from science (2) philosophy provided a basis on which to build science:

I think of philosophy as concerned with our knowledge of the world, and the nature of the world. I think of philosophy as attempting "to round out the system of the world" as Newton put it. There have been philosophers who have thought of philosophy as somehow separate from science and as providing a firm basis on which to build science. But this I consider an empty dream. Science, much of science, is firmer than philosophy is or can even perhaps aspire to be. I think of philosophy as continuous with science, even as a part of science.

To which philosophers and school of thoughts is Quine referring here?

Starckman
  • 1,510
  • 4
  • 14
  • 3
    All the "foundationalist" philosophers: Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel etc. – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Feb 12 '23 at 08:50
  • @MauroALLEGRANZA But how come? foundationalist include some many philosophers, including some in the same trend of thoughts (analytic philosophy and empiricism) as Quine: – Starckman Feb 12 '23 at 09:05
  • "Several other philosophers of the early modern period, including John Locke, G. W. Leibniz, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Thomas Reid, accepted foundationalism as well.[7] Baruch Spinoza was interpreted as metaphysical foundationalist by G. W. F. Hegel, a proponent of coherentism.[8] Immanuel Kant's foundationalism rests on his theory of categories.[9] – Starckman Feb 12 '23 at 09:05
  • In late modern philosophy, foundationalism was defended by J. G. Fichte in his book Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (1794/1795),[10] Wilhelm Windelband in his book Über die Gewißheit der Erkenntniss. (1873),[11] and Gottlob Frege in his book Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884).[12]

    In contemporary philosophy, foundationalism has been defended by Edmund Husserl,[13] Bertrand Russell[14] and John McDowell.[15][16]" (Wikipedia)

     – Starckman Feb 12 '23 at 09:05
  • Quine himself was not a foundationalist, favouring instead a more coherentist position in accordance with the principle of the underdetermination of theories by data. Russell was an advocate of what Quine is disagreeing with. For Russell, there is a sharp division of epistemological labour between scientists and philosophers. Philosophers are concerned with the task of conceptual analysis, while scientists tell us which propositions are true. Although Quine and Russell both stand in the analytical tradition, they are quite different on this point. – Bumble Feb 12 '23 at 13:33
  • @Bumble So here Quine is opposing to quite everybody? – Starckman Feb 12 '23 at 13:41
  • 2
    Not opposed to everybody, but to those who see philosophy as an apriori activity distinct from science. For Quine and many others, the two are continuous with one another: philosophy is perhaps more general and more abstract, but not fundamentally different in nature, and not different in its epistemology. – Bumble Feb 12 '23 at 14:27
  • @Bumble But foundationalism is not apriorism, and the reverse neither, right? – Starckman Feb 12 '23 at 14:36
  • 1
    In practice, scientists don't really rely on, or wait on, philosophers to do science. I would venture as far as saying that many scientists see philosophers with suspicion. – Frank Feb 12 '23 at 16:33
  • 4
    In practice, foundationalism needs to appeal to some kind of a priori principles, since otherwise it cannot boot itself up. Even the phenomenalism of the logical positivists involved a kind of a priori acceptance that sense data is indubitable and that all empirical statements of fact can be constructed from it. – Bumble Feb 12 '23 at 18:12
  • @Bumble So Quine does not "oppose" (sorry for the term) to everybody, but a lot of people still! Thank you – Starckman Feb 13 '23 at 03:25
  • @Frank "scientists don't really rely on, or wait on, philosophers to do science." This is a bit what this video says https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjckGq4j30k – Starckman Feb 13 '23 at 03:26
  • But still, I believe some philosophical thoughts are more in favor (in a way or another) to the development of natural sciences than other – Starckman Feb 13 '23 at 03:29
  • 1
    @Starckman Yes, and those that are strongly in favor align with a natural epistemology (SEP). – J D Feb 22 '23 at 20:12
  • What this is is reification, and all reification is a forgetting. A suppression of the full human and his history. No farmer. The orange really does come from the grocery store. – Gordon Feb 22 '23 at 21:05
  • Putnam saw the potential horror of Quine’s way towards the end of his life. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674013803 – Gordon Feb 22 '23 at 21:08
  • I am more suspicious of the reification angle. Philosophy as an area of broader thought. Here is Putnam’s take https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oLJfEVu3kbY – Gordon Feb 22 '23 at 21:14
  • PS Putnam is not going back to the a priori. But Putnam is correct, who would do ethics if we don’t? History? – Gordon Feb 22 '23 at 21:16
  • If the orange really “just” comes from the grocery store, if Man is forgotten, it becomes very easy to give the “final shot” in the hospital a little too early... – Gordon Feb 22 '23 at 21:31
  • @JD " Yes, and those that are strongly in favor align with a natural epistemology (SEP)." And naturalism has nothing to do with empiricism? – Starckman Feb 23 '23 at 03:18
  • A natural epistemology hoists science up among foundational sources of knowledge, and makes philosophical methods continuous with empirical methods. – J D Feb 23 '23 at 08:02
  • I am old enough to remember Magee interviews when they were first shown on BBC. Those were the days! – Marco Ocram Feb 23 '23 at 09:06
  • @MarcoOcram They are available on Youtube! Very agreeable to watch! – Starckman Feb 23 '23 at 09:07
  • @Starckman Indeed! They make such a contrast with the dumbed-down content produced by the BBC nowadays. – Marco Ocram Feb 23 '23 at 09:08
  • @MarcoOcram Quine speaks very clearly, that participates a lot also in the final effect. Nowadays you have "Closer to Truth" which is quite good. – Starckman Feb 23 '23 at 09:12
  • 1
    @Starckman Many thanks for the tip. I hadn't seen that! – Marco Ocram Feb 23 '23 at 09:22
  • @JD So natural philosophy (or naturalism? not sure the difference) is empiricist, but empiricism is not necessarily natural-philosophist, although it fits to it nicely? – Starckman Feb 23 '23 at 15:19
  • 1
    Naturalism is generally both rational and empirical. It stands in distinction to supernaturalism. As an atheist, I assent to naturalism and dissent from supernaturalism. But both I and a Catholic priest may advocate rational and empirical methods in our philosophies. Natural epistemology is a philosophical position that espouses that science and philosophy are intimately related. So, I could disagree with a fellow naturalist and athiest who believes that philosophy is very distinct from science. Logical positivists would argue that philosophy was essentially just linguistics... – J D Feb 23 '23 at 16:11
  • 1
    (anti-philosophical) and yet there are some philosophers who argue that scientific fact is a good basis for doing philosophy. For instance, some philosophers don't believe that logic reduces very much to psychology. (anti-psychologism). I personally advocate the opposite. That the theory of logic reduces to psychology on the grounds that formal and informal logic is a form of neural computation. – J D Feb 23 '23 at 16:13
  • "Naturalism is generally both rational and empirical. It stands in distinction to supernaturalism." But I think it stands in distinction to supernaturalism because it is materialist, not because it is rational and empirical. That's why a Catholic priest may also advocate rational and empirical methods in philosophy, but may certainly not be a naturalist. – Starckman Feb 25 '23 at 02:04

2 Answers2

4

What Quine is famous for, among other things is his advocacy that an thorough understanding of language means that there is no real demarcation between philosophy and science like the logical positivists tried to maintain. So, while Mauro is right in delineating "foundationalist" philosophers (particularly Descartes and his confidence in introspection as "first principles"), I think it's fair to say that in a more immediate sense, Quine was responding to the logical empiricists (SEP) and the logical positivists who are often referred to as the Berlin and Vienna circles. These philosophers were openly hostile to metaphysics and tried to show (without success) it could be eliminated. Thus, for the LPs, philosophy was nothing more than linguistic analysis.

Quine also believed in science, mathematics, and logic (the natural and formal sciences), however, he attacked some of the philosophical foundations that men such as Rudolf Carnap took as a starting point in their reasoning, in particular the analytic-synthetic divide that proposed by Kant and used heavily by the German Idealists followed later by the Germans who laid the foundation of modern analytical philosophy (according to Dummett). In his Two Dogmas of Empiricism, Quine attempts to show that there is no clear distinction between strictly analytical propositions which are true a priori, and synthetic truths which are real-world a posteriori. By doing so, he manages to soften up the notion that some truth belongs solely to the introspective powers of reason (read as philosophy) and others soley to sensory experience (read as science). If there's no strict border between truths of logic and truths of senses and observation, then philosophy and the science must in a manner exist as a continuum also with theories that co-mingle propositions of each sort. Quine is also known for his “Epistemology Naturalized” and in fact, he emphasizes the wholistic nature of thought:

On Quine's account, attempts to pursue the traditional project of finding the meanings and truths of science philosophically have failed on their own terms and failed to offer any advantage over the more direct methods of psychology. Quine rejects the analytic-synthetic distinction and emphasizes the holistic nature of our beliefs. Since traditional philosophic analysis of knowledge fails, those wishing to study knowledge ought to employ natural scientific methods. Scientific study of knowledge differs from philosophic study by focusing on how humans acquire knowledge rather than speculative analysis of knowledge.1 According to Quine, this appeal to science to ground the project of studying knowledge, which itself underlies science, should not be dismissed for its circularity since it is the best option available after ruling out traditional philosophic methods for their more serious flaws.

Contemporary philosophers have elaborated and commented on Quine's views extensively. Today, there are a variety of criticisms and plenty of lavish support for his ideas, and those folks, according the SEPs article Naturalism in Epistemology might be characterized as "moderate naturalism" which appeals to two criteria:

Moderate Naturalism

(A) All epistemic warrant or justification is a function of the psychological (perhaps computational) processes that produce or preserve belief.
(B) The epistemological enterprise needs appropriate help from science, especially the science of the mind. (Goldman 1999a: 26)

(Oddly to me) there is still some resistance to some of these statements for a variety of reasons (that you'll hear on this forum). In the extreme, not only does philosophy and science essentially overlap because logic and language reduce to psychology partially, but some philosophers take this relationship as license to practice science themselves to make assertions about philosophical principles. The sciences grew out of natural philosophy, and every science (formal or natural) has a healthy philosophy-of (philosophy of physics, chemistry, biology, etc.). But research, say in the psychology relevant to bias, may have impact on the philosophy of language or logic. According to An Introduction to Metaphilosophy:

[Experimental philosophy] seeks to replace or supplement traditional [philosophical] analysis with empirical, experimental data, specifically collected for the purposes of illuminating some philosophical question.

This, of course, has always been the case, but the appellation "experimental" is a relatively newer self-identification of philosophers. According to the SEP's Experimental Philosophy:

Experimental philosophy is an interdisciplinary approach that brings together ideas from what had previously been regarded as distinct fields. Specifically, research in experimental philosophy brings together two key elements:

  • the kinds of questions and theoretical frameworks traditionally associated with philosophy;
  • the kinds of experimental methods traditionally associated with psychology and cognitive science.

There are many philosophers (a very broad term indeed) who still believe there is some strict wall between philosophical and scientific practice based on topic or methodology, but I suspect on the whole most philosophers of metaphysics, language, and science don't believe there is a strict division like the logical positivists maintained, and in this sense Quine's view stand strong in the face of the failure of the logical positivist programme.

J D
  • 26,214
  • 3
  • 23
  • 98
  • "the analytic-synthetic divide that proposed by Kant and used heavily by the German Idealists who laid the foundation of modern analytical philosophy (according to Dummett)." In which way German Idealists laid the foundation of modern analytical philosophy? I thought modern analytical philosophy grew out of opposition to German Idealism – Starckman Feb 23 '23 at 03:21
  • Oops. Right to call that blunder out. Ill fix. – J D Feb 23 '23 at 07:53
  • Dummett cites Brentano, Meinong, Husserl, and of course Frege. – J D Feb 23 '23 at 07:57
  • Not sure I understood. "in particular the analytic-synthetic divide that proposed by Kant and used heavily by the German Idealists followed later by the Germans who laid the foundation of modern analytical philosophy (according to Dummett)." – Starckman Feb 23 '23 at 08:12
  • you are referring to the split between continental philosophy and analytical philosophy that followed Kant's analytical/synthetic distinction, which pointed to two road, one analytic and one synthetic? That the German idealists followed the synthetic road, while the analyticists (among whom major figures were German) followed the analytical road, and therefore founded the analytic philosophy tradition? – Starckman Feb 23 '23 at 08:12
  • I think that the analytic-synthetic distinction encourages the excessively simple idea that truth and meaning are objective. I'm going to end here. – J D Feb 23 '23 at 15:16
1

I'm not an expert on the topic, but from the IEP entry on Metaphilosophy, it seems that he was referring to analytic philosophy pioneers, who focused just on propositions, thus detaching from empirical science methods:

The pioneers of the Analytic movement held that philosophy should begin with the analysis of propositions. In the hands of two of those pioneers, Russell and Wittgenstein, such analysis gives a central role to logic and aims at disclosing the deep structure of the world. [..] Metaphilosophical views held by later Analytic philosophers include the idea that philosophy can be pursued as a descriptive but not a revisionary metaphysics and that philosophy is continuous with science.

As can be seen, he is aligned with the late contributors (even exact wording). Wikipedia also notices such distinction among some analytic philosophers:

Some argue that philosophy is distinct from science in that its questions cannot be answered empirically, that is, by observation or experiment.[34][35] Some analytical philosophers argue that all meaningful empirical questions are to be answered by science, not philosophy.

Quotes [34] and [35] are about Husserl.