Quine on science and truth

Response to a Quora Question

1/25/2021—1/1/2022

Anil Mitra

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The philosopher W.V.O. Quine said, "Only science can tell us about the world. It is the final arbiter of the truth." Do you agree with this comment or has Quine been too narrow in who should be the arbiter of the truth?

Updated Jan 30, 2021

1.25.2021

I do think he was somewhat narrow with regard to what should be the arbiter(s) of truth.

Keep in mind, though, that he had a rather expansive conception of science—for Quine, mathematics, logic, and properly done philosophy were science. If that sounds excessive, and it did sound excessive to some of his contemporaries, it is, for example, because he thought that logical truth was not a priori but empirical. It is empirical, he might say, in that logic is about the forms of propositions and relations among propositions such that they can be true at all (e.g., in some world). Which, in turn, implied to Quine, that logical systems are discoverable, empirical, and corrigible1. However, since their level of generality is a level above that of mathematics and perhaps two levels above science, the empirical character of logic tends to be opaque to us. But, as all the disciplines I mentioned above were seen by Quine to be empirical, so he found ‘science’ to be the arbiter of their truth.

The narrowness comes in, I think, in a too restrictive notion of truth. It is fine to have a hard notion of truth where one wants it—in logic, mathematics, science, and in some investigations in philosophy though not in all philosophical investigations2.

But what of intuition, aesthetics, and hypothetical truth-as-basis-of-action. Why ought we not have a more ‘diffuse but still appropriate’ notion of truth there? And what if our hard disciplines should at some future time become clearly not the way forward for the human endeavor(s)?

I think that Quine had an immensely sharp and powerful mind, which enabled him to play with mathematical logic as if it were a toy. This also empowered his thoughts on mathematics and science. I do think, however, that he pushed his thought too far and too rigidly beyond its proper domain. For is not the question of the nature and arbiter also dependent on our values? And ought not or can not our values in soft endeavors be different from those of the hard ones? And are we not perhaps both hard and soft in our own and universal nature?

Those are my thoughts.

1 Edit. 1.25.2021. This (a case of) where, per Quine, the analytic-synthetic breakdown occurs. See comments by Jim Farmelant.

2 Edit. 1.30.2021. The clause made of the last six words of this paragraph are true and a philosophical pun.

Comments by Jim Farmelant

Keep in mind that Quine started off as a logical positivist. As a young philosopher, he went to Vienna and spent time attending the meetings of the Vienna Circle. He was close to Rudolf Carnap. Even after writing his “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” where he demolished the distinction between synthetic truths and analytic truths - a distinction that had been crucial to the logical positivist program, Quine was still many respects a logical positivist. For him, like the logical positivists, all true knowledge is scientific knowledge. But as you say, he had a more expansive conception of science, which allowed him to treat logic, mathematics, and even epistemology as a part of science. And that more expansive conception of science followed directly from his demolition of the analytic-synthetic distinction.

For Quine, ethics and aesthetics were not a part of knowledge. In this, he was following the logical positivists, who argued that moral and aesthetic propositions were lacking in cognitive meaning. However, his friend, the philosopher Morton White did seek to incorporate ethics and aesthetics into a properly expansive notion of science.