Earlier this week I'd posted about whether Quine was a pragmatist. Well it turned out I'd read a paper a few years back that addressed this explicitly in a Peircean context. I'd just forgotten about it. (Yeah, I've been doing a lot of that with papers I've read - memory's the first thing to go when kids constantly are waking up all night) The paper is from The Relevance of Charles Peirce. That's a very nice collection of essays from The Monist applying Peirce to modern topics in philosophy. The paper in question is "Peirce on Meaning" by Robert Almeder. It's partially about Quine's well known papers like Two Dogmas but also a response to a (then) unpublished paper by Quine attacking pragmatism called, "The Pragmatist's Place in Empiricism." It's currently only printed in Pragmatism: Its Sources and Prospects. In it Quine does a fair bit to attack pragmatism which pretty well establishes he's not a pragmatist even beyond what I'd written earlier. Unfortunately he's not a terribly good reader of pragmatism and gets lots of things wrong and is ignorant of much else. Almeder's paper is largely pointing out these errors and explaining why Peirce is ultimately a better Quine than Quine - at least with respect to the analytic-synthetic divide.
The first part of the paper is getting clear that the pragmatic maxim is not the positivist verificationalism principle. As I've mentioned before, I think Peirce a tad more inconsistent here than I think Almeder allows. But certainly the coherent version of Peirce that is compatible with his realism entails a maxim quite unlike the positivists. Almeder argues that Quine's critique of analytic meaning really is just applying the positivist standard to analytic statements and saying they're impossible. (Since they can't be verified)
With Peirce, of course, the pragmatic maxim applies to sentences and not words or terms. This is a big difference that is often overlooked. Of course for any term one can construct a sentence of the form, "this is X." So having the maxim apply to sentences isn't that big a loss. The reasons for this limit are tied up in Peirce's semiotics and make perfect sense although I'll not go into the details. Roughly Peirce sees meaning in terms of sentences and not parts. (Which makes reading Davidson always interesting for me)
Peirce, unlike the positivists, allows for meanings beyond propositional (true/false) meanings. His version of speech act theory is roughly that signs have a logical interpretant (what is signified in terms of propositional meaning) but then also emotive and energetic interpretants. (Covering some of the same ground as the extra categories Searle has, although they don't map onto one another that well) The meaning of any logical interpretant is an other logical interpretant so in one sense meaning is always a matter of translation. The ultimate meaning is a habit which is what the sentence means. (Habit because it is a case where the powers directing interpretation mean that the interpretation of a sign is the same sign - sort of Eternal Recurrence meets Davidson) For Peirce this is what some ideal community of inquirers would believe.
This approach of Peirce entails a holism, despite Quine's belief that it doesn't.
The other big feature of Peirce's account of meaning, in contrast to Quine or the positivists is that Peirce sees the behavioralism entailed by verification counterfactually. That is meaning is entailed by all the possible contexts in which we could measure something rather than concrete particular moments when we do measure something. (I should note to be fair that originally Peirce didn't have this counterfactual aspect to his behavioral form of meaning - but he recognized the problem with the more positivist approach rather quickly) Thus while Peirce might be said to embrace a kind of behavioralism it is quite different from Quine. For Quine behavioralism is interesting in terms of actual behaviors whereas for Peirce it is possible behaviors that count.
Since for Peirce verification ends up being what the scientific community would accept this allows Peirce to claim that abstract entities can be verified. Indeed Peirce points to logic as an example of this. Thus what some see as the prime example of the a priori as analytic, Peirce sees as scientifically learned and as ultimately synthetic. (You can see echoes of this in Putnam's appeal for a quasi-empirical approach to mathematics) Not only is logic verifiable but all true abstractions are. Peirce is a scholastic realist and sees such entities as meaningful and verifiable precisely through their use in scientific explanation. You might recall our discussion of scientific realism from February. There I mentioned that scientific realism entails accepting theoretical entities. The Peircean perspective on scientific realism is to reject the convergence theory of this form of realism but accept all theoretical entities as real, if not necessarily actual. That is the abstractions in physics are real and verifiable precisely by how they function in scientific predictions, methods, and inquiry.
While in his later years Quine came to accept mathematical objects as real, he still basically was a nominalist who gave at best lip service to abstract entities as real. Far from being in the pragmatic tradition Quine is wrapped up in the Humean tradition. The difference between the two traditions with respect to empiricsm is profound. While I think the Peircean form of empiricism is still an empiricism, I must admit that the positivists still largely have locked up the way empiricism is viewed. Unfortunately so, given that few would consider positivism a live movement anymore.
For a good look at the way Quine handles abstract objects, see his "Philosophy of Logic" -- he has a pretty extensive treatment there of what he is willing to admit into his ontology. One of the peculiar things about Quine is that he seems to consider the discipline of ontology as mainly a matter of language: since "to be is to be the value of a bound variable", what entities we are committed to becomes largely a matter of what entities we quantify over (cf. "On What There Is"). It strikes me that if Quine ever talks like a pragmatist, it is mainly when it comes to avoiding the use of existential quantifiers. Quine does not, however, think that the inclusion symbol of set theory can be given a logical paraphrase (at least not absolutely), so that amounts to a pretty major concession as far as abstract objects are concerned. Of course, the difference between the way in which Quine handles ontology and the methods of someone like Heidegger could not be more extreme (though in some ways it is a ridiculous comparison), so that one wonders whether Quine's use of the term 'ontology' has anything at all in common with ontology as it has been traditionally understood. I think Terence Parson's has quite a fun rebuttal to Quine in the Blackwell anthology of metaphysics (these are *excellent* anthologies). I'm not sure whether we can refer to nonexistent objects myself, but I think Quine often over-simplifies rather complicated issues. That's actually what bothers me about his writing -- he's very elegant and witty, but I think he often over-states his case (and for that reason leaves himself open to misinterpretation and misappropriation, particularly by continental philosophers who think that being open to the analytic tradition amounts to reading Quine, Brandom, Putnam, Rorty, and Davidson).
This is unrelated, but I was reading the post on psychotherapy yesterday and I think I can now diagnose my qualms about the verification principle. The problem, as I see it, with dismissing the un-falsifiable as pseudo-science is that it is, in one sense, too general, and in another sense, lazy. Now when Popper said pseudo-scientific claims are unfalsifiable, he must have meant *empirically* -- but I am very hesitant to admit that there are a bunch of *absolutely* unfalsifiable claims -- that one *cannot* falsify a pseudoscience. I do believe that if Freudian psychology, for instance, is incorrect, it is either because it makes empirical predictions which don't pan out or because it commits some sort of a priori mistake in principles. But are there any empirical claims that absolutely do not admit of verification? I am very dubious (because you'd think that confirmation by observation is the very essence of what we mean by an *empirical* claim).
While I'm anything but a Quine expert, I tend to agree with you regarding his overstating his case. He's an excellent writer but tends to both read others poorly and (IMO) not think through all the implications of his claims.
Popper is a whole other case. Once again an excellent writer but probably takes the bad qualities of Quine and manifests them much stronger. (IMO) The whole idea of what constitutes verification is an odd one. Peirce, as I hinted at above, sees it more in terms of his logic of abduction. One precinds abstractions and then tests them out to see if they are scientifically fruitful. If they are one has justification for their being real (in the scholastic sense, not the existential sense). But one has to continue inquiry. This isn't an option for Quine or Popper which leads to either a too open relativism for Quine or too narrow of confirmation for Popper. Although to be fair Popper often is talking methadology rather than pure epistemology.
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