Critical Reading Group: 3rd June 2008

 Convenor: Dr Mahbub Gani

This session we will be going through an essay I wrote on a very important work  – important at least for philosophy of science and epistemology – by the celebrated analytical philosopher, Willard Van Orman Quine. Essay available via e-mail. You can find online Quine’s essay here:

http://www.ditext.com/quine/quine.html 

It gets technical at certain places: section VI, the last section, is the relevant one for Tuesday and fairly readable.

Here’s the Wiki entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Dogmas_of_Empiricism. 

Actually, Quine’s work will provide at least one philosophical lens through which we can examine our readings on evolution, and especially Maqasid.

To help you get started on the essay, let me briefly explain the terms analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posterior: 

An analytic statement is one whose meaning is completely given by studying just the meaning of the constituent terms. Eg, “All bachelors are unmarried” – you only have to know that unmarried man is a synonym for bachelor to know that this statements is (triviallu) true; you don’t have to go out and interrogate the outside world.

To work out the meaning of a synthetic statement, on the other hand, it is inadequate to study just the linguistic terms: you have to consult experience to ascertain its truth or falsity. Eg “All bachelors wish they were married.” 

The analytic/synthetic divide, then, applies to the degree of linguistic, or lack thereof, meaning of sentences.

An a priori statement is one whose truth can be ascertained without having to appeal to experience at all – eg the truths of mathematics and logic.

An a posterior statement is one whose truth has to be determined by testing against experience.

You might wonder what the difference is between analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posterior – I’ll leave that as an exercise and we will discuss that on Tuesday.