pragmatist comments on [Poll] Less Wrong and Mainstream Philosophy: How Different are We? - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Jayson_Virissimo 26 September 2012 12:25PM

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Comment author: pragmatist 26 September 2012 02:26:15PM *  14 points [-]

Yes: There are certain sentences which are true solely by virtue of the meanings of the words involved, so these sentences are not subject to empirical falsification. Example: "All bachelors are unmarried." It is impossible for this sentence to be false, provided the words retain their ordinary meaning.

No: Every sentence is potentially open to empirical falsification. [EDIT: I guess the "No" answer would also be appropriate for those who believe that no sentence is open to empirical falsification, although I would be very surprised if anyone on this site fits that description.]

Comment author: benelliott 26 September 2012 05:39:34PM 5 points [-]

The Yes answer seems obvious, is there some sort of gotcha?

Comment author: pragmatist 26 September 2012 07:10:31PM 6 points [-]

[VOTE BEFORE READING THIS COMMENT TO AVOID PRIMING.]

The most prominent critic of the distinction is Quine. You can read about the reasons for his opposition here. A quote:

Quine... offers a diagnosis of the persistence of the concept of analyticity. Philosophers find the idea plausible because they tend to assume, sometimes unwittingly, that there is a clear notion of cognitive meaning which relates each sentence to the experiences which count for it or against it and which can be applied to sentences taken one-by-one. Given that sort of notion of meaning, we could say: the synthetic sentences are precisely those to whose truth or falsehood experience is relevant; the analytic ones are those whose truth or falsehood is wholly independent of experience (and which can therefore be known a priori).

Quine criticizes this idea of atomistic (sentence-by-sentence) cognitive meaning.... Quine invokes holism, the idea that most of our sentences do not have implications for experience when they are taken one-by-one, each in isolation from the others. What has experiential implication is, in most cases, not an individual sentence but larger chunks of theory. Holism, Quine claims, undermines the atomism of atomistic cognitive meaning.

Comment author: diegocaleiro 04 October 2012 03:27:08AM 0 points [-]

There is also Chalmers 2009 I guess paper about this, which breifly reviews the history of what happened after Quine polarized the topic. Revisability and Conceptual Change.
Chalmers attemps (in my view succesfully) to rescue 80% of what matters in the distinction, avoiding Quinean and post Quinean traps.

Comment author: pengvado 27 September 2012 09:05:19PM *  4 points [-]

Is "some sentences of first-order logic are tautologies" a sufficient reason to vote yes? If so, clearly we should be talking about that rather than complicated human-language examples like bachelors. If not, what's the difference?

Comment author: torekp 28 September 2012 05:26:34PM 1 point [-]

The answer to your first question will be controverted for pretty much the same reasons that the analytic-synthetic distinction itself is, I think. Quineans will claim that insofar as those sentences of first order logic are actually used in science, they become enmeshed in the holism of cognitive meaning.

Good point to raise, nevertheless.

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