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Path: utzoo!watmath!watarts!bjanz
From: bjanz@watarts.UUCP (Bruce Janz)
Newsgroups: net.philosophy
Subject: Re: philosophy
Message-ID: <8516@watarts.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 2-Aug-85 14:13:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: watarts.8516
Posted: Fri Aug  2 14:13:04 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 3-Aug-85 03:20:36 EDT
References: <2438@mit-hermes.ARPA> <1364@pyuxd.UUCP>
Reply-To: bjanz@watarts.UUCP (Bruce Janz)
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 49
Summary: 

In article <1364@pyuxd.UUCP> rlr@pyuxd.UUCP (Rich Rosen) writes:

>No wonder philosophers can't agree on anything.  They have no idea what
>the next philosopher is talking about.  Perhaps they could learn a little
>something about rigorous definition before engagin in discussion or analysis.
>Two people can't analyze a phenomenon and come to conclusions if they're
>both operating on different notions of what the phenomenon is.

Actually, according to Quine and his doctrine of ontological relativity,
we will be hard pressed to agree on anything anyway, dictionary or not, 
because of the double relativity involved.

         . . .the ontological import of a theory can be determined
         only relative to some further theory or language (itself
         taken at face value) and relative to some choice of how to
         translate or interpret the former in terms of the latter.
         [G. Romanos, _Quine_and_Analytic_Philosophy_, p. 43]
         (this is quite a good summary of Quine's thought)

In normal life this doesn't matter much, but for philosophers it does.
Quine's example is of trying to discover a native's word for rabbit.
You point at a rabbit, and he says "gavagai", and you assume that there
is a one-to-one correspondance between rabbit and gavagai.  However,
you really don't know whether the native is referring to the rabbit,
an undetached rabbit part, or a rabbit stage, because you don't know
his ontology. In fact, we will always run into Aristotle's third man
problem, since there is never something to which we can objectively
appeal for our definition -- it always relies on some prior agreement
on language.  Thus, you can talk all you want about agreeing on 
definitions for free will, but if Quine is correct (and I think he is),
it will still only be a provisional agreement, based on some prior
agreement on language, which is based on an agreement before that (and so
on, and so on . . .).

Quine talks about this in several essays in _From_A_Logical_Point_of_View_
(like "On What There Is" and "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"), and especially
in the essay "Ontological Relativity", in _Ontological_Relativity_And_Other
_Essays_.

Sorry to break into your debate on free will, but I thought something new
needed to be added to this group.


-- 

Reality is for those who have no imagination. . .


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