Grice and Strawson: “In Defence of a Dogma”

Reasons for criticizing a distinction:

• Not sharp enough (unclear which side some cases fall)
• Drawn in ambiguous terms
• Drawn in easily-confused (habitually conflated) terms
• Not useful
• Not made clearly

None of these reasons are sufficient to warrant rejecting the distinction out of hand, much less writing, as Quine does,

That there is such a distinction to be drawn at all is an unempirical dogma of empiricists, a metaphysical article of faith.

G&S: “There are doubtless plenty of distinctions, drawn in philosophy and outside it, which still await adequate philosophical elucidation, but which few would want on this account to declare illusory” [463.1]

…particularly when the distinction is enshrined both in philosophical tradition and present practice, where the people who use the term apply it to the same new cases:

in general, if a pair of contrasting expressions are habitually and generally used in application to the same cases, where those cases do not form a closed list, this a sufficient condition for saying that there are kinds of cases to which the expressions apply; and nothing more is needed for them to mark a distinction. [464.1]

Two possible interpretations of Quine’s view:

1. the extreme thesis: “when we say of something true that it is analytic and of another true thing that it is synthetic, it simply never is the case that we thereby mark a distinction between them”

2. Milder thesis: “the nature of and reasons for the difference or differences are totally misunderstood by those who use the expressions, that the stories that they tell themselves about the difference are full of illusion.”

To illustrate why the second is better, consider a mistaken theory, in the light of which “some statements…appeared to have a characteristic which no statements really have”. It would still be wrong to say that there was “no distinction at all” being marked by the use of these expressions,”

For there would be at least the distinction we have just described (the distinction, namely, between those statements which appeared to have and those which appeared to lack a certain characteristic) [464.2]

It is not just philosophers who use the analytic-synthetic distinction, because

among the notions which belong to the analyticity-group is one which Quine calls “cognitive synonymy,” and in terms of which he allows that the notion of analyticity could at any rate be formally explained. Unfortunately, he adds, the notion of cognitive synonymy is just as unclarified as that of analyticity. [465.1]

BUT: if we can’t make sense of cognitive synonymy, then we can’t distinguish between “means the same as” and “does not mean the same as” (where these are distinct from coextensionality). “Is all talk of correct or incorrect translation of sentences of one language into sentences of another meaningless?” [465.2] (Quine later argues that it is.)

But it gets worse: “If talk of sentence-synonymy is meaningless, then it seems that talk of sentences having a meaning at all must be meaningless too.”

BECAUSE: sentence synonymy could be “roughly defined” as follows:

To sentences are synonymous if and only if any true answer to the question “what does it mean?” asked of one of them, is a true answer to the same question, asked of the other. [466.1]

BUT, since sentence synonymy is meaningless, then this must be meaningless too.

As it clearly is NOT, then Quine has produced a “typical example of a philosopher’s paradox”:

Instead of examining the actual use that we make of the notion of meaning the same, the philosopher measures it by some perhaps inappropriate standard (in this case some standard of clarifiability) and because it falls short of this standard, or seems to do so, denies its reality, declares it illusory. [466.1]

What is Quine’s standard of clarifiability? Making “satisfactory sense” of a member of the set of expressions in the analyticity family-circle requires

1. providing an explanation of the expression which does not incorporate any other of the expressions

2. the explanation provided must be of the same “general character” as those rejected explanations which do incorporate members of the family-circle (i.e. specify necessary and sufficient conditions for application)

Problems:

• NO set of terms meet these criteria (consider group of expressions “morally wrong,” “blameworthy,” “breach of moral rules,” etc. [466.2]
• If we reject (2), we CAN make sense of logical impossibility, which is one of the analyticity-group, in a way that satisfies (1)

[467.2-468.1: contrasting 3-year-old understanding Russell’s theory of Types [Naturally impossible, reaction to claim is “I don’t believe you”] and 3-year-old being an adult [logically impossible – “I don’t understand you”]

Two Further Points (about sections 1 and 2 of Quine’s paper):

1. In talking about definition and synonymy, Quine allows that there is one case where definition can explain synonymy, viz., synonymy by explicit convention, where a term is specifically created to be synonymous. BUT if he can make sense of s.b.e.c., then it makes no sense to say that he can’t make sense of other kinds of synonymy (analogy with man claiming not to understand “fit” [469.1]) G&S suggest a switcheroo on Quine: s.b.e.c would be unintelligible if the notion of synonymy by usage were not presupposed” [469.2].

2. Quine gives a case to show how the analytic-synthetic distinction is problematic: “I do not know whether the statement “Everything green is extended” is analytic””
BUT this is a bad example, because if you substitute “true” for “analytic”, you still aren’t sure. That is, the unclarity is not with “analytic”

Accommodating Quine’s Positive theory with the Analytic Synthetic Distinction

In section 6, Quine lays out his positive theory, and in particular, two theses:

A. No statements are “immune from revision”

B. No individual statement, taken in isolation, can admit of confirmation or disconfirmation (HOLISM)

Both are taken to be incompatible with the a/s distinction:

A. Because analytic statements were supposed to be immune from revision

BUT: if we allow that there are two ways to revise something – not just (a) because we think it false, but also (b) because the meaning of the terms has changed, then we can allow that apparently un-revisable statements can now be held false because they are underpinned by a different conceptual scheme.

B. Because the verification theory of meaning might preserve the a/s distinction if “statement synonymy” could be defined as “having the same conditions confirm or disconfirm them” but no statements can be confirmed or disconfirmed in isolation

BUT, we can define synonymy as this:

Two statements are synonymous iff any experience which, on certain assumptions about the truth values of other statements, confirm or disconfirm one of the pair, also, on the same assumptions, confirm or disconfirm the other to the same degree. [470.2]