Willard Van Orman Quine

242 daniel isaacson
Quine reviewed the book. But strangely, he seems to have retained
no conscious memory of this clear statement of Duhemian holism
as an element of Carnap’s philosophy. In 1990, in a lecture marking
the fortieth anniversary of “Two Dogmas,” Quine declared,
In a footnote to “Two Dogmas” I noted Duhem’s priority in stressing holism.
As a matter of curiosity, however, I might mention that when I wrote and
presented “Two Dogmas” here forty years ago, and published it in the Philosophical
Review, I didn’t know about Duhem. Both Hempel and Philipp
Frank subsequently brought Duhem to my attention, so I inserted the footnote
when “Two Dogmas” was reprinted in From a Logical Point of View.
(TDR 269)
I conjecture that the selectivity of Quine’s perception and memory
of the role of the holism in Carnap’s philosophy reflects the fact
that Quine’s holism is bound up with his rejection of the analyticsynthetic
distinction (e.g., it is the basis of his impossibility argument
in “Two Dogmas” as opposed to the weaker arguments there
that fault attempted elucidations of analyticity). In the Aufbau,
where the analytic-synthetic distinction is not invoked and is not at
issue, what Quine perceives as Carnap’s imaginative and perceptive
depiction of the Duhem effect is thereby compatible with Quine’s
rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction. In The Logical Syntax
of Language, Carnap’s explicit holism is bound up with invocation
of the analytic-synthetic distinction. What is really at issue are
opposed conceptions as to what constitutes (scientific) philosophy.
And what obscures the debate between Quine and Carnap is that
they seem never to have focused on this fundamental aspect of their
differences. 28
For Quine, philosophy is continuous with science, whereas for
Carnap, it is about science and distinct from it. For Carnap, philosophy
surveys possible forms of expression. Which form of expression
we choose is pragmatically and holistically constrained by our
experience of the world. But we are free to choose (that is the import
of Carnap’s principle of logical tolerance), and this freedom to
choose means that language is conventional. 29 Analytic truths are
those that are true just on the basis of whatever conventions have
been chosen. For Quine, philosophy cannot stand apart from science,
and we cannot choose the conventions that govern our languages of
science. This is why Quine so likes Neurath’s image of rebuilding
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006