So, How's The Writing Going?

Fans of the blog new and old will have been on something of an emotional rollercoaster over the last couple of months. On February 14 your favourite website burst back into the blogosphere with a renewed sense of purpose; I was going to write frequent posts even when I had nothing to say, exercising it like a long-neglected muscle until it became a powerful mouthpiece through which I could eventually put something valuable into the world.

The following week I posted about how I'd been eating at least one banana each day this year and documenting the journey on my second favourite microblogging site — I'm still keeping that up, by the way — and formed an intention to write a post each week. The following two Fridays brought posts about my various reading habits and the Kinks song Plastic Man. Things were going well.

Cracks began to show in week five, when my post was about how I'd got in over my head trying to write a post about Susan Stebbing and the second dogma of empiricism and wasn't going to be able to put up anything proper that day. The following week was also touch and go behind the scenes but I did manage to get one out about poetry. That's the most recent one, and it was twenty days ago. So, what happened?

The Distractions Of Ambition

The short answer is that I've been working on the Stebbing post. That needn't have been a problem: my plan was to keep at it while still putting out something else on Fridays, and then put the Stebbing one out in the week it was ready. But as you'll recall from the first post of the new era, the first step of the post was percolation, and you can't be percolating posts about poetry and bananas when you're distracted by something else. Or at least that's how it's turned out for me. And with no percolation, I've found myself tired and uninspired on Fridays, and of course it's so much easier to just put a little joke on Bluesky about how people will have to spend their Friday nights doing something else.

It isn't just the regular blogging that this Stebbing post has distracted me from. Remember I said I was reading a set theory textbook? Well I haven't opened that for weeks, and I'm wondering if I ever will. Perhaps I should just return it to the library and give up on the possibility of ever arguing for the indeterminacy of the continuum hypothesis based on Avicenna's notion of conceptual parts.

One big part of the distractions from the Stebbing post were that the second dogma part sent me down a bit of a Quine rabbit hole. (Or is it an undetached rabbit-part hole?) I still like Quine and find him interesting and enjoyable to read, and so after reading Two Dogmas to refresh my memory I ended up rereading the rest of From A Logical Point Of View as well, and some of the papers in Ontological Relativity, and it's all been very fascinating but any time spent reading and thinking about Quine is time not spent percolating frivolous blogposts about fruit or writing poems that scan perfectly and contain no interpretive secrets. And of course I've been reading things by and about Stebbing too, although it doesn't really feel like it's been that much.

The Stebbing Post

So anyway, what's this post about? What is this connection between Stebbing and the second dogma that I've been so keen to tell you all about? Well basically I read a paper of hers years ago called 'Logical Positivism and Analysis' from 1933, and was struck by the fact (if it is a fact) that one of the main positions she was critiquing was the second dogma of empiricism. But her response to it was entirely different from Quine's, which makes it all the more interesting, and so I thought I should write it up at some point.

Nonetheless, writing it up has proven difficult. I didn't think it'd be that difficult, because I first read the Stebbing paper years ago and had kind of integrated my thoughts on the topic into my general worldview, and so I ought to be able to be able to talk about it more or less off the cuff. I could reread the relevant texts so I can explain how what they say links up with what I'm saying, and that'd be that. But as can be the way with these things, rereading one thing leads to reading another, and you try to make sure you're interpreting things right and not missing out on mentioning important things that really ought to be mentioned, and things get away from you. Eventually you start wondering whether there's really anything important to say here at all. It can be fairly disspiriting at times, although parts of it can be exhilarating too.

Ultimately I think I can see myself falling prey to the kind of perfectionism that I talked about in the Field Of Dreams post. I don't expect the end product to be great in spite of the extra work I've put into it; this is history of philosophy after all and I don't really know what I'm doing. The basic ideas I want to get across are straightforward enough:

• 'Logical positivism and analysis' is a really interesting paper and is now available to read online, so if you're interested in that sort of thing, go and read it!
• Quine describes the second dogma of empiricism as 'reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience' (1951/1961:20), and Stebbing is arguing against a very similar idea in her paper. Quine was thinking in large part about Carnap as his opponent, and so was Stebbing. And Quine was writing almost two decades later, so how about that.
• Stebbing and Quine both associate the dogma with the logical positivists/empiricists' verificationism, according to which the meaning of a sentence is or at least is determined by what would count as a verification that it was true. And they both thought the verificationists were onto something, in that experience is ultimately where the rubber hits the semantic road. They don't go worrying about how statements of the verification principle aren't themselves verifiable or anything like that. They just don't think meaningful statements all reduce to statements about immediate experience.
• Quine's response to the dogma, famously, was to adopt a kind of holism in which we don't think about the meanings (or for Quine, synonymy relations) and confirmation or otherwise of sentences in isolation, but instead think of sentences and the beliefs they express as standing in an interconnected web which responds to unexpected experiences by making modifications all over the place. But we should nonetheless be careful not to think of Quine as a semantic or confirmational holist, because Hilary Putnam says that's a mistake, and he should know. (Quine doesn't really believe in meanings or confirmation at all, you see.) Now, Stebbing's response is entirely different:
• Stebbing responds by introducing the notion of the indirect given. Just because belief about things remote from the given have to be based on beliefs about the given, doesn't mean they have to be based on beliefs about immediate experience, because being given need not mean being directly given the way immediate experience (and not much else) is.
• She isn't fully explicit in that paper about what she means by the indirect given ¹, but I like to think of it in these terms: directness is a causal matter, whereas givenness is a normative matter. Your belief that there is a tree through the window is at one end of a time-consuming causal chain with the tree at the other end and photons, eyes and visual cortices in the middle. But that doesn't mean it's inferred from beliefs about experience or anything else, because it isn't inferred: you need not and could not reconstruct the (in fact causal) process whereby the belief came about in order to justify it. It's just "oh look, there's a tree out there". The belief about the tree enters on the normative ground floor.
• Now, one fun thing to notice about Quine's and Stebbing's responses to the dogma are that the dogma has two parts and they pick different parts to attack. Quine attacks the reductionism part, and Stebbing attacks the to-experience part. Isn't that neat? I think it's neat. And it opens up the possibility that they're both right: Quine is right about beliefs being a web that responds to unexpected inputs all over, and Stebbing is right that the inputs aren't immediate experiences; they're everyday out-there propositions about trees and so on. And I actually think they are both right in this sense, although I wasn't planning to argue for that in the post.

The Rabbit Hole

The problem is that I don't feel like I can just write a post with the outline above and have done with it; I want to make sure it's right — I suspect some of the claims in the outline above aren't right — and I want to connect it up properly with the texts, and it sprawls. One thing I found when reading the Quine stuff — it's actually in 'Epistemology naturalized', which is much less obscure than most people's least obscure paper — was a reference to an exchange between Carnap and Neurath in 1932 where they talk about whether protocol sentences should be sentences about experience or sentences about physical things, or sentences about ourselves having experiences of physical things.

The papers were in German but have since been translated into English, which is good for me because I can't read German, and Carnap kind of gets talked out of the strong form of methodological solipsism which Stebbing was objecting to². This was in 1932, the year before Stebbing's paper came out; her paper was based on a talk she gave on March 22 1933. So it seems Carnap's methodological solipsism was raising eyebrows all round. The famously tolerant Carnap seems to think in his paper that there's more than one way to climb his methodological mountain, and he gives an alternative account of protocol sentences which he credits in large part to Karl Popper, in which protocol sentences are about physical things and can be basically any statement about them, and they can act as protocol sentences in one context but admit of further justification in other contexts. I think there's a lot in that, and it points away from the second dogma stuff in both the direction Stebbing took things and the direction Quine took them. And that was Carnap himself, already, in 1932. And Frederique Janssen-Lauret (2017) argues that Stebbing herself was also going in a holist direction that anticipates Quine and Susan Haack to an extent, although I haven't properly got around the textual evidence for that yet.

Neurath's paper is also of interest; it includes the famous bit about how we're like mariners trying to rebuild our boats on the open sea, but instead of the idea being just that you have to do it a bit at a time so the boat doesn't sink, it's also important to the image that you only have access to materials that are already on the boat. I wasn't aware of that angle. Neurath also argues in that paper that private languages are impossible. And if you're impressed to see someone doing that in 1932, Quine (1969a) reports that Dewey was dismissing the possibility of private languages way back in 1925. It's all fascinating of course, and I wanted to include it all, but it's just too much and I fear that if I don't let go of this mindset then you'll never hear about any of it, so I'm not really sure what the best thing to do with the project is.

I'm on holiday next week — that's also why this is coming out on a Thursday — but hopefully I'll see you the week after that!

Notes

[1] She does refer us to Stebbing (1929) for the sense in which perception is indirect, and basically the answer is fairly standard for people who think perception is indirect, in that it's mediated by a sensum. To be honest I was a little disappointed when I read this, but hope something more interesting can be made of the notion of the indirect given.

[2] There's a fun bit in Stebbing's paper where she's talking about the methodological solipsism of Carnap and whatever kind of solipsism Wittgenstein adopts in the Tractatus, where she says "The doctrines of both Carnap and Wittgenstein seem to me to suggest that Wittgenstein’s statement—’What solipsism means is quite correct, only it cannot be said’—is just the reverse of what they require. For, in my opinion, methodological solipsism ought to assert: ‘What solipsism means is ɴᴏᴛ correct, but only solipsism can be said’. I do not, however, suppose for a moment that either Carnap or Wittgenstein would regard my suggestion as other than absurd." (1933:74, her emphasis)

References

• Carnap, Rudolf 1932/1987: 'On protocol sentences', translated by ; Richard Creath and Richard Nollan, Noûs 21(4):457-470
• Dewey, John 1925/1958: Experience and Nature (La Salle, IL: Open Court)
• Janssen-Lauret, Frederique 2017: 'Susan Stebbing, Incomplete Symbols and Foundherentist Meta-Ontology', Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 5(2):6-17
• Neurath, Otto 1932/1959: 'Protocol sentences', translated by Frederic Schick, in A. J. Ayer (ed) Logical Positivism (New York: The Free Press):199–208
• Quine, W. V. A. 1951/1961: 'Two dogmas of empiricism'
• Quine, W. V. A. 1961: From a Logical Point of View, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row)
• Quine, W. V. A. 1969a: 'Ontological Relativity', in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (Columbia University Press): 26–68
• Quine, W. V. A. 1969b: 'Epistemology naturalized', in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (Columbia University Press): 69-90
• Stebbing, L. Susan 1929: 'Realism and Modern Physics III', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes , 1929, Vol. 9, Knowledge, Experience and Realism, pp. 146–161
• Stebbing, L. Susan 1933: 'Logical positivism and analysis', Proceedings of the British Academy 19:53–87