‘Quine’s Meaning Nihilism: Revisiting Naturalism and Confirmation Method,’

The paper concentrates on an appreciation of W.V. Quine’s thought on meaning and how it escalates beyond the meaning holism and confirmation holism, thereby paving the way for a ‘meaning nihilism’ and ‘confirmation rejectionism’. My effort would be to see that how could the acceptance of radical naturalism in Quine’s theory of meaning escorts him to the indeterminacy thesis of meaning. There is an interesting shift from epistemology to language as Quine considers that a person who is aware of linguistic trick can be the master of referential language. Another important question is that how could Quine’s radical translation thesis reduce into semantic indeterminacy that is a consequence of his confirmation methord. Even I think that the notion and the analysis of meaning became hopelessly vague in Quine’s later work. I further argue on Quine’s position of meaning that I call, following Hilary Putnam, ‘meaning nihilism’. It seems to me that Quine had no belief like ‘meaning consists in’, or ‘meaning depends on’ something. Through this argument, I would like to challenge the confirmation holism that was foisted by Fodor on Quine’s thesis. My attempt would be to scrutinize Putnam’s point of view that Quine was neither a confirmation holist nor a meaning holist. I think that both Putnam and Quine denied the concept of constitutive connection of meaning as a second grade notion not only from the realm of semantic, but also from the perspective of epistemology. So, linguistic meaning cannot be formed by any sample of its uses. For Quine, the concept of meaning in metaphysics is heuristic and need not be taken seriously in any ‘science worthy’ literature

The Methods of Normativity

This essay is an examination of the relationship between phenomenology and analytic method in the philosophy of law. It proceeds by way of a case study, the requirement of compliance in Raz’s theory of mandatory norms. Proceeding in this way provides a degree of specificity that is otherwise neglected in the relevant literature on method. Drawing on insights from the philosophy of art and cognitive neuroscience, it is argued that the requirement of compliance is beset by a range of epistemological difficulties. The implications of these difficulties are then reviewed for method and normativity in practical reason. A topology of normativity emerges nearer the end of the paper, followed by a brief examination of how certain normative categories must satisfy distinct burdens of proof

Neuroeconomics: infeasible and underdetermined

Advocates of neuroeconomics claim to offer the prospect of creating a “unified behavioral theory” by drawing upon the techniques of neuroscience and psychology and combining them with economic theory. Ostensibly, through the “direct measurement” of our thoughts, economics and social science will be “revolutionized.” Such claims have been subject to critique from mainstream and non-mainstream economists alike. Many of these criticisms relate to measurability, relevance, and coherence. In this article, we seek to contribute to this critical examination by investigating the potential of underdetermination, such as the statement that testing involves the conjunction of auxiliary assumptions, and that consequently it may not be possible to isolate the effect of any given hypothesis. We argue that neuroeconomics is especially sensitive to issues of underdetermination. Institutional economists should be cautious of neuroeconomists’ zeal as they appear to over-interpret experimental findings and, therefore, neuroeconomics may provide a false prospectus seeking to reinforce the nostrums of homo economicus

Underdetermination as an Epistemological Test Tube: Expounding Hidden Values of the Scientific Community

Duhem-Quine underdetermination plays a constructive role in epistemology by pinpointing the impact of non-empirical virtues or cognitive values on theory choice. Underdetermination thus contributes to illuminating the nature of scientific rationality. Scientists prefer and accept one account among empirical equivalent alternatives. The non-empirical virtues operating in science are laid open in such theory choice decisions. The latter act as an epistemological test tube in making explicit commitments to how scientific knowledge should be like

Eternal Truth by Convention

Within the epistemology of the sciences, conventionalism\ud has been the subject of regular criticism for over six\ud decades. Critics such as W. V. Quine and Morton White,\ud and more recently Nathan Salmon (1992), and Paul\ud Boghossian (1996), have attacked even the most basic\ud tenet of conventionalism, namely its claim that the truth of\ud certain statements is fixed not by stipulation-independent\ud facts, but by the conventions governing the meaning of\ud those statements and their constituents

Apriority in Naturalized Epistemology: Investigation into a Modern Defense

Versions of naturalized epistemology that overlook or reject apriority ignore innate belief-forming processes that provide much of the grounding for epistemic warrant. A rigorous analysis reveals that non-experiential ways of viewing apriority, such as innateness, establish the domain for a plausible naturalistic theory of a priori warrant. A moderate version of naturalistic epistemology that embraces the non-experiential feature of apriority and motivates future cognitive scientific research is the preferred account

Two Dogmas of Analytical Philosophy

In his landmark article, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” W.V.O. Quine pushed analytical philosophy into its post-positivist phase by rejecting two central tenets of logical empiricism. The first dogma was the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements; the second was reductionism, or the belief that to each synthetic sentence there corresponds a set of experiences that will confirm or disconfirm it. But in both “Two Dogmas” and Word and Object, Quine stretches analytical philosophy to its limits. The problem is, ironically, his adherence to two separate dogmas. The first stems from Quine’s empiricism: he insists that there is nothing more to meaning than the empirical method of discovering it. The second has been taken as the defining characteristic of analytical philosophy;2 it is the belief that a philosophical account of thought can only be attained through an account of language – the famed “linguistic turn.” I will argue that a philosophical account of language can only be attained given an account of thought,3 and that the philosophies of Kant and Davidson can help us construct such an account

Evidence Enriched

Traditionally, empiricism has relied on the specialness of human observation, yet science is rife with sophisticated instrumentation and techniques. The present paper advances a conception of empirical evidence applicable to actual scientific practice. I argue that this conception elucidates how the results of scientific research can be repurposed across diverse epistemic contexts—it helps to make sense of how evidence accumulates across theory change, how different evidence can be amalgamated and used jointly, and how the same evidence can be used to constrain competing theories in the service of breaking local underdetermination