Combining Texts

Ideas for 'Natural Kinds', 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' and 'The Limits of Communitarianism'

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3 ideas

12. Knowledge Sources / D. Empiricism / 1. Empiricism
Our outer beliefs must match experience, and our inner ones must be simple [Quine]
     Full Idea: The outer edge of our empirical system must be kept squared with experience; the rest, with all its elaborate myths and fictions, has as its objective the simplicity of laws.
     From: Willard Quine (Two Dogmas of Empiricism [1953], p.45)
Empiricism makes a basic distinction between truths based or not based on facts [Quine]
     Full Idea: One dogma of empiricism is that there is some fundamental cleavage between truths that are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of facts, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact.
     From: Willard Quine (Two Dogmas of Empiricism [1953], p.20)
12. Knowledge Sources / D. Empiricism / 5. Empiricism Critique
The second dogma is linking every statement to some determinate observations [Quine, by Yablo]
     Full Idea: Quine's second dogma of empiricism is the reductionism that finds every statement to be linkable by fixed correspondence rules to a determinate range of confirming observations.
     From: report of Willard Quine (Two Dogmas of Empiricism [1953]) by Stephen Yablo - Does Ontology Rest on a Mistake? V
     A reaction: Quine's response to this is to embrace holism about theories, instead of precise connections with Humean impressions. I'm thinking that Lewis disagrees with Quine, when his Humean supervenience rests on a 'mosaic' of small qualities.