W&O : §§ 4-6

1. W&O: §§ 4-6 Pete Mandik Chairman, Department of Philosophy Coordinator, Cognitive Science Laboratory William Paterson University, New Jersey USA

2. § 4. Ways of Learning Words • “…even the sophisticated learning of a new word is commonly a matter of learning it in context--hence learning, by example and analogy, the usage of sentences in which the word can occur. It therefore remained appropriate, throughout § 3 and not just at the beginning of it, to treat sentences and not words as the wholes whose use is learned--though never denying that the learning of these wholes proceeds largely by an abstracting and assembling of parts.” p. 13

3. “The learning of words…partakes of a contrast correlative to that between learning sentences as wholes and building them of parts. In the case of words it is a contrast between learning a word in isolation--i.e., in effect, as a one-word sentence--and learning it contextually, or by abstraction, as a fragment of sentences learned as wholes.” p.14

4. “Some, certainly, e.g. ‘sake’, will be learned only contextually. The same would seem to be plausible for terms like ‘molecule’, which, unlike ‘red’, ‘square’, and ‘tile’, do not refer to things that can be distinctively pointed out. Such terms, can, however, be inculcated also by yet a third method: description of the intended objects. This method could be grouped under the head of the contextual, but it deserves separate notice.” p.14

5. “What makes insensible things intelligibly describable is analogy, notably the special form of analogy known as extrapolation. Thus consider molecules, which are described as smaller than anything seen. This term ‘smaller’ is initially meaningful to us through some manner of association with such observable contrasts as that of a bee to a bird, an gnat to a bee, or a mote of dust to a gnat.” p. 14

6. “This analogy is of course very limited….One must see the molecular doctrine at work in physical theory to get a proper notion of molecules.” p. 15

7. “One tends to imagine that when someone propounds a theory concerning some sort of objects, our understanding of what he is saying will have two phases: first we must understand what the objects are, and second we must understand what the theory says about them. ….[Sometimes] there is virtually no significant separation; our coming to understand what the objects are is for the most part just our mastery of what the theory says about them. We do not learn first what to talk about and then what to say about it.” p. 16

8. “Picture two physicists discussing whether neutrinos have mass. Are they discussing the same objects? They agree that the physical theory which they initially share, the pre-neutrino theory, needs emendation in the light of an experimental result now confronting them….To discern two phases here, the first an agreement as to what the objects are (viz. Neurtrinos) and the second a disagreement as to how they are (massless or massive), is absurd.” p. 16

9. “’Centaur’, though true of nothing, will commonly be learned by description of its purported objects. Also of course it could be learned contextually. ‘Sake’ can be learned only contextually. ‘Tile’, which does refer to objects, may be learned either in isolation as a one-word sentence, or contextually, or by description. ‘Molecule’, which also (let us grant) refers to objects, will be learned both contextually and by description. Similarly for ‘photon’ and ‘neutrino’….

10. Summarizing § 4 • There are three ways of learning a new word: (1) in isolation as a one-word sentence, (2) contextually as a part of a sentence, and (3) by description of the intended objects to which the word refers. Every word may be learned in at least one of these ways, but not every word may be learned in all three ways.

11. § 5. Evidence • “…words mean only as their use in sentences is conditioned to sensory stimuli, verbal and otherwise. The pattern of conditioning is complex and inconstant from person to person, but there are points of general congruence: combinations of questions and non-verbal stimulations which are pretty sure to elicit an affirmative answer from anyone fit to be numbered within the relevant speech community. Any realistic theory of evidence must be inseparable from the psychology of stimulus and response, applied to sentences.” p. 17

12. “Calling a stone a stone at close quarters is an extreme case. Evidence is deliberately marshaled only when there is more nearly an equilibrium between the sensory conditioning of an affirmative response and the contrary conditioning, mediated by the interanimation of sentences. Thus the question under deliberation may be whether something glimpsed from a moving car was a stone. That it was a stone, and that it was a crumpled paper, are two ready responses; and the tendency to the former is inhibited by the tendency to the latter, via sentential interconnections at the level of common-sense physical theory. Then one ‘checks,’ or seeks overwhelming evidence, by returning to the spot to the best of his judgment and so putting himself in the way of stimulations more firmly and directly associated with the attribution of stonehood or paperhood.” pp. 17-18

13. “Prediction is in effect the conjectural anticipation of further sensory evidence for a foregone conclusion. When a prediction comes out wrong, what we have is a divergent and troublesome sensory stimulation that tends to inhibit that once foregone conclusion, and so to extinguish the sentence-to-sentence conditionings that led to the prediction. Thus it is that theories wither when their predictions fail.” P. 18

14. “The sifting of evidence would seem from recent remarks to be a strangely passive affair, apart from the effort to intercept helpful stimuli: we just try to be as sensitively responsive as possible to the ensuing interplay of chain stimulations. What conscious policy does one follow, then, when not simply passive toward this interanimation of sentences? Consciously the quest seems to be for the simplest story.” p. 19

15. “Simplicity is not a desideratum on a par with conformity to observation. Observation serves to test hypotheses after adoption; simplicity prompts their adoption for testing. Still, decisive observation is commonly long delayed or impossible; and, insofar at least, simplicity is final arbiter.” p. 20

16. Summarizing § 5 • Evidence is best understood as relating sentences (interanimated by other sentences) to sensory stimuli. Likewise for notions related to evidence such as those of predictions, the testing of hypotheses, and theories. In deciding how best to organize our interanimated sentences with respect to sensory stimuli, our main guiding consideration is one of simplicity.

17. § 6. Posits and truth • A physicist is not interested solely in systemizing general truths said in common-sense terms about ordinary physical objects. He supplements his theory with reference to extraordinary physical things such as molecules and the resultant theory including the extraordinary objects is simpler than the theory that would exclude them. (p. 21)

18. Quine’s Underdetermination Thesis • Theory is undertermined by data. • An imagined completed theory of ordinary physical objects would not entail a unique theory of extraordinary physical objects: the extraordinary is underdetermined by the ordinary. And both kinds of physical objects are underdetermined by the totality of nerve hits undergone by human observers. We may have all available evidence and still no unique theory of physical objects would be entailed. Pp. 21-22

19. Posits • “Considered relative to our surface irritations, which exhaust our clues to an external world, the molecules and their extraordinary ilk are thus much on par with the most ordinary physical objects. The positing of those extraordinary things is just a vivid analogue of the positing or acknowledging of ordinary things: vivid in that the physicist audibly posits them for recognized reasons, whereas the hypothesis of ordinary things is shrouded in prehistory.” p. 22

20. Posits continued • “To call a posit a posit is not to patronize it….Nor let us look down on the standpoint of the theory as make-believe; for we can never do better than occupy the standpoint of some theory or other, the best we can muster at the time.” p. 22

21. Truth • “What reality is like is the business of scientists, in the broadest sense, painstakingly to surmise; and what there is, what is real, is part of that question.” p.22

22. Against the pragmatic theory of truth • “Peirce was tempted to define truth outright in terms of scientific method, as the ideal theory which is approached as a limit when the (supposed) cannons of scientific method are used unceasingly on continuing experience. But there is a lot wrong with Peirce’s notion, besides its assumption of a final organon of scientific method and its appeal to an infinite process….[A]s urged two pages back, we have no reason to suppose that man’s surface irritations even unto eternity admit of any one sytsematization that is scientifically better or simpler than all possible others.” p. 23

23. Against the pragmatic theory of truth continued • Even if there were such a unique theory “we should not thereby have defined truth for actual single sentences….Unless pretty firmly and directly conditioned to sensory stimulation, a sentence…is meaningless except relative to its own theory….” pp. 23-24

24. Quine’s disquotational theory of truth • “It is …[only?] when we turn back into the midst of an actually present theory…that we can and do speak sensibly of this and that sentence as true….To say that the statement ‘Brutus killed Caesar’ is true, or that “The atomic weight of sodium is 23’ is true, is in effect simply to say that Brutus killed Caesar, or that the atomic weight of sodium is 23.” p. 24

25. Against relativism • “Have we now so far lowered our sights as to settle for a relativistic doctrine of truth--rating the statements of each theory as true for that theory, and brooking no higher criticism? Not so….Within our own total evolving doctrine, we can judge truth as earnestly and absolutely as can be; subject to correction, but that goes without saying.” pp. 24-25 • Against relativism then, we do not have to honor any theory other than our own as containing true sentences.

26. Summarizing § 6. • Theory is underdetermined by data. We have no access to what exists or what is true independent of theory, so what there is and what is true are likewise undetermined. Everything is a posit of theory, but this is not to slight things as make-believe. There is nothing more to saying that “p is true” than to say that p, which in turn is assessed only from the vantage of our own theory, but this is not to slight truth as merely relative to one of multiple and unassailable theories.

27. THE END