Lexicon of Arguments

 

I 56
QuineVsVerification: it is pointless to equate a sentence with one outside of the theory - Inter-theoretically this has no meaning.
>Meaning, >Theories, >Reference, >Incommensurability, >Comparisons, >Comparability.
- - -
VII (b) 38
Verification Theory/Verificationism/Quine: but what are the methods or the nature of the relation between a statement and the experiences that should contribute to confirmation or refutation?
1. Most naïve view: radical reduction: direct report. This precedes the actual verification theory for a long time. (Locke and Hume, Tooke).
Tooke: a term should be the name of a sense date or a part of it, or an abbreviation for it.
Quine: that's ambivalent between:
Sense Data/Quine: can be understood as
a) event
b) quality. This remains vague as far as the contribution to the whole statement is concerned.
Verification theory/Quine: we better take whole statements as units of meaning
VII (b) 39
to translate them into sense data language, not expression for expression.
VII 40
Reductionism/Two Dogmas/Quine:
2. More refined form: each utterance is associated with a uniform range of possible sensory impressions, so that each occurrence either increases the probability (likelihood) of the truth of the utterance
VII (b) 41
or narrows it.
This, of course, is contained in the verification theory.
Quine thesis: (based on Carnap's "construction"): our statements stand before the tribunal of experience not individually, but as a whole corpus. (>Quine-Duhem-Thesis).