Why I Don't Like Quine (I)

I do not think I believe in the dissolution of the synthetic/analytic division. Or rather, I don't believe in what backs it up, or the reasons for which it's supposed to be significant. That no word has meaning on its own (separate from what? other words, life--two things that would usually be considered opposite domains to be reconciled--i.e. the "space of reasons" and "experience") is obvious. But Quine maintains that what gives our words the little meaning they have--and this is the reason why it is such little meaning--is a Humean concept of experience as something without any concepts in it. Experience, for Quine, is "sensory stimulations." It's in the face of this Humean skepticism that no word's meaning is any more determinate than any other's. (I think this is a more significant reason for indeterminacy than holism.) Now, analyticity is properly suspicious in light of the fact that meaning something by one's words is something we do, and isolating language from human activity and searching for the meaning in it is bound to be as fruitless (not to say misguided) as isolating what we experience from our concepts and searching for the causation in it. But it might still be acceptable to talk about analytic meaning in certain language-games. Or perhaps we can have analyticity in factive meaning--a relation between things in the world and other things in the world, rather than between concepts and other concepts. (Boar droppings mean there's a boar.) But as I'm not sure what to do with the flawed Wittgensteinianness of McDowell and Travis at the moment, I'd rather stay general, and say: if you refuse to draw a boundary between concepts (or conceptual-stuff, like meanings) and the world, then the implications our words have for us will just follow. They will be there, and we will be committed to them. Or we will be capable of being shown that a word has uses we haven't learned yet. The point is: words aren't contaminated by being dependent upon experience in order to be defined if experience is not an "external" substance.

From Emerson, "Experience"

"We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them" (314).

"Let us treat the men and women well; treat them as if they were real; perhaps they are" (314).

"Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; whatever language we will, we can never say anything but what we are" (323-324).

"We believe in ourselves as we do not believe in others. We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others is experiment for us. . . Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought. . .; but in its sequel it turns out to be a horrible jangle and confounding of all relations . . . Because the intellect qualifies in our case the moral judgments. For there is no crime to the intellect. . .To it, the world is a problem in mathematics or the science of quantity, and it leaves out praise and blame and all weak emotions. . .Sin, seen from thought, is a diminution, or less; seen from the conscience or will, it is pravity or bad. The intellect names it shade, absence of light, and no essence. The conscience must feel it as essence, essential evil. This it is not; it has an objective existence, but no subjective" (323).

"Why not realize your world?. . . It takes a good deal of time to eat or to sleep, or to earn a hundred dollars, but very little time to entertain an insight which becomes the light of our life. . .[I]n the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations which in his passage to new worlds he will carry with him" (326).