Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

What Quine calls the “‘idea’ idea” is the view that language is the expression of something “inner” which must be discovered before we can tell what an utterance means, or interpret the linguistic behavior of utterers (e.g., attribute beliefs, desires, and cultures to them). To abandon this idea is at once to abandon the logical-empiricist notion of “truth in virtue of meaning” and the sometime Oxonian notion of “conceptual truth,” since there are no meanings or concepts from which truths might be read off. This attitude toward the concept of “concept” makes it possible to dismiss Kant’s distinction between necessary truths (which can be determined by looking at concepts alone [analytic truth] or pure concepts and pure forms of intuition alone [synthetic a priori truth]) and contingent truths (which require reference to empirical intuitions). But Quine regards concepts and meanings as merely one species of intentions, and he wishes to obliterate all intentions. Thus, admitting that “means,” “believes,” and “desires,” for example, have no behavioristic equivalents (as Brentano and Chisholm, in an effort to preserve some kernel of truth in traditional mind-body dualism, had also attempted to show), Quine concludes that this shows that the notions of “belief” and “desire” are (for “scientific” purposes) as dispensable as those of “concept” and “intuition”: One may accept the Brentano thesis either as showing the indispensability of intentional idioms and the importance of an ...

November 16, 2020. Page 194.