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

by Richard Rorty

Quine thinks this anti-intentionalism of a piece with his polemic against analyticity. But it is not. The author of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” should have said that concepts and meanings are harmless if posited to give explanations of our behavior, and become harmful only when treated as the source of a special kind of truth and of a special sort of authority for certain assertions. In particular, we would expect him to say that the reasons normally given for translating languages one way rather than another (or for ascribing one set of beliefs and desires rather than an odd alternative which would predict the same linguistic behavior) are justified simply by their internal coherence, and that such practices as translation and ascription of intentional states are justified by their social utility. Quine grants the utility, but he thinks it philosophically important to insist that the sort of truth proffered in such remarks as “‘Hund’ is German for ‘dog,’” and “Robinson believes in God” is not the sort of truth which expresses “matter of fact.”26 He thus offers us a distinction between truth by convenience and truth by correspondence, so to speak, rather than the old positivist distinction between truth by convention and truth confirmed by sensory experience. Truths about meanings and beliefs and propositions are, somehow, not really truths in the full sense of the term—just as the positivists used to say that necessary truths were not really “about the world.”

November 16, 2020. Page 195.