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Quine Against the Dogmas of Empiricism
by Prof. Michele Marsonet . How can we be sure that our beliefs really bear on the world? If we read carefully Quine’s rejection of the second dogma of empiricism, it is clear that he relates the empirical significance of our statements about the world with their possibility of being subject to what he calls, in Kantian terms, “the tribunal of experience”. We writes, in fact, that “Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of experience not individually but as a corporate body.” So it turns out that when we want to verify whe…
Between Pragmatism and Analysis
by Prof. Michele Marsonet Many thinkers nowadays react against the strictures of the analytic tradition by reviving the American philosophy par excellence: pragmatism. The forerunner of this trend of thought in the second half of the past century is Quine, even though he has never been a full-fledged pragmatist: his stance is better pictured by saying that he inserted pragmatist elements in a largely analytic (and even logical empiricist) stance. Following Quine we find Rescher, who began reevaluating pragmatism in the late 1960’s. Rescher’s…
