Ep. 294: Quine on Science vs. Epistemology (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: Hey, this is the Partially Examined Life, episode 294, part 2. In discussing Willard Van Orman Quine's essay epistemology naturalized from 1969, where were we?

0:19 Wes: So we had just been talking about the idea that there was some hope with some conceptual advancements in terms of contextual definitions and the use of set theory to translate thing talk into sense data talk. But ultimately, because of the problem of induction and other skeptical concerns, there turns out to be no real doctrinal advantage to those conceptual advancements. We can't prove the external world, as Quine puts it, from sense data and then logic and set theory. Our generalizations will always cover more than we can observe. So we can't really demonstrate natural science from immediate experience. Cartesian certainty is not impossible. We can't endow the truths of nature with the full authority of immediate experience.

1:03 Mark: He mentions an essay by Bertrand Russell called the Existence of the External World that I looked at briefly. It might be a good thing for us to look at. I felt like we should read. Whether it's that or Problems of Philosophy, you should read some Russell this year. We're in the neighborhood of it and finish what was another like Quine, a very plain spoken, often writer who had a hugely influential take on empiricism before the time.

1:30 Seth: Have we ever read any Russell?

1:32 Mark: I think you were not on the one about mathematics. And then I think we read his theory of definite descriptions, maybe in conjunction with Frege or something.

1:39 Wes: Yeah, we got to control the amount of analytic philosophy though that we put into our bodies because I basically get poisoned. This leads us into really into the next big part of the essay, which is, he says, instead of doing rational reconstruction, à la Carnap, really just better off settling for epistemology as psychology and just saying I'm not going to do an armchair reconstruction of how sense data is related to my more theoretical talk. I'm just going to look at how it is actually related, how construction actually proceeds developmentally after stimulation of the sensory receptors starting in childhood and leading, you know. So in other words, you could look at language development, the development of language, and learn a lot about how we build up sensory stimulation into more theoretical talk.

2:37 Seth: Not that he's going to do it theoretically.

2:39 Wes: We could if we really wanted to. That's what. That's what's important.

2:47 Seth: So the transition, then. Quine says it was sad for epistemologists, Hume and others to have to acquiesce to in the impossibility of strictly deriving the sciences of the external world from sensory evidence. Two cardinal tenets of empiricism remained unassailable, however, and remain so to this day. One is that whatever evidence there is for science is sensory evidence. The other to which I shall recur, is that all inculcation of meanings, of words must rest ultimately on sensory evidence. Then he talks about the log, right, and he says Carnap was seeking a rational reconstruction.

And he says, but why would we do a reconstruction if the stimulation of sensory receptors is all the evidence anybody has to go on? You know, why not just. Instead of doing the reconstruction, why not just see how the construction proceeds? So don't reconstruct, just look at construction. In other words, why not settle for psychology? To which the response is, well, if your goal is the validation of the grounds of empirical science, you defeat your purpose by using psychology or any other empirical science in the validation. And he says, however, such scruples against circularity have little point once we have stopped dreaming of deducing science from observations.

If we are out simply to understand the link between observation and science, we are well advised to use any available information, including that provided by the very science whose link with observation we are seeking to understand. So in other words, once we're no longer concerned about maintaining some kind of consistency and completeness and deductive structure to what we're doing, then we don't have to worry about leveraging concepts which we might be trying to actually find the source of in sensory experience in order to do that. What I took this to be was just straight up phenomenology.

You got to start from where you stand, and there's nothing wrong with that. And he's just basically saying, we start the investigation from where we are and we'll do whatever work is necessary to get to where we want to be.

4:46 Wes: I mean, if we were doing math and we said, okay, I want to figure out the deductive relation between all my axioms, you know, say, geometry, all the basic axioms, and all the theorems, I'm going to, you know, show how everything can be proved from all these fundamental axioms. And then someone came along and said, well, to do that, you're going to actually have to make use of some of those theorems that supposedly are just going to be proved from the axioms and say, okay, well, what you're doing is patently circular. But that's not a problem in this case because we're no longer envisaging our epistemology according to this mathematical analogy where we're trying to derive the certainty of all our physicalist discourse from the certainty of our access to our sense data.

Instead, we are going to do science. There's no derivation or demonstration at all. There's observation. Now we look at. Because the interesting thing about this construction is, yes, we can do rational reconstruction, we can look at conceptual links, but the conceptual links actually happen and unfold over time in the real world. If you think about the fact that our theory stuff is essentially linguistic, happens in language. And if you think about the fact that we can observe language development, it's almost like we can observe this movement from sense data to higher level language instead of trying to figure out those links by sitting in our armchairs and deducing it theoretically.

So we rely on natural science to do that. And we can't ever say we've proved natural science, we assume it, but that doesn't matter because we're not trying to do this foundationalist thing anyway.

6:33 Mark: Doesn't that prove you just have your faith in science? This is the Kantian move, you know, I just said the religious version of that. But the idea that if all this science assumes induction, you know, as the most important thing assumes causality, well, that just must be something that we admit we are certain about. That is the Archimedean point, because that, you know, without that the entire edifice falls. And we're going to see through the rest of this essay that no, that's a very central piece. It is true that if you doubt causality in the first place, then the rest of your science is probably going to fall apart.

But that doesn't mean it is unassailable. It is assailable. It is a piece of the theory. It's just a piece. It's hard to imagine what kind of bizarre stuff we would have to see over time to make us change our minds about that. But maybe there's stuff at the quantum level or something that the same reason people were ruling out action at a distance, like things that you think are unassailable might end up being assailed at some point. The point is that in doing science, yes, we accept foundational things provisionally, right? As long as the evidence continues to seem to support them and so that goes not only with the current theory you're working with in its details, but in its central features like that.

There is no fundamental difference. It's more a matter of degree than a matter of difference in kind between those peripheral and central parts of your theory.

7:52 Wes: I want to say one more thing about this little, this circularity part, because I thought a lot about this before reading this in a, in a different context, which is that skepticism in a way is self limiting. There's already a circular element to skepticism because I, on my account, I see it as fundamentally motivated by science, right? Fundamentally motivated by the idea that theory is under determined by evidence and by including early cognitive science. Skepticism would be far less motivated if people weren't thinking about light particles hitting eyes.

But to have those thoughts, they have to be doing science, they have to be assuming causality and lots of other stuff. And the skeptical worries have a lot less force if you don't subscribe to a naturalistic point of view. If you don't subscribe to science, the skeptical worries, yes, there is ancient skepticism. There are other things at work here, but I don't think they have as much force. So this is one of the reasons, I think, that Hegel said in Introduction to the Phenomenology, why wouldn't we just doubt the doubt? We can doubt the doubt.

So the circularity, in other words, I think cuts both ways. If we were to doubt reject natural science, our motivations for skepticism would be undermined anyway.

9:02 Seth: The net net for the next couple pages is that the CARNAP project to reduce sentences of science into terms of observation, logic and set theory isn't going to work. He talks about translatability, basically the reduction, just the whole move of reduction is he's going to say isn't really what we want to do because it's part of this reconstructive experience.

9:26 Wes: So he's going to talk about later Carnap and his attempt to use these things called reduction forms, which are more liberal even than contextual definition, so that we can explain terms by specifying some sentences that are implied by those terms or sentences that they imply that contain those terms. It's almost like what Carnap is doing there is he's trying to imagine a kind of fictitious history in which we acquire physicalist discourse by building it up out of a succession of reduction forms. This is the really interesting thing I think about this part of the argument is he's just saying, look, you're trying to approximate the developmental psychology that I want us to move on to anyway.

And if it's not, once you move into this reduction form area, you no longer getting that rational reconstruction deduction that you wanted anyway. So there's simply no advantage to this over psychology. So this is like the final nail in the coffin for this Carnap approach. Carnap realized the shortcomings of his earlier project. Reduction forms don't help either. We might as well just do psychology. Because he's basically now he's going to say the meanings of physicalist discourse have to be cashed out not in terms of that Carnapian reduction to sense data, logic, set theory, but in terms of what difference it makes to possible experience.

This is the logical positivist verificationist conception of meaning. What difference would they make to possible experience? That's the meaning of this stuff.

10:58 Mark: Yeah, so there's a nice connection to early pragmatism here. Carnap does not sound like a pragmatist, right? He sounds like he's doing some weird, very impractical kind of translation. But this came from. He's why says, suppose we hold with that old empiricist Peirce, Charles Sanders Peirce, that the very meaning of a statement consists in the differences truth would make to possible experience. Might we not formulate in a chapter length sentence in observational language all the difference that the truth of a given statement might make to experience? And might we not then take all this as the translation?

11:29 Wes: So, you know, if you're going to spell out the difference that something makes to possible experience, you might have to go on for a very long time. In fact, you might have to go on ad infinitum. You know, the problem with that is it makes the empirical meanings of typical statements about the external world inaccessible and ineffable, quote unquote. The empiricist in the end, right, has to concede that ineffability. And once you actually go this verificationist route, the massiveness of possible implications for experience or problem. And then the other part of this is just that most statements about bodies, you can't just say, oh, let's just isolate the statement and talk about what its experiential implications are.

You actually have to grab onto a big chunk of theory surrounding that statement in order to talk about experiential implications. Almost no sentences actually have their own experiential implications. This is not unrelated to Lakatos, right, and his critique of falsifiability. It's not that we can just take any given sentence and say, oh, it's going to be overturned by some particular sensory experience. Actually, we might want to overturn part of our theory instead. So we have to bring all of that to the table if we're going to connect it up to experiential implications.

12:45 Seth: Let me ask if this is correct. You have a statement, let's call it a theory. Let it be woven in with other theoretical statements in this construct that's connected together. That theory predicts experience. When you talk about, though, the statement of the experience itself, or if you're talking about trying to reduce or cash or translate that theoretical statement, that does prediction in terms of straight up experiential statements. So not theories, but just observations about bodies or whatever. Part of the issue is those experiential statements, the observational statements, they don't predict. So as part of the issue here, how do you get to a point where you are making statements that predict experience from statements of experience that do no prediction themselves?

13:36 Wes: Let's try to take an example. We don't have to think about science. He says a typical statement about bodies has no fund of experiential implications it can call its own. So just like, let's take the old analytic, the cat is on the mat. You can think about the meaning of that in terms of all the possible hypotheticals that you could have in regard to, to that experience, right? So what happens if I step on the mat and the cat is in between the mat and my foot, right, And I crush the cat? Or what happens if I go to the other side of the cat and I'm looking at the back of the cat?

All these different phenomenological hypotheticals, I think, are what we mean by the possible experiential implications. But of course they aren't really, if you think about just that particular sensory experience. We need a lot more theoretical baggage before we can actually call those things experiential implications. Is the experiential implication of a cat on the mat really that it would be crushed if I stepped on it? Not with a bunch of other assumptions and theoretical stuff. I mean, the other thing we can do is think about Lakatos and Newton, right?

We can say if we make a discovery that I forget what it is, the perihelion of Mercury or something. Something like that is not what we expect given Newtonian theory. What is the experiential implication of that? Is it that we have to overturn the theory, or our observation is inaccurate, or that our observational theory, you know, our instruments are bad? Or to think about an implication of any given observation, we have to grab on to a bunch of other related sentences, theoretical and otherwise. It just doesn't have any implications on its own.

Without all of that, you know, it's theoretical context. Let's make it, let's put it that way.

15:22 Mark: So does it make a difference that we're be in the Lakatos instance, you know, Popper instance, working from a different direction? I think the quine would more be asking the question, consider the sentence, the perihelion of mercury is such and such and asking what are the observational consequences of that? What should we see? Whereas with this we're like, we have an observation, it looks like it doesn't move like we predicted. What does that mean to the theory? These are related questions, but one is working from the theory out and one is working from the observation in. Do you even see those as distinct in any interesting way?

16:00 Wes: Maybe we better go back to the cat on the mat example. Yeah. What do we mean by experiential implications? What is the verificationist theory of truth that's at work here? The simple version is that if I say something, the meaning what I say. In order to cash out that meaning, we have to do a bunch of hypotheticals where we say, okay, if I do this, then this happens. If I do that, then that happens. The simplest is if I go do an experiment and try and verify it. Isn't that what it means to say that the meanings of physicalist discourse come down to a difference to possible experience?

We cash out meanings in terms of these hypotheticals. If I do X, then Y happens, and so on. In a way, this is what it means to even have a concept where we think of language here as use as know how. Even to know the word cat is to have dispositions, to use it correctly in certain sentences. And to know what a cat is is to have certain expectations regarding what's going to happen if I do X. Right. So it's not just like the flat picture sense data that I have of the cat. That's not what the cat is. The cat is this big construct of possible future things that could happen with my interactions with it.

What happens if I open it up and look inside? What's its anatomy? Those are the experiential implications or possible experience.

17:21 Mark: Right. We talked about that a lot. In terms of like, what are colors? If we're going to say something is blue? It means observers in ideal conditions of proper lighting will have this sort of experience, whatever that is, and will, since we can't see inside each other's heads, it more becomes a Dispositional thing of like, well, when folks are in this, then they will both refer to the thing as blue. They can't match what's in their heads, but at least they can match the use of the word. So it's about experiences, but it's also about this public thing. And those are, you know, as part of the history here with Wittgenstein's private language argument, is to paper over that difference is to say that when we're talking about meanings of words, we can't be actually referring to private things in our heads. We're referring to usage.

18:08 Wes: Yeah, It's a form of know how. And that's why he uses this word ineffable. Right? Because to say I know the meaning of cat doesn't mean I have to be able to suddenly articulate every sentence that it could ever be used in. Right? I can. I have to know how to do that. But the ineffability just means I can't spell that out and I don't need to in order to say I understand the concept at any given time. You know, reading the word cat. I don't have a full picture of my cat in the head. You know, I'm not thinking about all the different implications of.

Of future experiences depending on hypothetical engagements with the cat. I don't think about its anatomy. There's a million things I don't think about. If I had that concept, I have something that exists largely in potentiality, that's largely ineffable. This is part of Wittgenstein's point as well. It's not like just some image in the head or some immediately grasped thing in the head. This is all about potentiality. The cat is more like a variable in a way, the word or the concept. What he does now is he does the indeterminacy of translation.

Bit transition is kind of the bottom of 79, just so it'll make sense,

19:09 Seth: he says, if we can aspire to a sort of logischer Aufbau der Welt at all, it must be to one in which the text slated for translation into observational and logico mathematical terms are mostly broad theories taken as wholes rather than just terms or short sentences. Now, I don't know why that's the case, but that's the claim. The translation of a theory would be a ponderous axiomatization of all the experiential difference that the truth of the theory would make. It would be a queer translation, for it would translate the whole, but none of the parts.

We might better speak in such a case, not of the translation, but simply of observational evidence for theories, and we may still fairly call this the empirical meaning of the theories. Then he goes on to say, this raises a philosophical question about ordinary unphilosophical translation, such as from English into I don't know what Arunta is, but Chinese. So basically, he says, if English sentences of a theory have their meaning only together as a body, then we can justify their translation only together as a body. There will be no justification for pairing off component sentences in each language, except insofar as those correlations make the translation of the whole theory come out right.

So any sentence translations will be correct as long as the overall empirical implications of the theory as a whole are preserved in translation. But it's to be expected that many different ways of translating sentences are possible that would still maintain the overall empirical implications. And that way there can really be no ground for saying which of two glaringly unlike translations of individual sentences is right, which.

20:50 Mark: Kemp, in Quine, A Guide for the Perplexed, takes this on how obviously unintuitive this is for a real language. If you actually bring two translators into English to Chinese, or vice versa, who are, you know, bilingual, probably their translations are going to be pretty similar. They're going to be some individual words, but there's no way in hell that one of them is going to come up with something that, you know, has a whole worldview built into it that the other one does not. And Kemp clarifies that that doesn't matter, that Quine is talking.

Even though it sounds like he's trying to get real here, he's actually still talking very theoretically. And so any intuitions that we would have from actual translation practices, right? The fact is that, that, like, those two bilingual speakers have things in common, right? They have worldviews in common already. So this is why I think maybe Quine moves to this idea of, well, we're not talking about a bilingual person or something, you know, somebody who already understands Chinese. We're talking about two people trying to figure out who are acting as translators to a completely unfamiliar language and do this thing that we, you know, talked about in the first half of ostension

21:56 Seth: and blah, blah, blah. The result of all this for him is he says, bottom of page 80. If we recognize with Peirce that the meaning of a sentence turns purely on what would count as evidence for its tr truth, and if we recognize that theoretical sentences have their evidence not as single sentences, but only as larger blocks of theory, then the indeterminacy of translation of theoretical sentences is the natural conclusion. And most sentences, apart from observation sentences, are theoretical.

22:22 Wes: Maybe let's start with the first part of it and say, do we understand his holism? So theoretical sentences have their evidence not as single sentences, but only as larger blocks of theory.

22:34 Seth: I feel like I do. So if you were to say, here's a theoretical sentence, force equals mass times acceleration, the evidence that would count towards that being true is not something that's simply contained in that sentence. There's a whole host of other sentences that you have to tie it into. And there has to be evidence for all those other sentences as well in order for this particular theoretical sentence to be true or to understand its meaning.

23:05 Wes: As I've been saying, any even ordinary sentence really is, any physical sentence is a theoretical sentence. So, like, the cat is on the mat is also a theoretical sentence that can't just be confirmed or disconfirmed by a single sensory experience. So we might see the cat on the mat, and there could be another explanation for that. It's cardboard or I'm hallucinating or whatever. So we need a get much more than one particular data point, right, to make our determination. But Quine's beyond that. I think Quine is, you know, we should take them seriously. It's not just we need one particular data point. We need practically everything, ultimately.

23:42 Mark: So I like this example in Kemp where he's talking like, you know, you think I use tree, but he uses rabbit. That if we are talking with this native speaker and I point to a thing, it's, you know, this rabbit that's jumping along and. And that person says a word and I'm like, okay, now I know their word for rabbit. And we raise these things. Of course, this is not going to come up in a real translation, but, well, how do we know he's talking about rabbit as opposed to rabbit at timeslice tea or whatever? Like, this is not a metaphysical mistake that any actual human would make.

But we need to rule this out if we want to say that I figured out the meaning and it turns out like, well, the way you would test it is, you know, ask more questions. So if the rabbit sticks around, then I might ask again, is that a rabbit? If what he was saying was, oh, there's a rabbit there at time slice, tea or whatever, then it would be a later time slice when you asked again. So he would have to say, no, it's this grue and bleen thing. This.

24:38 Wes: Well, it is. It is a real problem, right? Because in front of your child, you call your Dog spot, but you also call it dog. And they have to figure out one of those is a general term, one of those is a proper name. So.

24:48 Mark: But in terms of, like, why. This is not just a matter of, like, I need more data points. It's a matter of matter of the theory. So he's comparing two sentences. That rabbit is the same as that rabbit. In other words, like, I had rabbit at time one, rabbit at time two. And I thought that by asking those, you know, two questions, getting two data points, that I could settle it. He said yes, both times. Oh, he means what I mean by rabbit. A rabbit is the thing that exists over time. Well, look, no, consider this alternate. That rabbit stage is part of the same animal as that rabbit stage.

So maybe actually he's still talking about rabbit at timeslice t. But then when you point a few minutes later at the same rabbit who's still sitting there, he's like, well, I'm also now still talking about rabbit at time. Slice now, right? It's an indexical word. I'm not saying that this is the same as that. I'm saying they're part of the same animal. Right. In other words, there's a totally different theory of animalhood going on that is completely missed by the fact that they're both, you know, using the same word.

25:50 Wes: One slice could be sauteed and the other could be grilled. Lots of problems.

25:57 Mark: That was more complicated when I tried to explain it than it was in my head.

26:02 Wes: It's actually a really good example because it illustrates, you know, again, the theoretical background to when we first come to it. We would think these are just simple sensory experiences. But.

26:11 Mark: And I think this is something that is explored much more in word and object, that the chapter in Kemp is actually the previous chapter than the one that's supposed to be talking about this essay. It's talking about word and object. But he's just referring quine in this essay as if you already know this. You know, as if you've gone through the process of this. Improving the translation would be indeterminate. Kemp, at least I think, again, following Quine in Word and Object. It goes through this whole thing of like, well, we'd have to figure out ostension.

We'd have to figure out the point convention which we've just talked about in our symbolism episode. We'd also have to figure out logical quantifiers and. And there is all these things that are theoretical entities, that these are all ways in which something is theory laden. So we could do an Analysis, not just say the cat is on the mat is theory laden because, well, cats are animals. Like, even in the grammar of like is on, there's some theory involved in that. Like that there's material objects and some of them can be on others. And if you are some weird creature that just detected heat signatures of things, maybe you wouldn't have that is on.

27:17 Wes: Yeah, you're reminding me of how I can't explain it, but one of the downfalls of Carnaps Aufbau was just the concept is at.

27:25 Mark: Yep, that had to be remembered.

27:27 Wes: Do you understand how this leads to indeterminacy of translation? The holism, how one is connected to the other.

27:33 Mark: We're saying an individual sentence has an indeterminacy of translation because every individual sentence is tied to a whole. So you and I are saying the same sentence. This happens in philosophy discussions all the time. But you actually mean slightly different things by the words than I do. And so we think that we have the same meanings in our heads, but what we have is we're like two icebergs and the tip looks the same, but the underneath thing is different enough that actually those two tips actually mean something different.

28:02 Seth: The indeterminacy translation just says, wes, give me a sentence and then I can translate it one way and Mark can translate it another. And as long as those two different sentences don't disrupt the overall conveyance of meaning for all of the things that are entangled with that sentence, you can't judge between one and the other. Translations are equally good as long as in the context in which you're doing them, the whole, which is all the other sentences that are associated with it, as long as the empirical implications of all those sentences together, the whole isn't disrupted by translating the sentence one way or another, then you can't choose which one is a better translation.

28:46 Wes: What I think he means is you can always adjust all the other content and every other part of the language in order to make things work out. So it's to be expected that many different ways of translating the component sentences, essentially different individually, would deliver the same empirical implications for the theory as a whole. Deviations in the translations of one component sentence would be compensated for in the translation of another component sentence. Insofar there can be no ground for saying which of the two glaringly unlike translations of individual sentences is right.

So if you take this whole theoretical body composed of many, many different sentences, and all we're worried is that that theory line up with a certain set of theoretical implications, then conceivably Any adjustment in the meaning of one of those individual sentences could be compensated for by adjusting the meanings in other sentences in such a way that you get the same net effect at the level of the entire theory in relation to the entire set of sentences. So I don't know if that really clarifies things, but I don't fully understand it exactly, but that's my best stab at it.

30:00 Mark: But my understanding was two sentences could fit the data equally well. And what fits the data. So Seth was interpreting that as like the mass of beliefs that we're talking about, the web of belief, and you could tweak one of them, and as long as it doesn't disrupt the rest of the web too much. But that's not the data. The data is the observation, not the web of the belief that you're approaching.

30:20 Wes: We're not fitting sentences to data, though. We don't fit individual sentences to data. That's what he's saying.

30:25 Seth: It's not that it disrupts the web, it's that. Let's just say we have a theory, it's comprised of 10 sentences. That theory has experiential implications, aka it predicts something.

30:36 Wes: So we fit that theory to the data, but we don't fit any of the individual sentences into the data. We can only fit that set of 10 sentences as a whole to the data.

30:46 Seth: Yes, but the 10 sentences taken as a whole are what have the implication, not any One of the 10 component sentences on its own.

30:54 Mark: So that's holism, but that's not indeterminacy yet.

30:56 Seth: No.

30:57 Wes: Well, he's saying that holism implies indeterminacy.

31:00 Seth: Because suppose then we take sentence three and I translate it one way, you translate it another. In fact, let's say you translate the 10 sentences and I translate the 10 sentences, and all of them are different in some way, shape or form. But the 10 sentence translation that you make and the 10 sentence translation that I make have the same implication. They imply the same experience, or they predict the same experience as the original 10 sentences. There is no way to determine whether your translation or my translation is better. As long as the outcome of the whole is the same for any given sentence inside of that whole, you can't judge whether the translation is better or worse than any other, because ultimately the outcome is still the same. So those are both equally valid translations. That's the indeterminacy of translation.

31:51 Wes: Yeah. The way it works is if we do have radically different translations for one of those 10 sentences, we'd have to compensate with how we translate the other sentences in such the way that things work out at the whole theoretical level. But Quine is saying we could do that. That's what's not clear to me. I don't understand why he thinks that wouldn't necessarily work.

32:11 Seth: Well, we have to understand why this matters. Who cares? Even if we agree with him, it matters because.

32:18 Mark: And this is why I can't kept talking about a sentence being fit to the data, because the way for observation sentences, right. For the sentences that we would be starting with in doing a translation, we feel like if the sameness of meaning is a matter of it translates to the same data. In other words, instead of saying, when I'm doing this language game with the foreigner, that I don't know their language and I, you know, say tree or rabbit or whatever, what we're really doing is we're saying there's two sentences we have. Mine is this is a tree, and yours is whatever the equivalent is.

And those both cash out that particular observation. And so if a different translator comes along and observes the same thing, the person pointing at the tree and says, I'm translating is, that's a rabbit. Because I think that he's mistaken about what rabbits and trees are, and he's saying that that's a rabbit. But he's just wrong. I think Quine is saying actually both of those are legitimate translations because I guess he could be wrong about that. Right. It's just they both fit the data. It's just that there are obvious practical reasons. And Donald Davidson, I think we've talked about, says we have to assume that people are in general, right about most things.

Right. So it actually is an objectively better to Davidson translation that says, yeah, he's talking about a tree. He's not talking about a rabbit, but he's just confused about what a rabbit is. But technically speaking, if you're looking at the whole worldview of the person, you just don't know. You don't know if they're straightforwardly saying what's there and saying it the way that you would say it in their language, or whether they're applying some vastly different conceptual scheme to something. All right, so I think this is a great one for our new format in that we're going to on a different day when we've had a chance to think about this a little more.

Do the rest of the paper starting here so supporters get to hear more of this. It won't be out until next week. We want to have a release for you every week. Next time we're going to be talking about Kant's essay Perpetual Peace and some commentaries on that 1795 essay by Martha Nussbaum and Jurgen Habermas on the 200th birthday of the essay from a conference in 1995. Thanks audience. Please reach out to us with your suggestions with your comments where you can comment on the blog post to show you with this episode@PartiallyExaminedLife.com through Facebook, through Instagram, through Twitter.

Thanks guys and good night.

34:47 Seth: Good night.

34:47 Wes: Good night.