W. V. Quine on Necessary Truth (1963)

Dr. Willard Van Orman Quine gives a talk on necessity in 1963. This was the seventh talk in a series of 17 lectures given on the philosophy of science from Voice of America’s “Forum: The Arts & Sciences in Mid-Century America”. The series includes Paul Feyerabend, Ernest Nagel, Carl Hempel, Hilary Putnam, Nelson Goodman, Max Black, Sidney Morgenbesser, Patrick Suppes, and others.

00:00 Intro
01:37 Talk

#philosophy #quine

[Reviving_Virtue]

This is fantastic, gave it two listens.

I see Quine's naturalized epistemology here acting as an epistemic ritual that adds depth and richness to Hume's empiricism. While Hume saw regularities in nature as mere habits and refrained from calling them 'necessities, ' Quine is taking this a step further through emphasizing the importance of theoretical frameworks in giving meaning and coherence to these observed regularities. This integrated approach bridging theory with action and observation and reflection, serves to organize our empirical observations into a more coherent system, a point that Quine stresses towards the end of his lecture and reminds me of John Dewey's whole argument in Human Nature and Conduct.

[quinetastic]

Great!👍 Thanks very much for posting this 😀

[Eta_Carinae__]

It almost feels as though Quine treats terms like solubility as free variables to stand in for an object as yet unknown to science, where most other people see it as denoting a percept, or property defined wholly in terms of empirical content. I hope this reading is accurate; it sounds very Quinean to me. Though now it seems a mystery how Quine thinks about terms whose referent is explicitly a percept.

[Eta_Carinae__]

It might be more a violation of logical necessity to modify momentum's conservation under inelastic conditions, than any specific formula for it.

[johnurga]

it's not clear to me why you would want any 'promissory note' interpretation of 'necessarily, ' if it is all ultimately a matter of humean observed generalities. at some point, for whatever reason, people began searching for scientific explanations. but to say that some sort of further explanation is what they always had in mind when they said 'necessarily', seems a stretch.

[vhawkkl]

After prolonged painstaking deliberation, the committee finally settled on Willard Van Orman Quine to represent the western arm of the galaxy in the intergalactic boring beings out of their minds contest, which he won by boring the entire universe to tears, but sadly he never learned that the T in trait is silent and thus it is pronounced tray.