Monty Python and Philosophy, Gary Hardcastle [portable ebook reader TXT] 📗

“So what? Big deal.” Well, hang on. We’ve just shown that if you admit that language gets its meaning by being hooked up with the world, so to speak, then you have to deny that, strictly speaking, sentences have meanings all by themselves. Instead, they have meanings only when they hang out with other sentences. Willard Van Orman Quine, a philosopher who has the distinction of being one of the best logicians of the twentieth century (and having a pretty cool name, to boot), put it best in 1951, in a now-massively famous paper titled “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (in his From a Logical Point of View [Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1951]). He said, “statements about the external world face the tribunal of experience not individually but only as a corporate body.” Quine’s remark is an expression of semantic holism—the view which opposes semantic reductionism. The key idea of semantic holism is that meaning is had by the whole language, but not by any of its parts alone.

Semantic holism has some absolutely marvelous consequences. One is that you can’t really assert a meaningful statement without sort of implicitly asserting a bunch of other statements—indeed, perhaps the entire language—at the same time. Another is that it seems possible to hold any arbitrarily chosen statement as true no matter what empirical evidence is presented against it, and to do so rationally, by rejecting and accepting the right related statements. So if you want to maintain that the cat is on the mat when everybody else denies it, you can do so by deciding that certain atmospheric phenomena are making it look like there’s no cat, or that the cat on the mat is a special kind of transparent cat, and so on. And you can maintain these claims by making still further adjustments in other claims. This sounds like silliness, but the point is that it is just the kind of silliness that verificationism had hoped to do away with.

I know, it’s been a long time since a clip. So let’s have two. First, watch how Monty Python conveys this conflict between verificationism and semantic holism, by means of parrot.

“Dead Parrot,” Episode 8 of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “Full Frontal Nudity”

Mr. Praline, the man attempting to return the parrot, is our verificationist, as is evidenced by his attempt to verify the death of the parrot by reference to experience, such as seeing that it’s motionless, its falling to the ground when sent aloft, its being nailed to its perch, and so on. The shopkeeper is our philosophically more sophisticated holist. He knows that maintaining the truth of other statements, concerning for example the bird’s strength and its affection for the fjords, will allow him to maintain that the parrot is alive. Notice who wins: the shopkeeper is never brought to accept that the parrot is dead. Indeed, the sketch could go on indefinitely without that ever happening.

Here’s a rather more graphic depiction of holism.

Arthur Meets the Black Knight, Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Despite the successive loss of limbs, it is the Black Knight who is our holist. That’s because he maintains as true that he shall prevent the bridge from being crossed, and he knows how to maintain it come what may. If King Arthur ultimately triumphs over the Black Knight to cross the bridge, it is for contingent and empirical reasons, I would argue, and not for any weakness in the Knight’s arguments. And you realize that I could even argue that Arthur didn’t cross the bridge at all; now that’s semantic holism.

I bet you’ve guessed by now what the second of the two revolts in contemporary analytic philosophy is. It’s the revolt against logical positivism, of course! If you’re starting to feel guilty again for not having written anything down, then write down the names ‘Carl Hempel’, ‘Thomas Kuhn’, ‘Norwood Russell Hanson,’ ‘Nelson Goodman,’ ‘Hilary Putnam’, and, of course, ‘W.V. Quine’. These are just a few of the prominent post-positivists. There are lots more. Indeed, it’s much easier to list all the living positivists, and barring a change in the philosophical winds it’s going to get easier and easier with the passing of every year.

At any rate, unlike most revolts, the revolt against positivism was either sufficiently sensitive or sufficiently indiscriminate—it’s hard to tell which—to retain the essentially correct aspects of what it was revolting against. Specifically, it retained positivism’s love affair with language. Post-positivists, like the positivists, believed that understanding anything really important, like how we know, what there is, or what’s right and wrong, meant first understanding our language, which after all is pretty much the best and only means by which we express what we know, what there is, and what’s right and wrong. Throw in semantic holism, and it should come as no surprise that the story of analytic philosophy since the downfall of logical positivism is essentially the story of successive, multi-pronged and somewhat uncoordinated attempts to sort out the consequences of the fact that the unit of meaning in a language is not the sentence but the language itself.

One consequence of semantic holism, believe it or not, comes in the form of a threat to the very foundation of society. Let me explain. Holism seems to warrant bad reasoning, for it allows one to rationally maintain any statement come what may. That’s bad enough. But it took about half a second for analytic philosophers to realize that things were, potentially, much worse. You see, philosophers from way, way, back in the analytic tradition believed deeply that, one way or another, reason was the proper foundation for society; it was both the mechanism that runs society and the grease on which the mechanism turned. Ever eager to be of use, philosophers have worked hard at coming up with a theory of argument to describe how reason ought to work in daily life. This is why you, as undergraduates, are subjected to classes like Symbolic