The Selected Writings of Eva Picardi

From Wittgenstein to American Neo-Pragmatism

Eva Picardi, Annalisa Coliva, Annalisa Coliva

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350101104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia analitica

Eva Picardi has been one of the most influential Italian analytic philosophers of her generation. She taught for forty years at the University of Bologna, raising three generations of students. This collection of selected writings honors her work, confirming Picardi's status as one of the most important Frege scholars of her generation and a leading authority on the philosophy of Donald Davidson. Bringing together Picardi's contributions to the history of analytic philosophy, it includes her papers on major 20th-century figures such as Wittgenstein, Quine, Davidson, Rorty, and Brandom. She examines their work in comparison with the philosopher Michael Dummett's, illuminating contrasts between American Neo-pragmatism and Continental philosophy. By considering key contributions made by Gadamer and Adorno and contrasting them with Davidson and Rorty's proposals, Picardi is able to bridge the Analytic and Continental divide. Featuring an introduction by Annalisa Coliva and new translations of previously unpublished papers, this collection emphasizes the significance of Picardi's work for a new generation of readers.

PART ONE

Reflecting on Davidson

CHAPTER ONE

Empathy and Charity

EVA PICARDI

The title of my paper is “Empathy and Charity”, but I will not primarily concern myself with the nature and exercise of these two (allegedly very widespread) gifts of the human soul. The first part of my paper is about “stimulus meaning”, more precisely, about how sensory evidence bears on the meaning of observation sentences. For, if Davidson is right the expression “sensory evidence” is a misnomer: there is no such thing as “sensory evidence”, for the same reason why there is no such thing as stimulus meaning (either shared or private). The “myth of the subjective” is responsible for Quine’s clinging to these ideas and this terminology. Accordingly, in the first part of my paper I will try to assess whether and to what extent Davidson’s criticisms of Quine on this issue are justified. The answer I am inclined to give to that question is a qualified yes: there are remnants of the “sensuous given” in Quine. However, I am not sure they are “mythological”, nor am I sure that Davidson’s diagnosis of their persistence is on the right track. In the second part of my paper I will try to offer an explanation, different from the one suggested by Davidson, for Quine’s adhering to the notion of a private stimulus meaning. In the process of so doing I will point out a number of ambiguities surrounding Quine’s employment of the notion of empathy – charity being a specialization of empathy to the domain of psychological explanation. This ambiguity – I surmise – is due to a shift of emphasis in Quine’s latest writings from a conception of language as a social art to a conception of language as a vehicle of information contiguous with bird calls and apes’ cries.

1. THE MYTH OF THE SUBJECTIVE

Perhaps the best way to form an impression of how empathy and stimulus meaning hang together is to quote a passage from Quine’s latest book, From Stimulus to Science. After having observed that signals of apes and birds “evolved as means of reporting perception”, Quine remarks

Perception of another’s unspoken thought, however – up to a point – is older than language. Empathy is instinctive. Child psychologists tell us that an infant just a few days old responds to an adult’s facial expression, even to imitating it by the unlearned flexing of appropriate muscles. Dogs and bears are believed to detect fear and anger in people and other animals, perhaps by smell.

Empathy figures also in the child’s acquisition of his first observation sentences. He does not just hear the sentence, see the reported event and associate the two. In this yet inarticulate way he perceives that the speaker perceives the object or event. The listener is not satisfied by mere truth of the utterance: the child has to have perceived its truth to win applause. “Perceives that”, followed by an observation sentence as subordinate clause, is thus a construction that is implicit, if only tacit, in the learning of language, and handing down of it from generation to generation. I see it as in effect the primeval idiom for ascribing a thought. (Quine 1995a, pp. 89–90)

Perception, empathy, and the stimulus meaning of observation sentences are tightly bound together. Observation sentences are occasion sentences that command a speaker’s immediate assent or dissent on witnessing the relevant occasion. To the characterization of this class of sentences Quine has returned on several occasions, and, in a sense, their characterization is still undergoing changes and refinements. These changes, however, do not lessen the disagreement between Quine and Davidson, but put it in sharper focus. Let’s see how and why.

There are many important differences between Davidson’s idea of radical interpretation and Quine’s thought experiment of radical translation which I have discussed elsewhere. One of the most important differences between them stems – according to Davidson’s own diagnosis – from Quine’s tacit adherence to the myth of the subjective.¹ The myth of the subjective is the other side of the coin of the third dogma of empiricism, the distinction between scheme and content. It rests on the idea that what is directly experienced in sensation plays an epistemological role in the foundation of empirical knowledge. Davidson denies that sensation can play a role in determining the contents of our beliefs. For the contents of our beliefs are non-representational: it is this picture that engenders thoughts of relativism, for representations are relative to a scheme, as a map is relative to a method of projection. Led by this picture we indulge in talk of schemes which either divide up experience, or fit the facts.² But there is no such thing as a “conceptual scheme”, let alone a plurality of them.³

The myth of tile subjective is a variant of what Sellars and others have called the myth of the Given. Young Carnap, Moritz Schlick, and C. I. Lewis are among the philosophers who, in one way or another, have succumbed to this mythology. Indeed, the myth of the subjective shows few signs of disappearing, for despite the brave attempts at disarming it made by Wittgenstein, Sellars, Davidson, Rorty, and lately McDowell, it still lingers in the most unexpected quarters. One of the reasons why it lingers is that the first alternative to it that comes to mind, i.e. coherentism, is so unpalatable. Davidson, who had for a short while succumbed to the charm of coherentism, still maintains that “nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief”.⁴ For Davidson, this – which according to some is the coherentist slogan – is sound and in his view survives the rejection of coherentism, both as a theory of truth and as a theory of knowledge. However, the myth of the subjective survives not just for want of better alternatives. The reason for its persistence is that appeal to a neutral content of experience, identified with that which is directly experienced in perception, promises to provide the ultimate source of evidence on which all our knowledge rests. In short, the myth of the subjective survives because it serves the need of foundational epistemology. Although Quine officially embarked on Neurath’s boat a long time ago, yet the way he construes the role played by “sensory evidence” is reminiscent of traditional (unnaturalized) epistemology.

The offending aspect of Quine’s notion of sensory evidence is the assumption that “there should be an ultimate source of evidence whose character can be wholly specified without reference to ‘what it is evidence for’”. Thus patterns of stimulation can be identified and described without reference to “what goes on around us” (Davidson 1989, p. 162). But, Davidson urges, the “senses” cannot, by their very nature, play a role in justifying a belief. There is no such thing as “sensory evidence”: for if it is “sensory” it is not evidence, and if it is “evidence” it is not sensory. Only something which is propositional in character (a belief content) can support another belief. What is given in sensation, “the sensuous given”, or, to borrow McDowell’s terminology, a “bare presence”, can play no evidential role. So the argument goes at the epistemological level. Let us look and examine bow the notion of sensory evidence enters stimulus meaning, and hence, language.

2. PREESTABLISHED HARMONY

In Quine’s thought experiment of radical translation the ostended features of the environment play a double evidential role as far as occasion sentences are concerned. They provide sentences (and future “words”) with their meanings and at the same time supply the evidence on the strength of which such sentences, when uttered by others, can be assessed as either true or false. Evidence of the former type goes into the (positive or negative) stimulus meaning of observation sentences endowed with the highest degree of observationality; evidence of the latter kind is the ordinary sort of evidence on the basis of which we judge the correctness of assertoric utterances and assign conditional probabilities to beliefs.

Davidson’s main contention as regards stimulus meaning is twofold: first, he denies that there is such a thing as uninterpreted content (stimulus meaning); and, second, he questions the use of the word “evidence” for describing the result of having acquired such an uninterpreted content. In “Meaning, Truth and Evidence” he says that what is missing in Quine’s account is a description of how sensory stimulations determine the meaning of observation sentences:

We can’t say that sensory stimulations are the evidence, since an agent normally neither observes nor knows about them. Nor can we say sensory stimulations provide the evidence since the beliefs and the associated verbal dispositions which the stimulations engender are not basic evidence, but based on it. (Davidson 1990, p. 71)

In Davidson’s opinion the word “evidence” is appropriate when we talk of reasons, whereas mention of sensory stimulations is appropriate when we want to describe the causal impact of the environment. Davidson, as is well known, contrasts a distal theory of meaning with a proximal one: he opts for the former while Quine, notwithstanding the changes which his conception of the meaning of observation sentences has undergone after Word and Object, still adheres to the latter.

The parallel between the linguist and the child drawn by Quine conceals the fact that a different notion of evidence is involved in each case. However, there is nothing wrong in describing the child as having acquired perceptual recognitional abilities which are later exercised in verdictive behaviour. Only we must not be misled by the word “recognition”. We should not suppose that the child goes by, or consults, as it were, his private stimulus meaning before uttering an occasion sentence. The child does not look and see what his private stimulus meaning is like before applying the words “Red” or “Cold”, “Mama” or “Rabbit”, nor does he check the correctness of such sentences, when uttered by others, against his own private sensory sample. To name one’s private stimulus meaning is not to point to basic evidence of a special sort. If I am right, Davidson’s criticism of stimulus meaning by and large echoes Wittgenstein’s criticism of private ostensive definition, and it seems perfectly justified. Quine, however, sees matters differently.

The main change which Quine’s views have undergone since 1960 is the demise of the notion of a shared stimulus meaning. There are two main reasons why, in Quine’s opinion, the notion of a shared stimulus meaning had to be abandoned. The first reason is that the field linguist and the native share no receptors. The second reason for dissatisfaction with the notion of shared stimulus meaning is that a sentence could turn out to be an observation sentence for the speech-community without each member being disposed to assent to it in the same situations. To cope with the first difficulty Quine, in Theories and Things, relativized the definition of an observation sentence to individual speakers and then generalized it to the speech-community. This move acknowledges the possible lack of similarity of stimulus meaning for different speakers while maintaining that dissent and assent will tend to converge when witnessing the same occasion. To cope with the second difficulty, it suffices to refine the notion of “witnessing an occasion”. The witnessing must be construed as essentially involving “empathy”, i.e. projecting oneself into the position of the witness and issuing one’s verdict from that position. Stimulus meaning has become completely private. One of the reasons why it still survives unshared is that it helps to account for sameness of stimulus meaning of sentences for the single speaker. Intersubjective synonymy, i.e. community-wide synonymy, is, in its turn, defined in terms of intersubjective synonymy.

Quine has come to the conclusion that the “harmony” between intrasubjective similarity standards which is required for learning observation sentences from our elders goes back to natural selection and is in our genes. In “Progress on Two Fronts” we are told that thanks to our sharing “of an ancestral gene pool, our innate standards of perceptual similarity harmonize also intersubjectively”. Thus the key to the riddle of convergence in verdictive behaviour, in spite of divergence of neural anatomy, is explained by reflecting on the action of natural selection. Our instinct for induction is implemented by instinctive standards of perceptual similarity. The survival value of the inductive instinct hinges on predominantly successful induction, and hence on substantial harmony between the individual’s standards of similarities and trends in the environment. Since the individuals share the environment, the harmony of each other with the environment adds up to harmony with each. The reason offered by Quine for resisting Davidson’s suggestion to locate the stimulus in the distal object is twofold: first, the distal subject matter might be ill-defined, as for instance in “it is raining”, “it is cold”. In such a case we simply cannot pinpoint the “it” which does the causing. Second, in opting for the distal object we do ipso facto “put the whole vital causal structure of preestablished harmony back where it had been, out of sight and out of mind” (Quine 1996, p. 161). However, Quine thinks that once the semanticist has appreciated how preestablished harmony accounts for the “meeting of minds”, he can confine his attention to the distal with a “clear philosophical conscience”.5

3. BELIEF CONTENTS AND “THE SENSES”

According to Davidson “what is given in perception” plays no role in accounting for the contents of observation sentences. In his latest writings, on the other hand, Quine has laid more stress than ever before on perception. One may wonder to what extent, if any, Davidson and Quine differ over the question whether perception bears on the contents of the beliefs expressed by observation sentences. This issue is different from the one concerning the location of the stimulus which we have discussed in the previous section.

We are here treading on very slippery ground. For few would, I think, deny that perception plays an important role in language learning, and, perhaps in reference fixing. What Davidson finds controversial is not only the claim that sensory evidence should enter the account of language via stimulus meaning, but that sensation and perception have a role to play in accounting for the contents of our beliefs. Those contents are accounted for by adverting to normative principles of rationality which connect action, belief and desire. Davidson thinks that the details of the evidential situations in which sentences are learned have no bearing on the contents of the beliefs they express. The “facts” which Quine brings to bear on private stimulus meaning are neural facts, which as such can play only a causal role in language learning. To give you an impression of how far Davidson proposes to go in the rejection of what he calls the subjective or sensuous element of experience, I will quote a passage from his paper “The Myth of the Subjective”:

The reason the senses are of no primary theoretical importance to the philosophical account of knowledge is that it is an empirical accident that our ears, eyes, taste buds and tactile and olfactory organs plays an important role in the formation of beliefs about the world. The causal connections between thought and objects and events in the world could have been established in entirely different ways, without this making a difference to the contents and veridicality of beliefs. What is true is that certain beliefs directly caused by sensory experience are often veridical and therefore provide good reasons for further beliefs. But this does not set such beliefs apart in principle or award them epistemological priority. (Davidson 1989, p. 165)

I do not know whether in the above quoted passage Davidson is thinking of Putnam’s brains in a vat or of robots “triangulating” in the environment by drawing on information accessed through mathematical computations. Be that as it may, his positive suggestion seems to be that as far as the contents of all beliefs are concerned, it is utterly irrelevant that the beings who think such contents happen to have the perceptual capacities of human beings. Using the jargon in vogue in the philosophy of mind, we might say that Davidson falls squarely within the externalist camp. The externalist approach is, in his opinion, mandatory if we want to g...