Question Hello. This submission will include two questions. The panelist´s are of course free to answer only one of them, if the other turns out to be of no interest. I´m no student of philosophy in the conventional sense, but lately it does consume much of my time. I remember reading Frege´s "The thought: a logical inquiry" a while back, and his answer to "an unusual objection" he thought he heard, puzzled me; "what if it were all a dream?" It seems to me that questions of this kind are unanswerable, and that Frege´s answer to this question is unsatisfactory. The (short) reason for this is simply that the question is one of fact, and one would have no possible way of empirically proving that one is not. What is your take on my objection? (I am aware that it is not one of the sections in the article that did the most impact on future philosophy) The second question relates to the distinction between analytic and extra-logical statements. After reading "Two dogmas of empiricism" by Quine, I am left wondering about whether the word "analytic" remains unexplained. The question relates then to what objections Quine´s article met and what the general take on this issue is today. Thank you very much.

Accepted:
December 29, 2011

Comments

Thank you for these interesting reflections! As for your first point, there are a number of philosophers who address radical skepticism (e.g. can any of us know with certainty that we are not, as we seem to be, wide awake and acting in the world rather than, say, dreaming?) in the way you suggest. Arguably, life may continue just as it appears until one's death and yet there would be no decisive reason to rule out the possibility one was merely a brain in a vat. And because of this, some philosophers think that such radical skeptical hypotheses are idle or nonsensical or of no interest. I am somewhat of the other mind: I think we can imagine radical hypothetical states of affairs in which we are indeed systematically mistaken in almost all our beliefs about ourselves in the world (in brief, I think it conceivable that we might be in the matrix). While this does not have awesome practical consequences, I think it should humble us in our knowledge claims. As for the second point, Quine set out to dismantle the very categorical distinction between the analytic and synthetic. Today, some think he was spot on, but there are large numbers of philosophers (including myself) who believe the analytic category is sensible and intelligible. I think it is an analytic truth that 1+1 equals 2 --based on the principle of identity or A is A (because 2 simply is '1+1' and so 1+1 equals 2 because 1=1 equals 1=1. You ask about explanations. On that point, things get quite interesting. The concepts of necessity, impossibility, and possibility can be explained in terms of one another. So the statement '1+1 = 2 is necessary' is equivalent to '1+1=2 is possible and 1+1 is not equal to 2 is not possible. To many of this, explanations like this are acceptable, but to some radical thinkers, such explanations are considered insufficient. For a great defense of the analytic category and the concepts at issue, check out Alvin Plantinga's classic On The Nature Of Necessity.