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PHILOSOPHY 405 FINAL PAPER ASSIGNMENT SPRING 2005 WILBURN (Due date: Saturday, May 14 at 10:00 a.m.) |
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Note: I'm not going to have a whole lot of time to grade these between their due date and the day that grades have to be submitted. So, I'm asking you to take special care with formatting. Organize your answers in the way that the questions are organized, and write out the assignments and questions part by part before you write the answers. This will save me time. Also, note the study guide summary which I've posted to help you through the admittedly dense Davidson material.
Part
I In
five to seven pages, write an exegesis of the following three papers:
“Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, “Ontological Relativity” and “On the
Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.”
In doing this, try to tell as seamless a story as possible about
how each of the second two papers purports to radicalize the conclusions
of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”. In your exegesis, take pains to explain
how this is the case. This is very much an exercise in quickly getting to
the heart of a thesis and seeing the forest for the trees, so use the
class lectures as a guide to determining which parts of these papers you
should emphasize and which parts you should leave in darkness. Part
II Now,
write essays addressing each of the following questions. Page lengths are
recommended. “Two
Dogmas of Empiricism” 1. In
what way is
Quine's claim "that our statements about the external world face the
tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body"
a rejection of radical reductionism? (one page)
2. In what ways does
Quine's repudiation of a boundary between the analytic
and the synthetic and his rejection of radical
reductionism as a related dogma of empiricism lead him to "espouse a
more thorough pragmatism"? In what ways is Quine a pragmatist? (one
page)
“Ontological Relativity” 3. In considering the case
of an expression in "a remote language" which can be translated
into English in either of two ways (which are unlike in meaning), Quine
writes that "if the museum myth were true, there would be a right and
wrong of the matter ... see language naturalistically, on the other hand,
and you have to see the notion of likeness of meaning in such a case as simply
non-sense." What does Quine mean here and do you agree? Why
or why not? (one to two pages)
4.
"What makes ontological questions meaningless when taken absolutely
is not universality, but circularity. A question of the form `What is an F?' can only be answered by recourse to a
further term: `An
F is a G.' The answer makes only relative
sense: sense relative to an uncritical acceptance of 'G'." Explain
this carefully. Do you agree? Why or why not? (one to two pages)
“On
the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” 5. What are the two metaphors used to characterize conceptual schemes or
languages? How do they differ? In what ways does Davidson think that these
metaphors fail to make sense of the idea of a language (one to two pages)
6. Davidson writes
that "the dominant metaphor of conceptual relativism, that of
differing points of view, seems to betray an underlying paradox. Different
points of view make sense, but only if there is a common coordinate system
on which to plot them; yet the existence of a common system belies the
claim of dramatic incomparability." In what way is this a paradox, if
Davidson is correct? Do you agree with him that conceptual relativism
betrays an underlying paradox? (one to two pages) |