Grice and Strawson's "In Defense of a Dogma"

W. V. O. Quine's highly influential "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" was published in The Philosophical Review in 1951 (a slightly revised version was published in the second printing of From a Logical Point of View (1961); this online version places the revisions side-by-side with the original text). In "Two Dogmas" Quine rejects the 'analytic/synthetic' distinction as "an unempirical dogma of empiricists, a metaphysical article of faith." If this rejection is justified, then much of analytic philosophy (broadly defined) is untenable. Peter Hacker has remarked, "the wholesale repudiation of any distinction between analytic/synthetic, contingent/necessary, and a priori/a posteriori or any related distinction does, I think, constitute a decisive break. For with the repudiation of these three distinctions and any kindred, the conception of philosophy as sui generis, as a critical discipline toto caelo distinct from science, as an a priori investigation, as a tribunal of sense as opposed to a plaintiff confronting nature collapses." ("Analytic Philosophy: What, Whence, Whither?," in The Story of Analytic Philosophy, ed. Biletzki and Matar, p. 25)

H. P. Grice and P. F. Strawson published a reply to Quine, "In Defense of a Dogma," in The Philosophical Review (1956). (Strawson was Grice's student.) In this post I will summarize their argument (mainly by quoting the most pertinent passages). Obviously, my allegiance lies with Grice and Strawson against Quine, but I won't attempt to defend their position here (I'm sure there will be plenty of opportunity to do so in the comments).

According to Grice and Strawson, Quine's general strategy involves a move from "We have not made satisfactory sense (provided a satisfactory explanation) of x" to "x does not make sense." This move, they argue, is unwarranted.

(1) There is, Grice and Strawson claim, a "general prior presumption in favor of the existence of the distinction" (p. 142):

We can appeal, that is, to the fact that those [philosophers] who use the terms "analytic" and "synthetic" do to a very considerable extent agree in the applications they make of them. They apply the term "analytic" to more or less the same cases, withhold it from more or less the same cases, and hesitate over more or less the same cases. This agreement extends not only to cases which they have been taught so to characterize, but to new cases. In short, "analytic" and "synthetic" have a more or less established philosophical use; and this seems to suggest that it is absurd, even senseless, to say that there is no such distinction. For, in general, if a pair of contrasting expressions are habitually and generally used in application to the same cases, where these cases do not form a closed list, this is a sufficient condition for saying that there are kinds of cases to which the expressions apply; and nothing more is needed for them to mark a distinction. (pp. 142-3)

This fact of philosophical usage is strengthened by a related fact of general usage. Analyticity is, for Quine, a member of a family of notions: "'self-contradictory' [], 'necessary,' 'synonymous,' 'semantical rule,' and perhaps [] 'definition.'" (p. 147) The claim that two expressions are synonymous corresponds (roughly) to the claim that the expressions mean the same, and 'means the same'/'does not mean the same' is a common distinction used in everyday discourse. Thus, Quine cannot claim that

the pair of expressions in question (viz., "means the same," "does not mean the same") is the special property of philosophers.... Yet the denial that the distinction (taken as different from the distinction between the coextensional and the non-coextensional) really exists, is extremely paradoxical. It involves saying, for example, that anyone who seriously remarks that "bachelor" means the same as "unmarried man" but that "creature with kidneys" does not mean the same as "creature with a heart"—supposing the last two expressions to be coextensional—either is not in fact drawing attention to any distinction at all between the relations between the members of each pair of expressions or is making a philosophical mistake about the nature of the distinction between them. In either case, what he says, taken as he intends it to be taken, is senseless or absurd. […] But the paradox is more violent than this. For we frequently talk of the presence or absence of relations of synonymy between kinds of expressions—e.g., conjunctions, particles of many kinds, whole sentences—where there does not appear to be any obvious substitute for the ordinary notion of synonymy, in the way in which coextensionality is said to be a substitute for synonymy of predicates. Is all such talk meaningless? Is all talk of correct or incorrect translation of sentences of one language into sentences of another meaningless? It is hard to believe that it is. But if we do successfully make the effort to believe it, we have still harder renunciations before us. If talk of sentence-synonymy is meaningless, then it seems that talk of sentences having a meaning at all must be meaningless too. For if it made sense to talk of a sentence having a meaning, or meaning something, then presumably it would make sense to ask "What does it mean?" And if it made sense to ask "What does it mean?" of a sentence, then sentence-synonymy could be roughly defined as follows: Two sentences are synonymous if and only if any true answer to the question "What does it mean?" asked of one of them, is a true answer to the same question, asked of the other. We do not, of course, claim any clarifying power for this definition. We want only to point out that if we are to give up the notion of sentence-synonymy as senseless, we must give up the notion of sentence-significance (of a sentence having meaning) as senseless too. But then perhaps we might as well give up the notion of sense.—It seems clear that we have here a typical example of a philosopher's paradox. Instead of examining the actual use that we make of the notion of meaning the same, the philosopher measures it by some perhaps inappropriate standard (in this case some standard of clarifiability), and because it falls short of this standard, or seems to do so, denies its reality, declares it illusory. (146-7)

The Wittgensteinian tone of this last sentence should be apparent.

(2) After weighing Quine's thesis against these facts of philosophical and ordinary usage, Grice and Strawson turn to a consideration of Quine's notion of a satisfactory explanation of analyticity. It seems that a satisfactory explanation (i) must not employ any expression belonging to the family of notions mentioned above, and (ii) must provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a sentence's being 'analytic.'

If we take these two conditions together, and generalize the result, it would seem that Quine requires of a satisfactory explanation of an expression that it should take the form of a pretty strict definition but should not make use of any member of a group of interdefinable terms to which the expression belongs. We may well begin to feel that a satisfactory explanation is hard to come by.

It would seem fairly clearly unreasonable to insist in general that the availability of a satisfactory explanation in the sense sketched above is a necessary condition of an expression's making sense. It is perhaps dubious whether any such explanations can ever be given. (The hope that they can be is, or was, the hope of reductive analysis in general.) Even if such explanations can be given in some cases, it would be pretty generally agreed that there other cases in which they cannot. One might think, for example, of the group of expressions which includes "morally wrong," "blameworthy," "breach of moral rules," etc.; or of the group which includes the propositional connectives and the words "true" and "false," "statement," "fact," "denial," "assertion." Few people would want to say that the expressions belonging to either of these groups were senseless on the ground that they have not been formally defined (or even on the ground that it was impossible formally to define them) except in terms of members of the same group. (p. 148)

Does the fact that explanations of 'analyticity' and its kin do not meet Quine's criteria for adequacy mean that such expressions cannot be explained at all? Grice and Strawson don't think so. In their opinion, such expressions can be explained in less formal ways. They illustrate this with an informal explanation of 'logical impossibility' via a contrast between logical and natural impossibility:

We might take as our examples the logical impossibility of a child of three's being an adult, and the natural impossibility of a child of three's understanding Russell's Theory of Types. We might instruct our pupil to imagine two conversations one of which begins by someone (X) making the claim:

(1) "My neighbor's three-year-old child understands Russell's Theory of Types,"
and the other of which begins by someone (Y) making the claim:
(1') "My neighbor's three-year-old child is an adult."
It would not be inappropriate to reply to X, taking the remark as a hyperbole:
(2) "You mean the child is a particularly bright lad."
If X were to say:
(3) "No, I mean what I say—he really does understand it,"
one might be inclined to reply:
(4) "I don't believe you—the thing's impossible."
But if the child were then produced, and did (as one knows he would not) expound the theory correctly, answer questions on it, criticize it, and so on, one would in the end be forced to acknowledge that the claim was literally true and that the child was a prodigy.
Now consider one's reaction to Y's claim. To begin with, it might be somewhat similar to the previous case. One might say:
(2') "You mean he's uncommonly sensible or very advanced for his age."
If Y replies:
(3') "No, I mean what I say,"
we might reply:
(4') "Perhaps you mean that he won't grow any more, or that he's a sort of freak, that he's already fully developed."
Y replies:
(5') "No, he's not a freak, he's just an adult.''

At this stage—or possibly if we are patient, a little later—we shall be inclined to say that we just don't understand what Y is saying, and to suspect that he just does not know the meaning of some of the words he is using. For unless he is prepared to admit that he is using words in a figurative or unusual sense, we shall say, not that we don't believe him, but that his words have no sense. And whatever kind of creature is ultimately produced for our inspection, it will not lead us to say that what Y said was literally true, but at most to say that we now see what he meant. As a summary of the difference between the two imaginary conversations, we might say that in both cases we would tend to begin by supposing that the other speaker was using words in a figurative or unusual or restricted way; but in the face of his repeated claim to be speaking literally, it would be appropriate in the first case to say that we did not believe him and in the second case to say that we did not understand him. If, like Pascal, we thought it prudent to prepare against very long chances, we should in the first case know what to prepare for; in the second, we should have no idea. (pp. 150-1)

Grice and Strawson note that, while this explanation does not meet Quine's second criterion, it does meet the first—no relative of logical impossibility is used. For the distinction is ultimately explained in terms of 'not believing' and 'not understanding,' or 'incredulity yielding to conviction' and 'incomprehension yielding to comprehension.'

(As an aside, I'd like to point out the similarity between Grice and Strawson's imaginary conversation to explain logical impossibility and the following explanation of grammatical impossibility in Waismann's The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy (which was originally conceived as an exposition of Wittgenstein's philosophy):

Let us now consider the sentence 'Red and green are never at the same place'. Does this state a fact of experience? To anyone taking up Mill's position here we should put the question 'Can you describe what it would be like if this were false? Do you really know what you would see in such a case?' The empiricist may well reply: 'Of course I do; to say that red and green can be in the same place is precisely a description of my perception. I am saying just that, and the meaning of the sentence cannot be described any further.' But if someone told us he had had such a perception we should not at first quite understand what he meant; we should try to find out by asking him questions about the meaning of the words he used. 'Do you mean', we might ask, 'that you saw a red object through a green glass and switched your attention to and fro from the glass to the object? Or do you mean that the object was iridescent? Or that you saw it red with your right eye and green with your left? Or are you, like a painter, discerning the two shades in a mixed pigmentation?' If he said he did not mean any of these things, but that he had in fact just seen red and green at the same place, we should eventually say 'Then we do not understand you, for if you mean by "red" and "green" what we mean by them your sentence has no meaning'. So we do not say 'This never happens; you will never see such a thing', but we say 'We do not use words in that way, what you say means nothing'. In reality the sentence 'red and green cannot exist in the same place' is a veiled grammatical rule, which forbids the formation of the word-sequence 'something is red and green simultaneously'. (p. 58))

(3) Grice and Strawson make a couple of other objections to Quine's criticism of analyticity, and then make a couple of objections to his holism. I'll finish up with the first of the latter. Quine holds that there are no statements which are, in principle, immune to revision. That is, any statement can be given up in the face of experience (or conversely, any statement can be retained come what may). Grice and Strawson argue that this doctrine is compatible with the analytic/synthetic distinction provided we adopt another distinction, namely, that between giving up a statement because we judge it to be false, and "that kind of giving up which involves changing or dropping a concept or set of concepts." (p. 157)

Any form of words at one time held to express something true may, no doubt, at another time, come to be held to express something false. But it is not only philosophers who would distinguish between the case where this happens as the result of a change of opinion solely as to matters of fact, and the case where this happens at least partly as a result of a shift in the sense of the words. Where such a shift in the sense of the words is a necessary condition of the change in truth-value, then the adherent of the distinction will say that the form of words in question changes from expressing an analytic statement to expressing a synthetic statement. (p.157)

In other words, the analytic/synthetic distinction can be preserved in the face of Quine's claim that any accepted truth can subsequently be rejected as false, so long as we distinguish between the different ways that can come to pass. The first follows a change in the facts. The second involves a change in the concepts.

[Update: There are posts on these questions at SOH-Dan, DuckRabbit, and A brood comb; for discussion, see the comments at SOH-Dan]