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stress is on the different kinds of variables that theories of contemporary
physics have invoked, so that the entities that can be said to exist include
not only electrons, but quarks, particles "with no particularity," light
waves that are only analogously wave-like, and any other entity which
scientific theory must posit as existing in order to explain the evidence.
Quine speculates on how far the language game of science may depart
from the ordinary language game of everyday things. For him, who has
demonstrated the indeterminacy in translating from any language to any
other, it may be that technological applications of science take place
despite the significant measure of nontranslatability of the language of
SClence.
The success of science has legitimated the autonomy and, in some
sense, the priority, of the scientific language game, as the arbiter of what
can be said to exist in the world, in his phrase, for our ontological
commitments.
It
does not follow, however, that this priority should be
extended to adopting the analysis of the concept of "truth" that is most
appropriate for science as our meaning of the term in other contexts.
In
the final section of
Pursuit of Truth,
Quine extends and revises a
version of the correspondence or "semantic" theory of truth, developed
in the 1930s by Tarski and others of the Warsaw or Polish School of
logicians, who worked in fruitful relationship with the Vienna Circle in
the interwar period. He links it to contexts as diverse as Einstein's theory
of relativity or "the higher reaches of set theory." Yet the question re–
mains of the legitimacy of linguistic interpretations of " truth" as used in
other contexts. There is a moral in the etymological connection be–
tween the true and the trustworthy, preceding and surviving formal logic
and experimental science. Conceivably (and hopefully conceived only in
dystopian science fiction), a culture which had only a scientific or
correspondence concept of truth might be deficient in the moral
resources needed to achieve truth in its science.
It
could be lacking in the
capacity to develop persons who can be trusted to resist ideological or
other temptations in the pursuit of truth. This is another variation of
Popper's theme of the ethical basis of science.
Th'is leads to the philosophical question of the nature and future of
philosophy that has followed from the eclipse of the logical positivist
vision. Ayer's concluding thesis is that
all
philosophers in the future will
have to choose between being "pontiffs or journeymen."
In
progressive
science, a competent journeyman, standing on the shoulders of giants,
could continue the "cumulative and collective" advance of knowledge.
His distaste for the philosopher as pontificator, which he identified with
the metaphysical tradition as well as with named contemporaries like
