Quine and Wittgenstein on the Science/Philosophy Divide *

In his book Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy (Hacker 1996), P.M.S.Hacker set up a very sharp opposition between Wittgenstein and analytic philosophy, on the one side, and Anglo-American philosophy drawing inspiration from Quine on the other.As a way of identifying analytic philosophy, the opposition is unconvincing: Hacker rightly insists on the diversity of the analytic tradition, pointing out that different notions of philosophy's role and even different notions of analysis prevailed with different philosophers at different moments.But then, he wants to exclude Quine and other philosophers he regards as Quinean from the analytic tradition, without it being quite clear why the cleavage between Quine and the later Wittgenstein, or between Quine and Austin, should be so much wider or more crucial than the difference between, say, Austin and Russell (who are both included in the tradition).Anyway, in drawing the opposition Hacker focusses on one aspect that I would also like to concentrate upon.According to him, post-Quinean philosophy appears to be dominated by "modes of thought that emulate the forms of scientific theories, the jargon and formalization of respectable science, without the constraints of systematic data collecting, quantitative methods and experimental testing" (p.266); whereas analytic philosophy properly so called always conceived of itself as being other than science 1 , and the later Wittgenstein insisted that the attempt to emulate or ape natural science typically produces bad philosophy.In Hacker's own words, A fundamental tenet of analytic philosophy, from its post-Tractatus phase onwards, was that there is a sharp distinction between philosophy and science.Philosophy…whether or not it is conceived to be a cognitive discipline, is conceived to be a priori and hence discontinuous with, and methodologically distinct from, science.Similarly, analytic philosophy in general held that questions of meaning antecede questions of truth, and are separable from empirical questions of fact.If Quine is right, then analytic philosophy was fundamentally mistaken.Now, indicting post-Quinean philosophy for rejecting any sharp demarcation with respect to science (i.e. for seeing itself as continuous with science) is not the same as indicting it for being pseudo-science, or, to borrow Putnam's word 2 , parascience.Hacker does not seem to distinguish 1 It should be noted that this does not apply to Russell, for one. 2 Putnam 1992, p.141.