A Dogma Not Worth Exhuming: Empiricism in Language, Intelligence, and Thought

Abstract

I will demonstrate that a central presupposition of Barrow's Language, Intelligence, and Thought (1993) is the empiricist dogma that there is ''some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact" (Quine, 1953, p. 20). The analytic/synthetic distinction survived after Quine's revolutionary work only as a pragmatic tool for distinguishing language users' intentions in given contexts. However, in Barrow's recent book, the intrinsic, fundamental distinction as found in logical empiricism has been exhumed. Reliance on the dogma, I contend, threatens the positive aspects of many of Barrow's ideas. The role for philosophy of education in scholarly research on intelligence, which Barrow wishes to articulate, cannot be founded on an unsound philosophical theory. The empiricist dogma that the analytic and synthetic differ fundamentally is not worth exhuming. I will give a very brief overview of the main points of Barrow's thesis, and mention several caveats about the overall agenda, though the latter will not be pursued in depth. Thence, I will turn to the main task of showing how the empiricist version of the analytic/synthetic distinction is presupposed in much of Barrow's argument. Finally, I will provide a brief sketch of how to study language, intelligence, and thought without the empiricist dogma.