The logic of Quinean revisability

Abstract

W.V. Quine is committed to the claim that all beliefs are rationally revisable; Jerrold Katz has argued that this commitment is unstable on grounds of self-application. The subsequent discussion of this issue has largely proceeded in terms of the logic of belief revision, but there is also an issue here for the treatment of Quine's views in a doxastic modal system. In this paper I explore the treatment of Quinean epistemology in modal terms. I argue that a set of formal revisability desiderata can be distilled from Quine's epistemic writings, and that there are demonstrably coherent and non-trivial systems that meet these conditions.

Katz’s Revisability Paradox Dissolved

“…It also shows that Chase's modal treatment of holistic empiricism does not touch the heart of the matter. See [Chase 2012]. similar in spirit to our claim that including translations of the three constitutive principles of holistic empiricism into our theory of the world does not ensure that the resulting worldtheory conforms to these principles.…”

“…This observation undermines the 'and hence' in the following quote. 7 See [Resnik and Orlandi 2003;Adler 2003;Colyvan 2006;Elstein 2007;Chase 2012]. The first three papers target Katz's argumentation, the last two offer a formal reconstruction of his Revisability Paradox.…”