So I want you to start by picturing a brick wall,
just a really solid, heavy, unmoving brick wall.
Okay. And now think of a belief you hold that
feels exactly like that wall. And I'm not talking
about casual opinions here, not, you know, whether
pineapple belongs on pizza or if summer is better
than winter. We're talking about the bedrock
stuff. Exactly. The foundational things, the
belief that the past actually happened, the belief
that other people have minds and aren't just
like sophisticated robots or the belief that
two plus two equals four. The kind of stuff that
if you stopped believing it today, you wouldn't
just be considered wrong by society. You'd be
considered completely insane. Yes. Exactly. We
really like to think these beliefs are untouchable,
that they are true no matter what happens in
the outside world. But today for this deep dive,
we are looking at a philosophy that says, actually,
you could tear that wall down. You really could.
You could decide right now that two plus two
equals five or that the past is a total fiction
and you can do it completely logically as long
as you're willing to pay the price. I mean, that
price is incredibly steep. It basically involves
burning down the rest of your mental house just
to save that one strange new belief. It's fascinating.
So welcome to the Deep Dive. Today, we are grappling
with one of the most famous and honestly slippery
phrases in modern philosophy. The phrase is,
hold come what may. It's a great phrase. It almost
sounds poetic, doesn't it? It does. Like a romantic
promise or a line from a wedding vow or something.
Hold come what may. But we are diving into the
source material of Willard Van Orman Quine today.
He was this absolute titan of 20th century logic.
Yeah, and for Quine, this is definitely not romance.
Not at all. It was a radical, fundamental challenge
to how we understand truth itself. So the mission
today for you, the listener, is to unpack Quine's
web of belief. We are going to look at why it's
technically possible to believe literally anything,
no matter how crazy it sounds, and why, despite
that fact, we still mostly agree on reality.
It's quite a journey. You go from total epistemological
chaos to this really grounded pragmatic stability.
And it really changes how you look at arguments,
right? Or politics and even hard science. Oh,
absolutely. It becomes less about static facts
and much more about architecture, the structure
of how we think. Let's get right into it then.
Come what may, what is the actual textbook definition
here? Because to a layperson, it just sounds
like we're talking about someone being incredibly
stubborn. Right. So in the context of Quine's
seminal paper, which is called Two Dogmas of
Empiricism, holding a belief, come what may,
means you are completely unwilling to discard
a specific statement. No matter what. No matter
what new evidence comes in. No matter what you
see, what you hear, what you experience in the
world. That belief stays fixed. OK, but to the
average listener, that sounds like the exact
definition of a delusion. I mean, I hold the
belief it is raining. Right. And I walk over,
I look outside the window and it's completely
sunny. If I still say it is raining, I'm not
acting like a philosopher. I'm just flat out
wrong. Right, because in our normal everyday
lives, we assume that beliefs have to bow down
to evidence. If the facts change, I change my
mind. That's the rational thing to do. Exactly.
But Quine is looking at the machinery under the
hood of that rationality. He posited that it
is logically possible to hold on to that belief.
the belief that it's raining, even while you
are staring directly at the sun. But how? How
do you possibly justify that to yourself without
just closing your eyes and humming loudly with
your fingers in your ears? By making what Quine
calls suitable adjustments elsewhere in your
belief system. Suitable adjustments. Okay, give
me an example. Sure. you could claim that looking
out the window was actually a hallucination oh
wow or you could claim that the word raining
has always actually meant sunny in your own personal
internal language or maybe you decide there is
an invisible imperceptible force field that's
blocking the rain from your vision. OK, I see.
So if I am willing to completely break my understanding
of the English language or basic optics or my
own mental sanity, I can technically save the
belief that it's raining. Exactly. You can save
it. And this leads to Quine's massive, earth
-shaking claim in logic, which is... No statement
is immune to revision. No statement is immune.
Right. And conversely, any statement at all can
be held true, provided you are willing to make
drastic enough changes to everything else you
believe. Okay. This is the real nugget here,
because we usually divide our world into two
distinct buckets. The facts and the opinions.
Exactly. Bucket A is facts. Two plus two is four.
A bachelor is an unmarried man. These are the
things we feel strongly cannot be false. Ever.
And then bucket B is opinions, stuff like the
weather tomorrow or stock prices or who is going
to win the big game. And what you're saying is
Quine is basically taking bucket A, picking it
up and just dumping the whole thing into bucket
B. That is a brilliant way to put it, actually.
He is directly attacking a very old, very rigid
distinction in philosophy. It's called the analytic
synthetic divide. OK, let's clarify those terms
for the listener because they pop up constantly
in the source material we reviewed. Analytic
versus synthetic truths. Break that down for
us. All right, let's strip away the philosophical
jargon. Traditionally, philosophers, specifically
the logical positivists who Quine was fiercely
arguing against, they thought some truths were
analytic. Meaning? Meaning they are true just
by definition alone. The classic example is...
All bachelors are unmarried. Because you don't
need to go out and conduct a global census of
every single bachelor in the world to prove that
statement. It's just literally contained in the
definition of the word. Exactly. If you somehow
find a married bachelor, you haven't made a groundbreaking
scientific discovery. You've just misunderstood
the English word bachelor. Right. It's a closed
loop of logic. Yes, a closed loop. So then, on
the other side, you have synthetic truths. These
are truths that depend on the actual state of
the world. For example, the cat is on the mat.
Right, because that is only true if there is
physically a cat sitting on a mat in front of
you. You have to go check the room. You have
to observe it. So the traditional view before
Quine was, synthetic truths can easily change
if the world changes. The cat gets up, the truth
changes. But analytic truths like math or definitions,
those are eternal. They are true come what may.
And Quine just took a sledgehammer to that entire
concept. He absolutely did. He argued that this
boundary between the two buckets is a total illusion.
He said that even those supposedly perfect analytic
truths, like math, are only true because they
fit neatly into our current system of explaining
reality. So they aren't written in stone. No.
If we discovered something truly bizarre out
in the universe, say some weird quantum physics
phenomenon that completely broke our understanding
of counting injury, we might actually decide
to change our math rather than deny the physical
reality we're seeing. That is a really heavy
concept. It implies that 2 plus 2 equals 4 isn't
this universal law written in the stars. It's
just a tool we use because, well, it works for
us right now. Precisely. It's a tool. And it's
a very, very good tool. But if we ever found
a situation where we're saying 2 plus 2 equals
5, somehow explain the incoming data better,
we could logically revise the math. You know,
I remember hearing an example about this involving
fluids. Like if I have one drop of water and
then I add another drop of water to it, they
merge into one bigger drop. So in that physical
space, one plus one equals one. That is a classic
counterexample. Now, usually in our normal lives,
we would say, no, no, that's just physics. That's
not math. We quickly redefine what we are counting.
To save the mass. Right. We'd say we are counting
the volume of water, not the distinct drops.
Exactly. But Quine's point is that we made a
choice there. We actively chose to save the arithmetic
and complicate the physics. Oh, I see. We could
have done it the completely opposite way. We
could have just said, OK, in this particular
world, 1 plus 1 equals 1. Wow. So literally nothing
is safe. No statement is immune to revision.
But if that's true, why isn't our day -to -day
worldview just a total mess of contradictions?
If I can believe whatever I want by tweaking
the rules, why do you and I both agree that the
sky is blue and that cars need to stop at red
lights? Well, because while we logically can
revise anything, human beings are fundamentally
lazy. Or, to be kinder, we are highly efficient.
And this brings us to the core metaphor of Quine's
work. I think this is the absolute most useful
visualization for you listening right now. It's
called the web of belief. I love this image.
Picture a spider web. Right, but imagine it as
a huge three -dimensional web. Quine suggests
that our knowledge isn't just a random list of
independent facts stacked on top of each other.
It's an interconnected structure, a vast network.
Every single belief you hold is connected to
other beliefs by these strands of logic and association.
So my belief that my car will start when I turn
the key isn't just floating out in empty space.
It is tied directly to my belief that gasoline
is flammable, which is tied to chemistry is a
real science, which is tied to the fundamental
idea that the past predicts the future. Exactly.
And this deep interdependence is what philosophers
call holism. This is Quine's key technical insight
here. You can never, ever test a single belief
in total isolation. And this is referred to in
the sources, the Duhem -Quine thesis, right?
Yes, named after Pierre Duhem and Quine. The
core idea is that if you run a scientific experiment
and it fails, logic alone does not tell you what
part of your system failed. Let's make this concrete
for the listener. Say I'm an astronomer. I've
got this grand theory that says a new planet
should be right at coordinate X in the sky. So
I point my shiny telescope at coordinate X and
there's nothing there. The planet is missing.
Okay, so now you have a conflict. Your web is
vibrating. Your theory says planet is here. But
your observation says space is totally empty.
So standard logic would say my theory is just
wrong. I failed. But not necessarily. Maybe the
lens on the telescope is dirty. Maybe the math
for the coordinates was done wrong. Maybe light
travels differently in that specific sector of
space. Or maybe there's just an invisible space
dust cloud blocking your view. I see. The failure
sends a shockwave through the whole web, but
it doesn't point a big neon red arrow at the
specific culprit. Exactly. You, the human being,
the scientist, have to make a choice about which
strand of the web to cut. Do you cut the strand
labeled my planet theory? Do you cut the strand
labeled this telescope is reliable? Or do you
cut the incredibly thick strand labeled the established
laws of optics? And this is where the hold come
what may idea comes rushing back in. I could
legitimately say my theory is absolutely perfect.
The planet is definitely there. Therefore, the
telescope must be lying to me. I can hold my
theory come what may, as long as I sacrifice
the telescope's reliability. And scientists actually
do this all the time. When Isaac Newton's theory
of gravity didn't perfectly predict the weird
orbit of the planet Uranus, astronomers didn't
just throw out the law of gravity. Right, that
would be madness. They assumed there simply must
be another unseen planet out there pulling on
it. They held on to the theory of gravity come
what may, and they basically invented a hypothetical
planet to make the math work out. And in that
case, they were actually right. That's exactly
how we discovered Neptune. True. But sometimes
they do the exact same thing, and they're wrong.
They tried the same trick with the planet Mercury.
Mercury's orbit was moving weirdly, so they invented
another hypothetical planet called Vulcan to
explain it without breaking Newton's laws. But
Vulcan didn't exist. Right. Vulcan wasn't real.
So in that case, they eventually had to cut the
thick Newtonian gravity strand and replace it
with a whole new paradigm. Einstein's theory
of relativity. So the web of belief is just this
constant, ongoing negotiation. We're always trying
to keep the structure intact while dealing with
this unfriendly evidence that keeps poking at
us from the outside world. That is exactly the
dynamic. And this naturally leads us to the second
really famous Quinian phrase from our source
material. We've talked extensively about hold
come what may. But now we need to introduce hold
more stubbornly, at least. Hold more stubbornly,
at least. That sounds a lot more like a practical
fix to a philosophical headache. It really is.
Because Quine fully acknowledges that while all
beliefs can technically be revised, they're definitely
not created equal in our minds. Some beliefs
sit right at the outer edge of the web, and some
sit deep in the center. Okay, let's map the geography
of this web for the listener. What exactly lives
out at the edge? The edge is basically where
your personal web touches the outside world.
These are your sense beliefs. Things like, I
see a red coffee cup, or I hear a dog barking
down the street. I smell burnt toast. These seem
pretty disposable, honestly. Like, if I look
closer and see the coffee cup is actually blue,
I just say, oops, bad lighting, and I move on
with my day. Right. Cutting a strand at the edge
causes very little vibration in the rest of the
web. It's a cheap fix. You don't have to rewrite
your entire worldview just because you misread
a stop sign. But the center of the web, that
is a completely different story. The center is
where the heavy lifters live. the fundamental
laws of logic, the belief in an external world
of physical objects, the basic principle of cause
and effect, even the belief that you are the
exact same person you were five minutes ago.
These are the load -bearing walls of reality.
Exactly. These central beliefs are connected
to virtually everything else in the web. If you
try to casually cut the strand labeled basic
logic, the entire structure collapses. If you
decide that a statement like A and not A can
somehow both be true at the exact same time,
you literally can't make sense of anything anymore.
Right. Your car would be both started and not
started. You'd be both starving and completely
full. It's chaos. Complete chaos. So when Quine
talks in the source about ramifying consequences,
he's talking about the catastrophic damage caused
by removing a central belief. Yes. We are deeply
conservative creatures when it comes to our minds.
We want to do the absolute minimum amount of
mental renovation necessary to explain whatever
new data we encounter. That explains so much
about human behavior, doesn't it? It really does.
Let's apply this to a fun real -world scenario.
The ghost example from the outline is perfect
for this. I love this one. Okay, suppose you
were walking through an old creepy house and
you clearly see a translucent figure. Walk straight
through a solid closed door. Now that is some
serious, unfriendly evidence. Right. It completely
assaults your web. Your central web says, people
are solid and dead people don't walk around.
But your edge web, your eye says, I just saw
a ghost. So I'm forced to make a choice. I have
to resolve this conflict quickly to stop my web
from vibrating so violently. Option A. I just
accept the ghost is real. But if you do that...
Think about what you have to cut. You have to
cut strands deep at the center. You have to drastically
revise human biology, modern physics, and probably
your entire theology. You have to accept that
solid walls aren't actually barriers for everyone.
That is a massive tearing hole in my web. Huge.
It requires a total architectural overhaul of
your entire reality. Okay, so, option B. I reject
the literal evidence of my own eyes. I tell myself,
I'm just really tired. It was a weird reflection
from a passing car. Or maybe someone slipped
something into my drink. In option B, you were
just cutting one tiny flimsy strand at the very
edge of the web. You're simply saying, my visual
perception was slightly glitchy for about two
seconds. And since we are efficient, or let's
face it, mentally lazy, we almost always choose
option B. We hold the laws of physics more stubbornly
than we hold the immediate evidence of our own
eyes. Exactly. We gladly sacrifice the raw sensory
data just to save the central theory. And Quine
says this isn't a flaw. This is entirely rational.
It is highly pragmatic. Pragmatism. That is the
key word to underline here. We don't fiercely
protect the center because we know for a fact
it's true in the capital T. We keep it because
it is incredibly useful. Right. Logic and math
are immensely useful. They help us predict the
future. They help us build bridges that don't
collapse. If they suddenly stop working, if bridges
started falling down specifically because our
math was wrong, we would absolutely change the
math. This is all a little bit unsettling, though,
isn't it? It implies that our deepest, most profound
convictions aren't actually anchored in some
objective bedrock. They're just anchored in,
well, other convictions. It's what philosophers
call coherentism. There really is no bottom foundation.
The web only hangs together because the pieces
mutually support each other, not because the
whole thing is hooked onto some skyhook of absolute
objective truth. It's literally just a web floating
in space. Correct. And honestly, this is exactly
why it is so incredibly difficult to change someone's
mind about deeply held things like politics or
religion or even bizarre conspiracy theories.
Oh, for sure. If you argue with a hardcore conspiracy
theorist, you usually think you're just handing
them a new helpful fact. Like, hey, look at this
official document. You think you're just asking
them to snip one tiny little string at the edge
of their web? But for them, that specific fact
might be hardwired directly to the very center
of their web. If their core load -bearing belief
is the government lies about absolutely everything
and you show them a government document that
proves them wrong, they literally cannot accept
it. Because accepting it would mean tearing out
the entire core of their worldview. Right. So
they make a suitable adjustment. They just say
the document is obviously fake. Or they say you
are a paid shill. They will cut the strand connecting
to you and your credibility way before they cut
the strand connecting to their core identity.
They are just protecting the structural integrity
of their mind. It's psychological self -defense.
And the humbling part is we all do it. Every
single one of us. We all have certain things
we hold come what may. We all have evidence we
refuse to look closely at because the mental
cost of revision would just be too devastating.
Quine leaves us in this really interesting, almost
paradoxical position. On the one hand, he is
the ultimate skeptic. Nothing is truly safe.
Math, logic, hard science, it's all technically
up for grabs. But on the other hand, he's incredibly
conservative. He's saying, don't tear down the
mental house unless you absolutely positively
have to. It's a delicate balance between radical
open -mindedness and basic sanity. You need a
stable, stubborn web just to function. daily
life. But you also need to remember that it is,
at the end of the day, just a web. It's a model.
It is not the world itself. The map is not the
territory. And the map can always, always be
redrawn. I do want to circle back to something
we touched on a little earlier, the idea that
this fundamentally changes how we see truth.
Because if truth is just defined as whatever
fits best in my personal web, does objective
reality just completely disappear? That's definitely
the danger zone people worry about. But Quine
was actually a strict realist. He absolutely
believed there is a real physical world out there.
He believed in atoms and particles and gravity.
But he believed that our human theory of that
world is always underdetermined by the data.
Underdetermined. Let's unpack that because it
sounds like a concept we really need to get straight.
It just means that for any given set of data,
imagine a random set of dots on a graph. There
are literally infinite lines you could draw to
connect them. If you have five data points, you
can draw a simple straight line or a wavy line
or a crazy loop -the -loop that hits all five
dots. And as a society, we basically pick the
line called physics, but technically there could
be a line called magic or simulation theory that
connects those exact same dots just as well.
Theoretically, yes. If you were willing to make
the rest of the web complicated enough, you could
invent a theory about an invisible magic demon
that moves the planets around in exactly the
same way gravity does. The observational data
would look completely identical. But the theory
itself would be an absolute mess to maintain.
Exactly. So physics is just the simplest line.
It's the most elegant. Yeah. So pragmatically,
we stick with it. We choose the theory that gives
us the most predictive power for the least amount
of mental effort. We want a theory that connects
the most dots with the fewest wild assumptions.
We are basically bargain hunters for reality.
That is a fantastic way to put it. We want the
absolute most reality for the cheapest cognitive
cost. We don't want to have to memorize the unique
individual movements of every single falling
object on Earth. We just want one simple law
of gravity that explains them all at once. This
connects so perfectly back to something we discuss
a lot on this show, cognitive bias. We usually
talk about bias like confirmation bias as a glitch
in the human brain, like something that's broken.
But Quine makes it sound like confirmation bias
is actually a built -in feature of the web. In
a fundamental way, yes. Confirmation bias is
just us efficiently trying to protect the center
of the web. If I have a strong core belief that
people are generally good, and then I see someone
do something clearly bad, I immediately interpret
it as, oh, they just had a really bad day. I
twist the new evidence to fit the existing web.
Because if I fully accepted the alternative that
people are inherently evil, I'd have to completely
change how I treat my neighbors, how I raise
my kids, and how I vote. The psychological cost
is just way too high. Exactly. But Quine would
also warn us, eventually, if enough bad things
keep happening, the bad day excuse stops working.
The web gets too tangled and messy to maintain.
And that is exactly when the revolution happens.
Paradigm shift. Right. Thomas Kuhn, who was another
brilliant philosopher, popularized that exact
term. But it's very closely related to Quine's
work. A paradigm shift is when the web finally
snaps. It's when you can no longer comfortably
patch up the edges and the whole center collapses
under the weight of the anomalies and you just
have to build a new web from scratch. Kind of
like going from the medieval belief that the
Earth is the center of the universe to the modern
understanding that the sun is the center. Perfect
example. Yeah. For centuries, brilliant astronomers
were making these desperate, suitable adjustments
just to keep the Earth locked to the center.
They invented epicycles, these incredibly weird,
complicated loops that planets supposedly did
in the sky just to make their flawed math work.
They held the Earth -centric view come what may.
Until the math just got so overwhelmingly messy
that Copernicus finally stepped in and said,
guys, if we just put the sun in the middle, all
this mess instantly goes away. And the web was
rebuilt. The center fundamentally shifted, and
suddenly everything in the sky looked completely
different. So let's wrap this up and look at
the big takeaway for you listening. We started
with this phrase, hold come what may. We learned
that technically, logically, you can hold on
to any belief forever if you're willing to twist
your logic into a giant pretzel. But we also
learned that pragmatically, we shouldn't. We
should hold our central beliefs stubbornly, yes,
but not infinitely. We have to be willing to
let the web vibrate. We have to be willing to
actually feel the tension when the outside world
contradicts us. It's really about noticing when
you are actively making those suitable adjustments
in your own life. When you hear a political fact
you don't like, do you immediately reflexively
say, oh, that source is obviously biased or that
study is totally flawed? Right. You have to pause
and ask yourself. Am I rejecting this new information
because it is actually false? Or am I just rejecting
it because accepting it would force me to painfully
rewire my entire brain? That is the really hard
work of critical thinking. It's not just basic
fact checking. It's serious web maintenance.
It's constantly checking your own structural
integrity. And sometimes, you know, you need
a controlled demolition. Sometimes you just have
to admit that a central belief, whether it's
about a relationship, a career path, or a political
ideology, is simply no longer supporting the
weight of the reality you're experiencing. And
you have to let it crash. And then you rebuild.
And rebuild. Because that is how we actually
learn. That's how scientific progress happens.
And ultimately, it's how individual people grow.
This deep dive into quine has been a serious
mental workout. We've gone all the way from romantic
sounding vows to the structural engineering of
the human mind. It is incredibly dense stuff,
but I find it liberating. It frees you from the
exhausting idea that you have to be perfectly
right about everything forever. You just have
to have the best working model for right now.
As we sign off today, I want to leave you, the
listener, with a final provocation to mull over.
We talked extensively about how we fiercely protect
the center of our core beliefs almost at all
costs. We constantly dismiss unfriendly evidence
just to save them. But as we've seen, we also
know the center can break. It has broken many
times before in human history. Exactly. So here's
the question I want you to think about. Pick
one of your absolute untouchable core beliefs.
Maybe it's a deep religious conviction. Maybe
it's a foundational political stance. Or maybe
it's just the quiet belief that you fundamentally
are a good person. What would it take? Yeah.
What specific piece of evidence would you have
to see, hear, or experience firsthand that would
force you to look in the mirror and say, I was
wrong about everything? Because if you can't
answer that question, if there is literally nothing
that could ever change your mind under any circumstances,
then you aren't really holding a belief anymore.
You are holding a dogma. You've essentially stopped
thinking. And as Quine showed us today, even
the most basic laws of the universe shouldn't
be held quite that tightly. It's a slightly scary
thought, but honestly, that is exactly where
the real growth happens. Thanks so much for diving
deep with us today. See you next time.