Donald Davidson has argued that W.V. Quine’s empiricism depends on sensory stimulations as epistemic intermediaries between theory and world (1974, 1990), a view which should be rejected. Once this step is taken, the doctrine that empirical beliefs play a foundational epistemic role should also be abandoned. Nothing distinctive then, Davidson has suggested, is left to call empiricism. This paper addresses what Davidson describes as the ‘Cartesian’ spirit of Quine’s account of observational beliefs (1990). I shall argue that Davidson’s reading may not reflect what Quine’s approach amounts to and that it may, perhaps, even conflict with it.
Davidson suggests that Quine’s empiricism involves a Cartesian epistemology based on sensory intermediaries, much like traditional forms of empiricism are based on sense data (2001). In this paper, I shall first focus on analysing what Davidson means by qualifying Quine’s empiricism as Cartesian. This is important as Quine is rarely associated to first-personal approaches to knowledge or meaning. Given the anti-mentalistic strictures imposed by naturalism, such as the requirement to explicate the empiricist notion of objects ‘before the mind’ (1989) in terms of sensory exteroceptors, neural firings or nerve endings, Quine’s epistemology is customarily associated with third-personal scientific accounts of language. In a similar vein, Davidson does not think that Quine reduces the subject matter of observation sentences to patterns of sensory stimulation. Davidson’s reading is significantly more nuanced.
In Davidson’s view, though shying away from traditional empiricism, Quine’s use of the notion of stimulus meaning in Word and Object (1960) leads to similar consequences. The core of Quine’s empiricism consists in what Davidson calls the “proximal” theory of meaning and belief, which establishes that two sentences mean the same thing if they are prompted by the same patterns of stimulation (Davidson, 1990: 71-73). According to Davidson, stimulus meaning introduces a gap between the radical translator’s conception of the speaker’s beliefs on one hand, and the world with its public objects and events on the other hand. While sense data philosophers would have placed such gap within the subject’s mind, Quine instead has externalized it to an aspect of the world potentially describable in scientific terms. Nevertheless, Quine’s naturalization of sense data leads to the same subjectivist consequences: it is by asking herself which patterns of nerve endings would prompt a speaker to accept or reject an observation sentence, and then by translating that sentence into one that she would be disposed to accept or reject, that the linguist is able to construct a translation manual (1994). Since different patterns might be stimulated in different people by the same situations, the same utterance might be assigned conflicting truth values in the mouths of different people. In Davidson’s eyes, precisely because the linguist’s or speaker’s beliefs are independent from sensory intermediaries, and both are independent from the public world, an utterance of theirs of the same expression would issue in conflicting truth values even assuming that their response was caused by exactly the same token-stimulations or proximal conditions of assent and dissent.
This paper then moves on to an assessment from Quine’s perspective of Davidson’s Cartesian interpretation. The conclusion I attempt to support is twofold. On one hand, though aware of the perils of assimilating Quine’s empiricism to a mentalist account of sensory stimulation, I argue that the subjectivist aspect which Davidson attributes to mentalist kinds of empiricism (1989) may constitute one possible way to make sense of Davidson’s view of the consequences of Quine’s empiricism, namely that it entails skepticism and a certain kind of relativism (1990). What I mean by subjectivism is the view that it is the speaker’s circumstantial and idiosyncratic theory of how the world appears to her which governs the content and meaning of her empirical beliefs. On the other hand, I attempt to argue that Quine’s empiricism does not fit the design of subjectivism. To do so, I examine it in light of Quine’s thesis of the reciprocal containment of ontology and epistemology (1981: 72).
A consequence of the containment thesis is that all existential claims obey the same standards of evidence, namely those conducive to more science. From the evidential standpoint, therefore, all objects are on equal footing: it is only arbitrarily that sensory stimulations are more fundamental than other objects. By following through Quine’s naturalism, empiricism emerges as, at once a scientific description of an aspect of the world such as language learning and theory construction, and a validation of such description from within the purview of our scientific worldview. Any air of circularity may be tolerated on the grounds that there simply is no “first philosophy” (Quine, 1981: 77), no domain of assessment reaching beyond science and against which science can be compared. The containment thesis I argue, supports two conclusions. Firstly, it at least casts doubt on the viability of attributing to Quine the assignment of a privileged role to sensory intermediaries. Secondly, it has significant bearing on Quine’s use of the notion of stimulus meaning, which notion therefore is of no immediate use for the theory of meaning. Empiricism belongs to a different level of Quine’s philosophical system, namely Quine’s naturalized epistemology. Instead, because of his genuinely semantical concerns, Davidson reads it as a theory of translation; but instead, it should be read as a second-order scientific claim without immediate bearing for the semantic work of the linguist.
Davidson’s critical involvement with Quine on empiricism has significantly informed Quine’s philosophical development from the 1970’s to the 1990’s. Davidson’s arguments sometimes prompt Quine to reconsider certain aspects of his earlier views. For instance, Quine has rejected the thesis of a “homology between people’s nerve endings” (Quine, Davidson, 1994: 227). Other times Davidson prompts Quine to provide new explanations for older commitments. This is where empiricism should be located. Quine is unrepentant in retaining the philosophical role of stimulation patterns (Quine, 1981: 38). However, rather than providing a semantic criterion for translation, stimulus meanings provide a definition for why it works (Quine, 1999: 74).
References
Davidson, D., (1990), ‘Meaning, Truth and Evidence’, in (1990) Perspectives on Quine, Barrett, R., B., Gibson, R., F., (eds.), Blackwell.
- (2001a) ‘Comments on Karlovy Vary Papers’, in (2001), Interpreting Davidson, Kotatko, P., Pagin, P., Segal, G., (eds.), Stanford University.
Quine, W., V., (1960b) Word and Object, MIT Press, 2013.
- (1981) Theories and Things, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
- (1999), ‘Where do We Disagree’, in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Hahn L. E., (ed.).
Quine, W., V., Davidson, (1994), D., ‘Exchange between Donald Davidson and WV Quine following Davidson's lecture’, Theoria.
