Abstract
In this chapter, I reconstruct Quine’s attempts to accommodate the privacy of stimulus meaning in his naturalized epistemology. These attempts span three decades and equally many monographs as well as a number of articles. Furthermore, I delineate his final proposal to solve it, which relies on natural selection to guarantee a preestablished harmony of innate perceptual similarity standards, and I discuss the extent to which this final solution still agrees with the basic doctrines that Quine defended in the 1960s (and never explicitly retracted). Finally, I develop an internal critique of two central aspects of Quine’s mature account, one focused on his use of natural selection, the other on his conception of pleasure through approval.
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Notes
- 1.
I am here not referring to the indeterminacy of translation. The essential point here is that Quine cannot explain communication at a very basic level, a level that Quine did not want to be touched by any indeterminacy, namely the level of holophrastic observation sentences. Quine intended holophrastic observation sentences to furnish true intersubjectivity, almost entirely unaffected by indeterminacies.
- 2.
Quine’s use of phrases such as the cosmic machine revealed by science (Quine 1969, p. 133) is certainly notable. I discuss below (Sect. 7.3.2), why the use of these metaphors does not imply that Quine defends anything close to contemporary scientific realism (for this contemporary notion, see below, Sect. 7.3.1). Still, these phrases explain why naturalistic realists like Kornblith (2002) are particularly fond of Natural Kinds.
- 3.
We still find these two positions in contemporary debates. The view of naturally selected abilities as irrational is basically the line of reasoning developed by Alvin Plantinga in his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism. In short, Plantinga (2002) argues that if our cognitive faculties are the product of evolution by natural selection, it is probable that naturalism is false, as evolution does not select for truth-conducive abilities, but only for abilities which foster survival. Since the latter are distinct from the former, evolutionary psychologists must conclude that, while their Darwinism may help them survive, it has nothing to do with truth. In contrast, Kornblith explicitly argues for a continuity between the kind of reasoning that fosters survival and the kind of reasoning that is at work in successful scientific theories (Kornblith 1993, pp. 61ff.; 2014, p. 132). Furthermore, Kornblith (2014, p. 126) makes clear that he commits himself to the claim that “natural selection is selecting for knowledge-acquiring capacities – that is, processes of belief acquisition that tend to produce truths”. In contrast to both positions, Maddy (2017, p. 219) and Burge (2010, p. 308) hold that some mental ability’s being the product of natural selection is neutral with regard to the ability’s capacity to, as it were, deliver truths about the world.
- 4.
This has led Føllesdal (2014, p. 276) to claim that Quine’s position is surprisingly similar to Husserl’s.
- 5.
See also Quine (2016 [1995], pp. 29ff.), where Quine emphasizes publicly observable behavior at the cost of intersubjectively shared stimuli—and then gives an account of how preestablished harmony of innate perceptual similarity standards is needed to explain first-language acquisition based on such publicly observable behavior. This nicely agrees with my position, according to which the preestablished harmony is needed to, as it were, compensate for the privacy of stimulus meanings (see below, Sect. 3.1.4). I take the following paragraph from said article (Quine 2016 [1995], pp. 30f.) to express exactly this problem caused by the privacy of stimulus meanings:
In Pursuit of Truth that appeal [to intersubjective similarity of stimulus meanings, RG] is out of order, so the causal question recurs: why, after the mother has got the child to affirm ‘Milk’ once in an appropriate situation, does the child’s usage continue to agree with the mother’s? The answer can lie no longer in intersubjective similarity of stimulus meaning.
- 6.
Remember how Quine (1960, p. 83) puts it: “If the child is to be amenable to such training, however, what he must have is a prior tendency to weight qualitative differences unequally. He must, so to speak, sense more resemblances between some stimulations than between others. Otherwise a dozen reinforcements of his response ‘Red’, on occasions where red things were presented, would no more encourage the same response to a thirteenth red thing than to a blue one”.
- 7.
- 8.
This summary of the account from The Roots of Reference is mentalistic. This mentalistic vocabulary is also used by Quine (1974, p. 43); of course, he would argue that he is not committed to the mentalistic version of the story, but only to the safely behavioristic one. However, I will suggest below, Sect. 3.3.2, that he is not able to completely avoid intentional vocabulary.
- 9.
For completeness’ sake, note that ‘to approve’ can be used opaquely, as in ‘Peter approves of a right to asylum for all citizens of countries that are at war.’ This statement could be true even if, happily, no country would be at war at the time Peter utters the statement.
- 10.
A similar problem arises in Quine’s discussion of radical translation. As Glock (2003, pp. 175–182) shows, Quine’s conception of the situation in which radical translation occurs is so radically behavioristic that the radical translator would have virtually no hope of getting his translation studies started without some “closet hermeneutics” (Glock 2003, p. 175). In particular, Glock argues that, pace Quine’s official doctrine, his account presupposes that the native and the translator “engage in a specific kind of dialogue, that is, perform certain types of speech acts” (Glock 2003, p. 179). Among others, Glock points out, Quine presupposes that the native understands that the conversation with the translator has a specific aim, namely teaching and learning a language, respectively.
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Gubelmann, R. (2019). Quine II: The Evolutionary-Perceptual Account. In: A Science-Based Critique of Epistemological Naturalism in Quine’s Tradition. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24524-5_3
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