Abstract
In this chapter, I show how Quine’s empiricist justificatory monism, his claim that the only fundamental way to verify any claim is through empirical evidence, is based on his verification holism, which in turn presupposes his holophrastic conception of empirical data. I then point out that the problems outlined in my discussion of Quine’s naturalized epistemology threaten to undermine his empiricist justificatory monism. Finally, I argue that Quine’s explication of empirical-scientific justification itself cannot be justified in the sense that it itself specifies. Given justificatory monism, this means that the explication is unjustified.
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Notes
- 1.
As in Chapter 2, my reconstruction of Quine’s views is in several ways analogous to both Hylton (2007) and Verhaegh (2015). Where I differ most clearly from both is in my evaluation of these views. In Chapter 3, I have argued that Quine’s story of how the infant arrives from stimulus to science is untenable. In the present chapter, I show that the same holds for his attempt to conceive of all Carnapian external questions as basically empirical questions.
- 2.
It is potentially confusing that Carnap and Quine use the adjective ‘theoretical’ in different senses. For Quine, a theoretical statement is ontologically committed and logically structured, and hence contrasted to a holophrastic observation statement. For Carnap, a theoretical statement is one that can be empirically judged, and contrasted to an external, non-scientific statement.
- 3.
- 4.
He also gives another wording of the goal of naturalized epistemology: its goal is to analyze “the relation between the physicist’s sentences on the one hand, treating of gravitation and electrons and the like, and on the other hand the triggering of his sensory receptors” (Quine 1981a, pp. 24–25).
- 5.
- 6.
Quine also declares, following Popper, that such a observation categorical can never be verified sensu stricto, but only falsified (see Quine 1992, p. 12).
- 7.
In fact, Quine also requires intersubjectivity from any observation sentence, that is, all competent speakers of a community must agree on their verdict on an observation sentence given an appropriate sensory stimulation (see Quine 1992, p. 3). However, this is immaterial for present purposes.
- 8.
Here is another passage where Quine delineates the same holophrastic conception of scientific evidence. The passage also contains an interesting reflection by Quine on his development regarding the notion of the tribunal of experience: “If there was still an unintended overtone of sensory quality in my reference to surface irritation, it was effectively banished by the time I wrote Word and Object; for there I wrote explicitly of the triggering of sensory receptors. […] Putting matters thus physiologically was of a piece with my naturalism, my rejection of a first philosophy underlying science. Empiricist discipline, however, is not lost thereby. The fabric celebrated in my old metaphor is with us still. As before it is a fabric of sentences accepted in science as true, however provisionally. The ones at the edges are occasion sentences. Moreover, they are occasion sentences of a special sort, namely, ones whose acceptance is prompted by the firing of associated sets or patterns of receptors on that occasion. The tribunal, to worry another of my old metaphors, is just the firing of the receptors” (Quine 1981c, p. 40).
- 9.
Analogously, it is completely in line with Quine’s overall theory of semantics and with his explicit assertions on the topic that theoretical terms like rabbit do have a stimulus meaning, but one which is not intersubjectively invariant, see, for example Quine (1960, p. 42).
- 10.
Further textual evidence for reading ‘contributes’ in this deductive sense is given by passages where Quine uses the term ‘imply’ to describe the relationship between theory and a certain observation categorical, for example: “The theory will imply a lot of observation conditionals, as I call them, each of which says that if certain observable conditions are met then a certain observable event will occur” (Quine 1981b, p. 70). See also Quine (1992, p. 17).
- 11.
Note, as elaborated above (Sect. 4.2), that there are much more credible alternatives than clairvoyance and telepathy to Quine’s choice of sources of information: if Burge is right, then our visual systems provide us with structured representations as of distal stimuli. This has nothing to do with telepathy, but it flatly contradicts Quine’s holophrastic conception of empirical data.
- 12.
It is certainly remarkable that Quine here, at least in passing, remarks that changing the checkpoints amounts to a change of the game of science itself. Does this imply that he himself acknowledges the non-scientific nature of his explication of science? Probably not: note that Quine does not claim that such a change could not be scientifically justified, which is the claim that I am defending here.
- 13.
Indeed, it seems that the statement is not only unjustified, but even meaningless. Consider the relationship between meaning and evidence that Quine establishes in Epistemology Naturalized: “For epistemology remains centered as always on evidence, and meaning remains centered as always on verification; and evidence is verification” (Quine 1969, p. 89). If meaning is basically verification, an unverifiable statement such as the statement of Quine’s explication of justification is meaningless. The same goes for the statements of poetry and fiction: since they do not contribute to a falsifiable portion of theory, they are meaningless.
- 14.
Thus, the analysis presented here supports van Fraassen’s suggestion to conceive of empiricism as a stance rather than a theory because, in the present case, doing the latter amounts to immunizing a specific doctrinal form of empiricism, namely Quine’s holophrastic, stimulations-correlated empiricism, against empirical falsification. As a consequence, for van Fraassen, treating empiricism as a scientific doctrine runs counter to the flexible and open-minded spirit of empiricism and has an air of what he dismissively calls metaphysics.
- 15.
These findings contradict a currently common reading of Quine’s philosophy. Verhaegh (2015, p. 94) specifies epistemological naturalism in Quine’s tradition as rejecting any “detached, science-independent perspective on reality” and instead as aiming at a fully immanent, self-sufficient scientific worldview. However, when discussing Quine’s empiricism, Verhaegh (2015, pp. 97–98) fails to make Quine’s distinction between source- and checkpoint-empiricism. This leads him to conclude, mistakenly, that what I have called checkpoint-empiricism is subject to empirical refutation, too. In contrast, I have argued here that this can be claimed only for source-empiricism, but not for checkpoint-empiricism.
Note also that it will not help, as Verhaegh (ibid.) does, to argue that this is just a version of Quine’s circle at work, that is, of justifying science, as all good naturalists should, by the use of science. I have argued that it is precisely not possible to scientifically justify checkpoint-empiricism; as it were, in the case of checkpoint-empiricism, the circle cannot be closed, whereas it is possible to do this in the case of source-empiricism. However, as I have argued in Chapters 3 and 4, the scientific evidence actually speaks against, and not in favor of Quine’s source-empiricism.
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Gubelmann, R. (2019). Quine’s Empiricist Justificatory Monism. 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_6
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