: Jerry Fodor proposes a solution to Quine's inscrutability–of–reference problem for certain naturalized semantic theories, thereby defending such theories from charges that they cannot discriminate meanings finely enough. His proposal, combining elements of informational and inferential–role semantics, is to eliminate non–standard interpretations by testing predicate compatibility relations. I argue that Fodor's proposal, understood as primarily aimed at Mentalese, withstands Ray's and Gates's objections but nonetheless fails because of unwarranted assumptions about ontological homogeneity of target language predicates, and problems with Fodor's (...) reliance on predicate conjunction to resolve ambiguity. Naturalized semantics thus remains without an answer to the inscrutability objection. (shrink)

Quine's metaphilosophical naturalism is often dismissed as overly “scientistic.” Many contemporary naturalists reject Quine's idea that epistemology should become a “chapter of psychology” and urge for a more “liberal,” “pluralistic,” and/or “open-minded” naturalism instead. Still, whenever Quine explicitly reflects on the nature of his naturalism, he always insists that his position is modest and that he does not “think of philosophy as part of natural science”. Analyzing this tension, Susan Haack has argued that Quine's naturalism contains a “deep-seated and significant (...) ambivalence”. In this paper, I argue that a more charitable interpretation is possible—a reading that does justice to Quine's own pronouncements on the issue. I reconstruct Quine's position and argue that Haack and Quine, in their exchanges, have been talking past each other and that once this mutual misunderstanding is cleared up, Quine's naturalism turns out to be more modest, and hence less scientistic, than many contemporary naturalists have presupposed. I show that Quine's naturalism is first and foremost a rejection of the transcendental. It is only after adopting a broadly science-immanent perspective that Quine, in regimenting our language, starts making choices that many contemporary philosophers have argued to be unduly restrictive. (shrink)

The review praises the philosophical quality, but is less enthusiastic about the scholarship and historical accuracy.

In this paper I distinguish two ways of using the expression ‘epistemological naturalism’. In one sense, naturalism amounts to a denial that epistemology should be understood as a kind of first philosophy providing the foundations for science from outside. In a second sense, naturalism holds that human knowledge is a natural phenomenon and that epistemology should be seen as a chapter of natural science. Moreover, naturalism in this second sense usually incorporates some additional specifications that build up a very restrictive (...) concept of science. Two different projects for naturalizing epistemology lie behind these two meanings of ‘naturalism’, and the two projects, although sometimes seen as complementary or even equivalent, are not necessarily so. After drawing this distinction, I set out the difficulties faced by those naturalistic stances that do not discriminate sharply enough or do not establish the appropriate hierarchical relationship between both projects. Finally, I argue for a conception of epistemology which is best described as a radical antilfoundntionnlism. This conception sticks to the requirements that follow from naturalism when understood in the first sense above, and takes the cluster of theses that give birth to the second as subsidiary and revisable. (shrink)

This survey article discusses the pragmatist tradition in twentieth century philosophy of science. Pragmatism, originating with Charles Peirce's writings on the pragmatic maxim in the 1870s, is a background both for scientific realism and, via the views of William James and John Dewey, for the relativist and/or constructivist forms of neopragmatism that have often been seen as challenging the very ideas of scientific rationality and objectivity. The paper shows how the issue of realism arises in pragmatist philosophy of science and (...) how some pragmatists, classical and modern, have attempted to deal with it. Various dimensions of the realism dispute are thus discussed, especially realism as contrasted to instrumentalism and realism as contrasted to relativism/constructivism. It is argued that the pragmatist tradition cannot avoid these tensions but is largely constituted by them. (shrink)

It is often assumed that there is a close connection between Quine's criticism of the analytic/synthetic distinction, in 'Two dogmas of empiricism' and onwards, and his thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, in Word and Object and onwards. Often, the claim that the distinction is unsound (in some way or other) is taken to follow from the indeterminacy thesis, and sometimes the indeterminacy thesis is supported by such a claim. However, a careful scrutiny of the indeterminacy thesis as stated by (...) Quine, and the varieties of the analytic/synthetic distinction, reveals that the two claims are mutually independent. Neither does the claim that the distinction is unsound follow from the indeterminacy thesis, nor that thesis from unsoundness claim, under any of the common interpretations of the analytic/synthetic distinction. (shrink)

Alexander George has put forward a novel interpretation of the Quine-Carnap debate over analyticity. George argues that Carnap's claim that there exists an analytic-synthetic distinction was held by Carnap to be empty of empirical consequences. As a result, Carnap understood his position to be empirically indistinguishable from Quine's. Although George defends his interpretation only briefly, I show that it withstands further examination and ought to be accepted. The consequences of accepting it undermine a common understanding of Quine's criticism of Carnap, (...) and I argue that it is difficult to find a perspective from which Quine can criticize Carnap in a non-question-begging way. (shrink)

Despite offering many formulations of his controversial indeterminacy of translation thesis, Quine has never explored in detail the connection between indeterminacy and the conception of meaning that he supposedly derived from the work of Peirce and Duhem. The outline of such a conception of meaning, as well as its relationship to the indeterminacy thesis, is worked out in this paper; and its merits and implications are assessed both in the context of Quine’s own philosophical agenda, and also with a view (...) to a very different approach to meaning and understanding exemplified by the work of Gadamer. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ : Même s’il formule à diverses reprises sa thèse controversée de l’indétermination de la traduction, Quine n’a jamais examiné de près le lien entre l’indétermination et la conception de la signification qu’il aurait développée à partir des travaux de Peirce et de Duhem. Cet article esquisse le plan d’une telle conception de la signification dans sa relation à la thèse de l’indétermination et évalue les avantages et les implications de cette conception dans le contexte du programme philosophique de Quine (...) lui-même, ainsi que selon l’approche très différente de la signification et de la compréhension élaborée dans l’œuvre de Gadamer. (shrink)

We need not accommodate facts about meaning if Quine is right about the indeterminacy of subsentential expressions; there can be no such facts to accommodate. Evans argued that Quine’s approach overlooks the ways speakers use predication to endow their use of subsentential expressions with the necessary determinacy. This paper offers a critical assessment of the debate in relation to current arguments about naturalism and shows how Evans’s response depends on a basic claim that turns out to be false.

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. (shrink)

In this article, I analyze Quine’s conception of science, which is a radical defence of extensionalism on the grounds that first‐order logic is the most adequate logic for science. I examine some criticisms addressed to it, which show the role of modalities and probabilities in science and argue that Quine’s treatment of probability minimizes the intensional character of scientific language and methods by considering that probability is extensionalizable. But this extensionalizing leads to untenable results in some cases and is not (...) consistent with the fact that Quine himself admits confirmation which includes probability. Quine’s extensionalism does not account for this fact and then seems unrealistic, even if science ought to be extensional in so far as it is descriptive and mathematically expressible. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore [(1992) Holism: a shopper's guide, Oxford: Blackwell; (1996) in R. McCauley (Ed.) The Churchlands and their critics , Cambridge: Blackwell] have launched a powerful attack against Paul Churchland's connectionist theory of semantics--also known as state space semantics. In one part of their attack, Fodor and Lepore argue that the architectural and functional idiosyncrasies of connectionist networks preclude us from articulating a notion of conceptual similarity applicable to state space semantics. Aarre Laakso and Gary Cottrell [(1998) (...) in M. A. Gernsbacher & S. Derry (Eds) Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Mahway, NJ: Erlbaum; Philosophical Psychology ] 13, 47-76 have recently run a number of simulations on simple feedforward networks and applied a mathematical technique for measuring conceptual similarity in the representational spaces of those networks. Laakso and Cottrell contend that their results decisively refute Fodor and Lepore's criticisms. Paul Churchland [(1998) Journal of Philosophy, 95, 5-32 ] goes further. He uses Laakso and Cottrell's neurosimulations to argue that connectionism does furnish us with all we need to construct a robust theory of semantics and a robust theory of translation. In this paper I shall argue that whereas Laakso and Cottrell's neurocomputational results may provide us with a rebuttal of Fodor and Lepore's argument, Churchland's conclusion is far too optimistic. In particular, I shall try to show that connectionist modelling does not provide any objective criterion for achieving a one-to-one accurate translational mapping across networks. (shrink)

This paper offers an interpretation of Quine's naturalized epistemology through the lens of Jaegwon Kim's influential critique of the same. Kim argues that Quine forces a false choice between traditional deductivist foundationalism and naturalized epistemology and contends that there are viable alternative epistemological projects. However it is suggested that Quine would reject these alternatives by reference to the same fundamental principles (underdetermination, indeterminacy of translation, extensionalism) that led him to reject traditional epistemology and propose naturalism as an alternative. Given this (...) interpretation of Quine, it is essential that a successful critic of naturalism also examine Quine's aforementioned principles. The divide between naturalist and nonnaturalist epistemology turns out to be defined by the divide between more fundamental naturalist and nonnaturalist approaches to semantics. (shrink)

This thesis explores attempts to characterise the structure of reality. Three notions stand out: Lewisian naturalness, Sider’s ‘structure’, and grounding, where the latter has become the most popular way to characterise the structure of reality in the contemporary literature. I argue that none of these notions, as they are currently understood, are suited for limning the metaphysical structure of reality. In the first part of the thesis I argue that, by the lights of the relevant theories, both naturalness and structure (...) fall short of the theoretical role carved out for those posits. In the second part of the thesis I present two challenges to the ‘orthodox’ conception of grounding. The first contests the standard assumption that grounding is asymmetric, both by citing what I take to be best described as symmetric instances of grounding, and by developing and arguing for a new theory of metaphysical structure – ‘metaphysical interdependence’ – which takes grounding to be nonsymmetric. The second challenge concerns the relationship between grounding and explanation, and leads to a dilemma for the grounding theorist. My proposed resolution to the dilemma is to adopt an antirealist approach to grounding, which I further motivate and develop in the final chapter. (shrink)

This article examines whether Willard Van Orman Quine’s indeterminacy thesis can be sustained. The argument from above, Quine argues, can derive indeterminacy as its conclusion. I will argue that the indeterminacy claim cannot be sustained. I further argue that Quine changed the formulation of the underdetermination of theory by evidence (UTE) argument from what Duhem said to the Quine/Pierce meaning verification view, in order use the new formulation of UTE to imply indeterminacy. Given all that, we see when we apply (...) the old UTE argument we only arrive at underdetermination of theory by evidence, and that applies to all sciences, philosophy and knowledge, including philosophy of language. (shrink)