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Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 1979.

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CHAPTER IV

Privileged Representations

1. Apodictic Truth, Privileged Representations, and Analytic Philosophy

At the end of the nineteenth century, philosophers were justifiably worried about the future of their discipline. On the one hand, the rise of empirical psychology had raised the question "What do we need to know about knowledge which psychology cannot tell us?"¹ Ever since Descartes's attempt to make the world safe for clear and distinct ideas and Kant's to make it safe for synthetic a priori truths, ontology had been dominated by epistemology. So the "naturalization" of epistemology by psychology suggested that a simple and relaxed physicalism might be the only sort of ontological view needed. On the other hand, the tradition of German idealism had declined -- in England and America -- into what has been well described as "a continuation of Protestantism by other means." The idealists purported to save the "spiritual values" which phvsicalism seemed to neglect by invoking Berkeleian arguments to get rid of material substance and Hegelian arguments to get rid of the individual ego (while resolutely ignoring Hegel's historicism). But few took these high-minded efforts seriously. The earnest reductionism of Bain and Mill and the equally earnest romanticism of Royce drove aesthetical ironists like James and Bradley, as well as social [165] reformers like the young Dewey, to proclaim the unreality of traditional epistemological problems and solutions. They were provoked to radical criticisms of "truth as correspondence" and "knowledge as accuracy of representations," thus threatening the entire Kantian notion of philosophy as metacriticism of the special disciplines. Simultaneously, philosophers as various as Nietzsche, Bergson, and Dilthey were undermining some of the same Kantian presuppositions. For a time, it seemed as if philosophy might turn away once and for all from epistemology, from the quest for certainty, structure, and rigor, and from the attempt to constitute itself a tribunal of reason.

The spirit of playfulness which seemed about to enter philosophy around 1900 was, however, nipped in the bud. Just as mathematics had inspired Plato to invent "philosophical thinking," so serious-minded philosophers turned to mathematical logic for rescue from the exuberant satire of their critics. The paradigmatic figures in this attempt to recapture the mathematical spirit were Husserl and Russell. Husserl saw philosophy as trapped between "naturalism" and "historicism," neither of which offered the sort of "apodictic truths" which Kant had assured philosophers were their birthright.² Russell joined Husserl in denouncing the psychologism which had infected the philosophy of mathematics, and announced that logic was the essence of philosophy.³ Driven by the need to find something to be [166] apodictic about, Russell discovered "logical form" and Husserl discovered "essences," the "purely formal" aspects of the world which remained when the nonformal had been, "bracketed." The discovery of these privileged representations began once again a quest for seriousness, purity, and rigor,⁴ a quest which lasted for some forty years. But, in the end, heretical followers of Husserl (Sartre and Heidegger) and heretical followers of Russell (Sellars and Quine) raised the same sorts of questions about the possibility of apodictic truth which Hegel had raised about Kant. Phenomenology gradually became transformed into what Husserl despairingly called "mere anthropology."⁵ and [167] "analytic" epistemology (i.e., "philosophy of science") became increasingly historicist and decreasingly "logical" (as in Hanson, Kuhn, Harre, and Hesse). So, seventy years after Husserl's "Philosophy as Rigorous Science" and Russell's "Logic as the Essence of Philosophy," we are back with the same putative dangers which faced the authors of these manifestoes: if philosophy becomes too naturalistic, hard-nosed positive disciplines will nudge it aside; if it becomes too historicist, then intellectual history, literary criticism, and similar soft spots in "the humanities" will swallow it up.⁶

The full story of the splendors and the miseries of phenomenology and analytic philosophy is, obviously, far beyond the scope of this book. The story I want to tell in this chapter is merely how the notion of two sorts of representations -- intuitions and concepts -- fell into disrepute in the latter days of the analytic movement. I have been claiming that the Kantian picture of concepts and intuitions getting together to produce knowledge is needed to give sense to the idea of "theory of knowledge" as a specifically philosophical discipline, distinct from psychology. This is [168] equivalent to saying that if we do not have the distinction between what is "given" and what is "added by the mind," or that between the "contingent" (because influenced by what is given) and the "necessary" (because entirely "within" the mind and under its control), then we will not know what would count as a "rational reconstruction" of our knowledge. We will not know what epistemology's goal or method could be. These two distinctions were attacked at intervals throughout the history of the analytic movement. Neurath had questioned Carnap appeal to the given, for example, and doubts had often been expressed about Russell's notion of "knowledge by acquaintance" and Lewis's "expressive language." These doubts only came to a head,. however, in the early 1950s, with the appearance of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Austin's mockery of "the ontology of the sensible manifold," and Sellars's "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind." The distinction between the necessary and the contingent -- revitalized by Russell and the Vienna Circle as the distinction between "true by virtue of meaning" and "true by virtue of experience" -- had usually gone unchallenged, and had formed the least common denominator of "ideal language" and "ordinary language" analysis. However, also in the early fifties, Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" challenged this distinction, and with it the standard notion (common to Kant, Husserl, and Russell) that philosophy stood to empirical science as the study of structure of the study of content. Given Quine's doubts (buttressed by similar doubts in Wittgenstein's Investigations) about how to tell when we are responding to the compulsion of "language" rather than that of "experience," it became difficult to explain in what sense philosophy had a separate "formal" field of inquiry, and thus how its results might have the desired apodictic character. For these two challenges were challenges to the very idea of a "theory of knowledge," and thus to philosophy itself, conceived of as a discipline which centers around such a theory. [169]

In what follows, I shall confine myself to discussing two radical ways of criticizing the Kantian foundations of analytic philosophy -- Sellars's behavioristic critique of "the whole framework of givenness" and Quine's behavioristic approach to the necessary-contingent distinction. I shall present both as forms of holism. As long as knowledge is conceived of as accurate representing -- as the Mirror of Nature -- Quine's and Sellars's holistic doctrines sound pointlessly paradoxical, because such accuracy requires a theory of privileged representations, ones which are automatically and intrinsically accurate. So the response to Sellars on givenness and Quine on analyticity is often that they have "gone too far" -- that they have allowed holism to sweep them off their feet and away from common sense. In order to defend Sellars and Quine, I shall be arguing that their holism is a product of their commitment to the thesis that justification is not a matter of a special relation between ideas (or words) and objects, but of conversation, of social practice. Conversational justification, so to speak, is naturally holistic, whereas the notion of justification embedded in the epistemological tradition is reductive and atomistic. I shall try to show that Sellars and Quine invoke the same argument, one which bears equally against the given-versus-nongiven and the necessary-versus-contingent distinctions. The crucial premise of this argument is that we understand knowledge when we understand the social justification of belief, and thus have no need to view it as accuracy of representation.

Once conversation replaces confrontation, the notion of the mind as Mirror of Nature can be discarded. Then the notion of philosophy as the discipline which looks for privileged representations among those constituting the Mirror becomes unintelligible. A thoroughgoing holism has no place for the notion of philosophy as "conceptual," as ''apodictic," as picking out the "foundations" of the rest of knowledge, as explaining which representations are "purely given" or "purely conceptual," as presenting a "canonical [170] notation" rather than an empirical discovery, or as isolating "trans-framework heuristic categories." If we see knowledge as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an attempt to mirror nature, we will not be likely to envisage a metapractice which will be the critique of all possible forms of social practice. So holism produces, as Quine has argued in detail and Sellars has said in passing, a conception of philosophy which has nothing to do with the quest for certainty.

Neither Quine nor Sellars, however, has developed a new conception of philosophy in any detail. Quine, after arguing that there is no line between science and philosophy tends to assume that he has thereby shown that science can replace philosophy. But it is not clear what task he is asking science to perform. Nor is it clear why natural science, rather than, the arts, or politics, or religion, should take over the area left vacant. Further, Quine's conception of science is still curiously instrumentalist. It is based on a distinction between "stimuli" and "posits" which seems to lend aid and comfort to the old intuition-concept distinction. Yet Quine transcends both distinctions by granting that stimulations of sense-organs are as much "posits" as anything else. It is as if Quine, having renounced the conceptual-empirical, analytic-synthetic, and language-fact distinctions, were still not quite able to renounce that between the given and the postulated. Conversely, Sellars, having triumphed over the latter distinction, cannot quite renounce. the former cluster. Despite courteous acknowledgment of Quine's triumph over analyticity, Sellars's writing is still permeated with the notion of "giving the analysis" of various terms or sentences, and with a" tacit use of the distinction between the necessary and the contingent, the structural and the empirical, the philosophical and the scientific. Each of the two men tends to make continual, unofficial, tacit, heuristic use of the distinction which the other has transcended. It is as if analytic philosophy could not be written without at least one of the [171] two great Kantian distinctions, and as if neither Quine nor Sellars were willing to cut the last links which bind them to Russell, Carnap, and "logic as the essence of philosophy."

Analytic philosophy cannot, I suspect, be written without one or the other of these distinctions. If there are no intuitions into which to resolve concepts (in the manner of the Aufbau nor any internal relations among concepts to make possible "grammatical discoveries" (in the manner of "Oxford philosophy"), then indeed it is hard to imagine what an "analysis" might be. Wisely, few analytic philosophers any longer try to explain what it is to offer an analysis. Although there was a great deal of metaphilosophical literature in the 1930s and 1940s under the aegis of Russell and Carnap, and another spate of such literature in the 1950s which took the Philosophical Investigations and The Concept of Mind as paradigms,⁷ there is now little attempt to bring "analytic philosophy" to self-consciousness by explaining how to tell a successful from an unsuccessful analysis. The present lack of metaphilosophical reflection within the analytic movement is, I think, symptomatic off the sociological fact that analytic philosophy is now, in several countries, the entrenched school of thought. Thus in these countries anything done by philosophers who employ a certain style, or mention certain topics, counts (ex officiis suis, so to speak) as continuing the work begun by Russell and Carnap. Once a radical movement takes over the establishment against which it revolted, there is less need for methodological self-consciousness, self-criticism, or a sense of location in dialectical space or historical time.

I do not think that there any longer exists anything identifiable as "analytic philosophy" except in some such stylistic or sociological way. But this is not a disparaging remark, as if some legitimate expectation had been [172] disappointed. The analytic movement in philosophy (like any movement in any discipline) worked out the dialectical consequences of a set of assumptions, and now has little more to do. The sort of optimistic faith which Russell and Carnap shared with Kant -- that philosophy, its essence and right method discovered at last, had finally been placed upon the secure path of a science -- is not something to be mocked or deplored. Such optimism is possible only for men of high imagination and daring, the heroes of their times.

2. Epistemological Behaviorism

The simplest way to describe the common features of Quine's and Sellars's attacks on logical empiricism is to say that both raise behaviorist questions about the epistemic privilege which logical empiricism claims for certain assertions, qua reports of privileged representations. Quine asks how an anthropologist is to discriminate the sentences to which natives invariably and wholeheartedly assent into contingent empirical platitudes on the one hand and necessary, conceptual truths on the other. Sellars asks how the authority of first-person reports of, for example, how things appear to us, the pains from which we suffer, and the thoughts that drift before our minds differs from the authority of expert reports on, for example, mental stress, the mating behavior of birds, or the colors of physical objects. We can lump both questions together and simply ask, "How do our peers know which of our assertions to take our word for and which to look for further confirmation of?" It would seem enough for the natives to know which sentences are unquestionably true, without knowing which are true "by virtue of language." It would seem enough for our peers to believe there to be no better way of finding out our inner states than from our reports, without their knowing what "lies behind" our making them. It would also seem enough for us to know that our peers have this acquiescent attitude. [173] That alone seems sufficient for that inner certainty about our inner states which the tradition has explained by "immediate presence to consciousness," "sense of evidence," and other expressions of the assumption that reflections in the Mirror of Nature are intrinsically better known than nature itself. For Sellars, the certainty of "I have a pain" is a reflection of the fact that nobody cares to question it, not conversely. Just so, for Quine, the certainty of "All men are animals" and of "There have been some black dogs." Quine thinks that "meanings" drop out as wheels that are not part of the mechanism,⁸ and Sellars thinks the same of "self-authenticating non-verbal episodes."⁹ More broadly, if assertions are justified by society rather than by the character of the inner representations they express, then there is no point in attempting to isolate privileged representations.

Explaining rationality and epistemic authority by reference to what society lets us say, rather than the latter by the former, is the essence of what I shall call "epistemological behaviorism," an attitude common to Dewey and Wittgenstein. This sort of behaviorism can best be seen as a species of holism -- but one which requires no idealist metaphysical underpinnings. It claims that if we understand the rules of a language-game, we understand all that there is to understand about why moves in that language-game are made (all, that is, save for the extra understanding obtained from inquiries nobody would call epistemological -- into, for example, the history of the language, the structure of the brain, the evolution of the species, and the political or cultural ambiance of the players)." If we are hen a behaviorist in this sense, then it will not occur to us to invoke either of the traditional Kantian distinctions. But [174] can we just go ahead and be behaviorist? Or, as Quine's and Sellars's critics suggest, doesn't behaviorism simply beg the question?¹⁰ Is there any reason to think that fundamental epistemic notions should be explicated in behavioral terms?

This last question comes down to: Can we treat the study of "the nature of human knowledge" just as the study of certain ways in which human beings interact, or does it require an ontological foundation (involving some specifically philosophical way of describing human beings)? Shall we take "S knows that p" (or "S knows noninferentially that p," or "S believes incorrigibly that p," or "S's knowledge that p is certain") as a remark about the status of S's reports among his peers, or shall we take it as a remark about the relation between subject and object, between nature and its mirror? The first alternative leads to a pragmatic view of truth and a therapeutic approach to ontology (in which philosophy can straighten out pointless quarrels between common sense and science, but not contribute any arguments of its own for the existence or inexistence of something). Thus for Quine, a necessary truth is just a statement such that nobody has given us any interesting alternatives which would lead us to question it. For Sellars, to say that a report of a passing thought is incorrigible is to say that nobody has yet suggested a good way of predicting and controlling human behayior which does not take sincere first-person contemporary reports of thoughts at face-value. The second alternative leads to "ontological" explanations of the relations between minds and meanings, minds and immediate data of awareness, universals and particulars, thought and language, consciousness and brains, and so on. For philosophers like Chisholm and Bergmann, [175] such explanations must be attempted if the realism of common sense is to be preserved. The aim of all such explanations is to make truth something more than what Dewey called "warranted assertability": more than what our peers will, ceteris paribus, let us get away with saying. Such explanations, when ontological, usually take the form of a redescription of the object of knowledge so as to "bridge the gap" between it and the knowing subject. To choose between these approaches is to choose between truth as "what it is good for us to believe" and truth as "contact with reality."

Thus the question of whether we can be behaviorist in our attitude toward knowledge is not a matter of the "adequacy" of behaviorist "analyses" of knowledge-claims or of mental states. Epistemological behaviorism (which might be called simply "pragmatism," were this term not a bit overladen) has nothing to do with Watson or with Ryle. Rather, it is the claim that philosophy will have no more to offer than common sense (supplemented by biology, history, etc.) about knowledge and truth. The question is not whether necessary and sufficient behavioral conditions for "S knows that p" can be offered; no one any longer dreams they can. Nor is the question whether such conditions can be offered for "S sees that p," or "It looks to S as if p," or "S is having the thought that p." To be behaviorist in the large sense in which Sellars and Quine are behaviorist is not to offer reductionist analyses, but to refuse to attempt a certain sort of explanation: the sort of explanation which not only interposes such a notion as "acquaintance with meanings" or "acquaintance with sensory appearances" between the impact of the environment on human beings and their reports about it, but uses such notions to explain the reliability of such reports.

But, once again, how are we to decide whether such notions are needed? It is tempting to answer on the basis of an antecedent decision about the nature of human beings -- a decision on whether we need such notions as "mind," [176] "stream of consciousness," and the like to describe them. But this would be the wrong answer. We can take the Sellars-Quine attitude toward knowledge while cheerfully countenancing" raw feels, a priori concepts, innate ideas, sense-data, propositions, and anything else which a causal explanation of human behavior might find it helpful to postulate.¹¹ What we cannot do is to take knowledge of these "inner" or "abstract" entities as premises from which our knowledge of other entities is normally inferred, and without which the latter knowledge would be "ungrounded." The difference is between saying that to know a language is to be acquainted with the meanings of its terms, or that to see a table is to have a rectangular sense-impression, and explaining the authority of tokens of "All men are animals" or "That looks like a table" by virtue of the prior (internal, private, nonsocial) authority of a knowledge of meanings or of sense-impressions. Behaviorism in epistemology is a matter not of metaphysical parsimony, but of whether authority can attach to assertions by virtue of relations of "acquaintance" between persons and, for example, thoughts, impressions, universals, and propositions. The difference between the Quine-Sellars and the Chisholm-Bergmann outlooks on these matters is not the difference between lush and spare landscapes, but more like the difference between moral philosophers who think that rights and responsibilities are a matter of what society bestows and those who think that there is something inside a man which society "recognizes" when it makes its bestowal. The two schools of moral philosophy do not differ on the point that human beings have rights worth dying for. They differ rather about whether, once we have [177] understood when and why these rights have been granted or denied, in the way in which social and intellectual historians understand this, there is more to understand. They differ, in short, about whether there are "ontological foundations for human rights," just as the Sellars-Quine approach differs from the empiricist and rationalist traditions about whether, once we understand (as historians of knowledge do) when and why various beliefs have been adopted or discarded, there is something called "the relation of knowledge to reality" left over to be understood.

This analogy with moral philosophy lets us focus the issue about behaviorism in epistemology yet again: the issue is not adequacy of explanation of fact, but rather whether a practice of justification can be given a "grounding" in fact. The question is not whether human knowledge in fact has "foundations," but whether it makes sense to suggest that it does -- whether the idea of epistemic or moral authority having a "ground" in nature is a coherent one. For the pragmatist in morals, the claim that the customs of a given society are "grounded in human nature" is not one which he knows how to argue about. He is a pragmatist because he cannot see what it would be like for a custom to be so grounded. For the Quine-Sellars approach to epistemology, to say that truth and knowledge can only be judged by the standards of the inquirers of our own day is not to say that human knowledge is less noble or important, or more "cut off from the world," than we had thought. It is merely to say that nothing counts as justification unless by reference to what we already accept, and that| there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence.

To say that the True and the Right are matters of social practice may seem to condemn us to a relativism which, all by itself, is a reductio of a behaviorist approach to either knowledge or morals. I shall take up this charge in discussing historicism, in chapters seven and eight. Here I shall simply remark that only the image of a discipline -- [178] philosophy -- which will pick out a given set of scientific or moral views as more "rational" than the alternatives by appeal to something which forms a permanent neutral matrix for all inquiry and all history, makes it possible to think that such relativism must automatically rule out coherence theories of intellectual and practical justification. One reason why professional philosophers recoil from the claim that knowledge may not have foundations, or rights and duties an ontological ground, is that the kind of behaviorism which dispenses with foundations is in a fair way toward dispensing with philosophy. For the view that there is no permanent neutral matrix within which the dramas of inquiry and history are enacted has as a corollary that criticism of one's culture can only be piecemeal and partial -- never "by reference to eternal standards." It threatens the neo-Kantian image of philosophy's relation to science and to culture. The urge to say that assertions and actions must not only cohere with other assertions and actions but "correspond" to something apart from what people are saving and doing has some claim to be called the philosophical urge. It is the urge which drove Plato to say that Socrates' words and deeds, failing as they did to cohere with current theory and practice, nonetheless corresponded to something which the Athenians could barely glimpse. The residual Platonism which Quine and Sellars are opposing is not the hypostatization of nonphysical entities, but the notion of "correspondence" with such entities as the touchstone by which to measure the worth of present practice.¹² [179]

I am claiming, in short, that the Quine-Sellars attack on the Kantian notion of two sorts of representations -- intuitions "given" to one faculty, and concepts (or meanings) "given" to another -- is not the attempt to substitute one sort of account of human knowledge for another, but an attempt to get away from the notion of "an account of human knowledge." It amounts to a protest against an archetypal philosophical problem: the problem of how to reduce norms, rules, and justifications to facts, generalizations, and explanations.¹³ For this reason, we will not find neutral metaphilosophical ground on which to argue the issues Quine and Sellars raise. For they are not offering an "account" to be tested for "adequacy" but pointing to the futility of offering an "account." To refuse, as both do, to justify assertions by appeal to behavioristically unverifiable episodes (in which the mind recognizes its own direct acquaintance with an instantiation of blueness or with the meaning of "blue") is just to say that justification must be holistic. If we are not to have a doctrine of "knowledge by acquaintance" which will give us a foundation, and if we do not simply deny that there is such a thing as justification, then we will claim with Sellars that "science is rational not because it has a foundation, but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, [180] though not all at once."¹⁴ We will say with Quine that knowledge is not like an architectonic structure but like a field of force,¹⁵ and that there are no assertions which are immune from revision. We will be holistic not because we have a taste for wholes, any more than we are behaviorist because of a distaste for "ghostly entities," but simply because justification has always been behavioristic and holistic. Only the professional philosopher has dreamed that it might be something else, for only he is frightened by the epistemological skeptic. A holistic approach to knowledge is not a matter of antifoundationalist polemic, but a distrust of the whole epistemological enterprise. A behavioristic approach to episodes of "direct awareness" is not a matter of antimentalistic polemic, but a distrust of the Platonic quest for that special sort of certainty associated with visual perception. The image of the Mirror of Nature -- a mirror more easily and certainly seen than that which it mirrors -- suggests, and is suggested by, the image of philosophy as such a quest.

If what I have been saying so far is sound, there is no way to argue for the views of Sellars and Quine except by replying, to their critics. There is no neutral ground on which to stand and show that they have overcome, respectively, "the given" and "the analytic" in a fair fight. The best we can do is to disentangle the pure form of their criticisms of the tradition from various extraneous issues which their critics (and, to some extent, Quine and Sellars themselves) have introduced, and thereby perhaps to mitigate the paradoxical air of their doctrines. In the next section, I shall, take up Sellars's attack on the Myth of the Given, and try to disentangle it from the "unfair to babies" implications of the claim that there is no such thing as pre-lingujstic awareness. Next, I shall take up Quine's attack on the distinction between language and fact and try to disentangle [181] it from Quine's unhappy reductionist claims about the "indeterminacy" of translation and of the Geisteswissenschaften. When Sellars's and Quine's doctrines are purified, they appear as complementary expressions of a single claim: that no "account of the nature of knowledge" can rely on a theory of representations which stand in privileged relations to reality. The work of these two philosophers enables us to unravel, at long last, Locke's confusion between explanation and justification, and to make clear why an "account of the nature of knowledge" can be, at most, a description of human behavior.

3. Pre-Linguistic Awareness

In "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," Sellars formulates "psychological nominalism" as the view that

all awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short all awareness of abstract entities -- indeed, all awareness even of particulars -- is a linguistic affair. According to it, not even the awareness of such sorts, resemblances, and facts as pertain to so-called immediate experience is presupposed by the process of acquiring the use of language.¹⁶

The existence of raw feels -- pains, whatever feelings babies have when looking at colored objects, etc. -- is the obvious objection to this doctrine. To counter this objection, Sellars invokes the distinction between awareness-as-discriminative- behavior and awareness as what Sellars calls being "in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says" (p. 169). Awareness in the first sense is manifested by rats and amoebas and computers; it is simply reliable signaling. Awareness in the second sense is manifested only by beings whose behavior we construe as the utterance of sentences with the intention of justifying the utterance of other sentences. In this latter sense awareness is justified true belief -- knowledge -- but in the former [182] sense it is ability to respond to stimuli. The bulk of "Epistemology and the Philosophy of Mind" is an argument that such ability is a causal condition for knowledge but not a ground for knowledge. This view has as a corollary that knowledge of particulars or of concepts is not temporally prior to knowledge of propositions (but always an abstraction from the latter), and thus that empiricist accounts of language-learning and of the nonpropositional basis for propositional knowledge are inevitably misguided. The crucial premise of this argument is that there is no such thing as a justified belief which is nonpropositional, and no such thing as justification which is not a relation between propositions. So to speak of our acquaintance with redness or with an instantiation of redness as "grounding" (as opposed to being a causal condition of) our knowledge that "this is a red object" or that "redness is a color" is always a mistake.

Children and photoelectric cells both discriminate red objects, but pre-linguistic children are thought to "know what red is" in some sense in which photoelectric cells do not. But how can the child know what pain is if all awareness of anything "is a linguistic affair?" Here Sellars needs another distinction. This time it is between "knowing what X is like" and "knowing what sort of thing an X is." The latter involves being able to link the concept of Xness up with other concepts in such a way as to be able to justify claims about X's. On Sellars's Wittgensteinian view, in which to have a concept is to use a word, these two abilities are the same ability. It follows that we cannot have one concept without having many, nor can we come "to have a concept of something because we have noticed that sort of thing"; for "to have the ability to notice a sort of thing is already to have the concept of that sort of thing" (p. 176). But to "notice a sort of thing" is to notice under a description, not just to respond discriminatively to it. What, then, is it to know what pain is like without knowing or noticing what sort of thing it is? [183]

It is just to have pain. The snare to avoid here is the " notion that there is some inner illumination which takes place only when the child's mind is lighted up by language, concepts, descriptions, and propositions, and does not take place when the child inarticulately wails and writhes. The child feels the same thing, and it feels just the same to him before and after language-learning. Before language, he is said to know the thing he feels just in case it is the sort of thing which in later life he will be able to make noninferential reports about. That latent ability is what sets him apart from the photoelectric cell, not his greater sensitivity. Thus he may respond directly to a lack of oxygen in the air, the overly rapid motion of molecules, kinky alpha-rhythms in his brain, and so on, but he is not said to "know what they are" unless and until he comes to grasp the relevant vocabulary. But suffocation, heat, ecstasy, pain, fire, redness, parental hostility, mother love, hunger, loudness, and the like, are "known" pre-linguistically, or so ordinary speech would have it. Thev are known just by being had or felt. Thev are known without being able to be placed in classes, or related in any other way to anything else.

There is no reason for Sellars to object to the notion of "knowing what pain (or redness) is like," for this would only support the Myth of the Given, and contradict psychological nominalism, if there were some connection between knowing what pain feels like and knowing what sort of thing pain is. But the only connection is that the former is an insufficient and unnecessary causal condition for the latter. It is insufficient for the obvious reason that we can know what redness is like without knowing that it is different from blue, that it is a color, and so on. It is unnecessary because we can know all that, and a great deal more, about redness while having been blind from birth, and thus not knowing what redness is like. It is just false that we cannot talk and know about what we do not have raw feels of, and equally false that if we cannot talk about them we may [184] nevertheless have justified true beliefs about them. What is special about language is not that it "changes the quality of our experience" or "opens up new vistas of consciousness" or "synthesizes a previously unconscious manifold" or produces any other sort of "inner" change. All that its acquisition does is to let us enter a community whose members exchange justifications of assertions, and other actions, with one another.¹⁷

So Sellars may be taken as saying to traditional empiricism: knowing what things are like is not a matter of being justified in asserting propositions. To this, the empiricist is likely to reply, as have Roderick Firth and others, that such a view confuses concepts with words.¹⁸ Sellars, [185] Wittgenstein, and others who "exaggerate" the importance of language are said to beg the question in favor of psychological nominalism by assuming that to have a concept is to have the use of a word. Sellars can rejoin with the following dilemma: either grant concepts to anything (e.g., record-changers) which can respond discriminatively to classes of objects, or else explain why you draw the line between conceptual thought and its primitive predecessors in a different place from that between having acquired a language and being still in training. This dilemma highlights the fact that traditional notions of givenness have run together raw feels and ability to discriminate, using the lack of the first to eliminate machines and include babies, and then using the presence of the second to make what babies have resemble propositional knowledge. The argument between Sellars and his critics on this point boils down to: Shall we take conceptualization as a matter of classification or of justification? Sellars can say that he will give up the term concept to those who wish to endow record-changers or their protoplasmic counterparts with concepts, as long as he can have some other term to indicate what we have when we can place classifications in relation to other classifications in the way language-users do when they argue about what class a given item should fall in. Once again, Sellars falls back on saying that justification is a matter of social practice, and that everything which is not a matter of social practice is no help in understanding the justification of human knowledge, no matter how helpful it may be in understanding its acquisition. The naturalistic and the genetic fallacies have, Sellars thinks, combined in traditional empiricism to produce the view that we would be in a better position to congratulate ourselves on accurately mirroring nature (or to lament our failure) if we could only bring to consciousness the stages of our childhood development. [186] Confused by Descartes's conflation of thought and feeling, bemused by the virgin innocence of Locke's wax tablet, and frightened by the fact that if truth is in the whole then certainty is nowhere, empiricists have fastened on "what red feels like" as the key to our knowledge of the natural world. For Sellars, this is like fastening on what the baby feels like when its feeding is delayed as the key to the common moral consciousness.

To sum up, Sellars's psychological nominalism is not a theory of how the mind works, nor of how knowledge is born in the infant breast, nor of the "nature of concepts." nor of any other matter of fact. It is a remark about the difference between facts and rules, a remark to the effect that we can only come under epistemic rules when we have entered the community where the game governed by these rules is played. We may balk at the claim that knowledge, awareness, concepts, language, inference, justification, and the logical space of reasons all descend on the shoulders of the bright child somewhere around the age of four, without having existed in even the most primitive form hitherto. But we do not balk at the thought that a cluster of rights and responsibilities will descend on him on his eighteenth birthday, without having been present in even the most primitive form hitherto. The latter situation is, to be sure, more clear-cut than the former, since there is no mark of the former occasion save some adult's casual remark (e.g., "the kid knows what he's talking about"). But in both cases what has happened is a shift in a person's relations with others, not a shift inside the person which now suits him to enter such new relationships. It is not as if we might be mistaken in thinking that a four-year-old has knowledge but that no one-year-old does, any more than we might be mistaken in taking the statute's word for the fact that eighteen-year-olds can marry freely whereas seventeen-year-olds cannot. It may be injudicious to take the prattle of certain four-year-olds seriously, just as it may have been injudicious to have set the age of legal responsibility so low, but no greater [187] understanding of how knowledge (or responsibility) "works" will decide such matters.

Thus Sellars should not be expected to offer arguments for a "theory of the relation between language and thought," for thoughts are inner episodes which may or may not (depending on the needs of empirical psychology) be thought of as necessarily linked to language, to brain-states, or to various other things. As an epistemologist, Sellars is not offering a theory about inner episodes. Rather, he is noting that the traditional, nonbehaviorist notion of "episitemology" is the confusion of an account of such episodes with an account of the right to make certain assertions. This is to adopt the view that philosophy (and, specifically, "philosophy of mind") cannot, by supplying a loftier critical point of view, reinforce or diminish the confidence in our own assertions which the approval of our peers gives us. Sellars's psychological nominalism does not stem from behaviorism as a thesis about what the mind is or is not. It stems only from epistemological behaviorism in the sense defined above, a sense indistinguishable from epistemological holism. To be behaviorist in this sense is simply to "divide through" by any and all mental events and faculties and to view our practices of justifying assertions as not needing empirical or "ontological" ground.¹⁹

Having reverted yet again to the community as source of epistemic authority, I shall end this section by reemphasizing that even the nonconceptual, nonlinguistic knowledge of what a raw feel is like is attributed to beings on the basis of their potential membership in this [188] community. Babies and the more attractive sorts of animal are credited with "having feelings" rather than (like photoelectric cells and animals which no one feels sentimental about -- e.g., flounders and spiders) "merely responding to stimuli." This is to be explained on the basis of that sort of community feeling which unites us with anything humanoid. To be humanoid is to have a human face, and the most important part of that face is a mouth which we can imagine uttering sentences in synchrony with appropriate expressions of the face as a whole.²⁰ To say, with common sense, that babies and bats know what pain and red are like, but not what the motion of molecules or the change of seasons is like, is just to say that we can fairly readily imagine them, opening their mouths and remarking on the former, but not on the latter. To say that a gadget (consisting of a photoelectric cell hitched up to a tape recorder) which says "red!" when and only when we shine red light on it doesn't know what red is like is to say that we cannot readily imagine continuing a conversation with the gadget. To say that we just don't know whether androids who have been manufactured out of protoplasm (and are all ready to go except for the speech center, which is about to be installed) know what red is like is not to confess scientific or philosophical bafflement concerning the nature of subjectivity.²¹ It is merely to say that things with roughly human faces which look as if they might someday be conversational partners are usually credited with "feelings," but that if we know too much about how these things [189] have been put together we may be loath to think of them as even potential partners.²²

This view of the attribution of pre-linguistic awareness -- as a courtesy extended potential or imagined fellow-speakers of our language -- has as a corollary that moral prohibitions against hurting babies and the better looking sorts of animals are not "ontologically grounded" in their possession of feeling. It is, if anything, the other way around. The moral prohibitions are expressions of a sense of community based on the imagined possibility of conversation, and the attribution of feelings is little more than a reminder of these prohibitions. This can be seen by noticing that nobody except philosophers of mind cares whether the raw feel of pain or redness is different for koalas than for us, but that we all care quite a bit about a koala when we see it writhing about. This fact does not mean that our or the koala's pain "is nothing but its behavior"; it just means that writhing is more important to our ability to imagine the koala asking us for help than what is going on inside the koala. Pigs rate much higher than koalas on intelligence tests, but pigs don't writhe in quite the right humanoid way, and the pig's face is the wrong shape for the facial expressions which go with ordinary conversation. So we send pigs to slaughter with equanimity, but form societies for the protection of koalas. This is not "irrational," any more than it is irrational to extend or deny civil rights to the moronic (or fetuses, or aboriginal tribes or Martians). Rationality, when viewed as the formation of syllogisms based on discovery of "the facts" and the application of [190] such principles as "Pain should be minimized" or "Intelligent life is always more valuable than beautiful unintelligent beings," is a myth. Only the Platonic urge to say that every moral sentiment, and indeed every emotion of any sort, should be based on the recognition of an objective quality in the recipient makes us think that our treatment of koalas or whites or Martians is a "matter of moral principle." For the "facts" which must be discovered to apply the principle are, in the case of the koala's or the white's "feelings," not discoverable independently of sentiment.²³ The emotions we have toward borderline cases depend on the liveliness of our imagination, and conversely. Only the notion that in philosophy we have a discipline able to give good reasons for what we believe on instinct lets us think that "more careful philosophical analysis" will help us draw a line between coldness of heart and foolish sentimentality.

This claim that animals' knowledge of what some things are like has little to do with justified true belief, but a lot to do with morals, follows naturally from the Sellarsian notion that the inside of people and quasi-people is to be explained by what goes on outside (and, in particular, by their place in our community) rather than conversely. Ever since Descartes made methodological solipsism the mark of rigorous and professional philosophical thinking, philosophers have wanted to find the "ground" of cognition. [191] morality, aesthetic taste, and anything else that matters within the individual. For how could there be anything in societies which individuals had not put there? Only since Hegel have philosophers begun toying with the notion that the individual apart from his society is just one more animal. The antidemocratic implications of this view, not to mention its historicist and relativist implications, have made it difficult for Hegelian modes of thought to have any impact on the hard core of analytic philosophy -- epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. But Sellars's "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind"; -- self-described as "incipient Meditations Hegeliennes"²⁴ -- succeeds in prying raw feels and justified true belief apart and depriving raw feels of their status as priveleged representations. It thereby shows how behaviorism in epistemology can avoid the confusion between explanation and justification which made empiricist epistemology seem possible and necessary. In chapters seven and eight I shall try to show how the emphasis on the priority of the public to the private which results from repudiating empiricism paves the way for further Hegelian and Heideggerian projects of deconstruction.

4. The "'Idea' Idea"

Having argued that Sellars's attack on the Myth of the Given is compatible with kindness to babies and animals and thus with the common moral consciousness, I now want to argue that Quine's attack on the "'idea' idea" and the distinction between language and fact is compatible with the intellectual respectability of the Geisteswissenschaften. Quine's doctrines of the "indeterminacy of translation" and the "inscrutability of reference" have led him to claim that there is no "matter of fact" involved in attributions of meaning to utterances, beliefs to people, and aspirations to cultures. I think that here again some distinctions will take [192] care of putative counter-intuitive consequences of epistemological behaviorism, letting us see it as clearing the ground for morality and high culture rather than depriving them of "objective truth."

What Quine calls the "'idea' idea" is the view that language is the expression of something "inner" which must be discovered before we can tell what an utterance means, or interpret the linguistic behavior of utterers (e.g., attribute beliefs, desires, and cultures to them). To abandon this idea is at once to abandon the logical-empiricist notion of "truth in virtue of meaning" and the sometime Oxonian notion of "conceptual truth," since there are no meanings or concepts from which truths might be read off. This attitude toward the concept of "concept" makes it possible to dismiss Kant's distinction between necessary truths (which can be determined by looking at concepts alone [analytic truth] or pure concepts and pure forms of intuition alone [synthetic a priori truth]) and contingent truths (which require reference to empirical intuitions). But Quine regards concepts and meanings as merely one species of intentions, and he wishes to obliterate all intentions. Thus, admitting that "means." "Ibelieves," and "desires," for example, have no behavioristic equivalents (as Brentano and Chisholm, in an effort to preserve some kernel of truth in traditional mind-body dualism, had also attempted to show), Quine concludes that this shows that the notions of "belief" and "desire" are (for "scientific" purposes) as dispensable as those of "concept" and "intuition":

One may accept the Brentano thesis either as showing the indispensability of intentional idioms and the importance of an autonomous science of intention, or as showing the baselessness of intentional idioms and the emptiness of a science of intention. My attitude, unlike Brentano's, is the second. To accept intentional usage at face value is, we saw, to postulate translation relations as somehow objectively valid though indeterminate [193] in principle relative to the totality of speech dispositions. Such postulation promises little gain in scientific insight if there is no better ground for it than that the supposed translation relations are presupposed by the vernacular of semantics and intention.²⁵

Quine thinks this anti-intentionalism of a piece with his polemic against analyticity. But it is not. The author of "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" should have said that concepts and meanings are harmless if posited to give explanations of our behavior, and become harmful only when treated as the source of a special kind of truth and of a special sort of authority for certain assertions. In particular, we would expect him to say that the reasons normally given for translating languages one way rather than another (or for ascribing one set of beliefs and desires rather than an odd alternative which would predict the same linguistic behavior) are justified simply by their internal coherence, and that such practices as translation and ascription of intentional states are justified by their social utility. Quine grants the utility, but he thinks it philosophically important to insist that the sort of truth proffered in such remarks as "'Hund' is German for 'dog,' " and "Robinson believes in God" is not the sort of truth which expresses "matter of fact."²⁶ He thus offers us a distinction between truth by convenience and truth by correspondence, so to speak, rather than the old positivist distinction between [194] truth by convention and truth confirmed by sensory experience. Truths about meanings and beliefs and propositions are, somehow, not really truths in the full sense of the term -- just as the positivists used to say that necessary truths were not really "about the world."

The holism and pragmatism of "Two Dogmas" would seem to make this distinction between two sorts of truth as difficult to maintain as the older distinctions which Quine is concerned to attack. Many critics of Quine have noted this point, and have diagnosed his insistence on this distinction as a hangover of traditional empiricism.²⁷ I agree with most of these criticisms, and shall not attempt to summarize or synthesize them (beyond noting that such critics unite in remarking that any sort of "indeterminacy" which we can find in translation will show up, equally harmlessly, in the Naturwissenschaften). But by examining the notion of "inscrutability of reference" we may get some understanding of the "empiricist" intuitions which make Quine persist in talk of "correspondence," and which hold him back from the Hegelian implications of his own behaviorism and holism.

Quine summarizes the argument of his "Ontological Relativity" by saying: [195]

What makes sense is to say not what the objects of a theory are, absolutely speaking, but how one theory of objects is interpretable or reinterpretable in another. . . . What our present reflections are leading us to appreciate is that the riddle about seeing things upside down, or in complementary colors, should be taken seriously and its moral applied widely. The relativistic thesis to which we have come is this, to repeat: it makes no sense to say what the objects of a theory are, beyond saying how to interpret or reinterpret that theory in another. . . . Talk of subordinate theories and their ontologies is meaningful but only relative, to the background theory with its own primitively adopted and ultimately inscrutable ontology.²⁸

One would think this relativistic thesis the natural and happy result of the approach to knowledge and science which Quine shares with Sellars, were it not for the disturbing phrase "primitively adopted and ultimately inscrutable ontology." On a full-blooded holistic view, the question "Are we really referring to rabbits or rabbit-stages? formulae or Gödel numbers?" would be regarded neither as senseless, nor as sensible only when relativized to a background language,²⁹ but as like "Are we really talking about nations or about groups of individual persons?" or "Are we really talking about witches or about hallucinatory psychotics?" The latter questions have a sense if we give them a sense -- that is, if something further depends upon the answer. It is easy to imagine situations in which sense would be given to them; it is harder, but not impossible, for the rabbit-versus-rabbit-stage case. But Quine is not [196] interested in the question of that way of giving sense. His claims about indeterminacy and inscrutability are not supposed to tie in with the needs of science or practice. Admitting that linguists never dream of taking advantage of indeterminacy to translate the short expressions normally uttered when rabbits break cover as "another rabbit-stage!" Quine says:

The implicit maxim guiding his [the linguist's] choice of "rabbit" ... is that an enduring and relatively homogenous object, moving as a whole against a contrasting background, is a likely reference for a short expression. . . . The maxim is his own imposition, toward settling what is objectively indeterminate. It is a very sensible imposition, and I would recommend no other. But I am making a philosophical point.³⁰

A "philosophical point" in this sense is, at a minimum, one that has no relevance to deciding how the world is. Quine teeters between the older positivist view that such points are disreputably "metaphysical" and the more Oxonian philosophy-as-therapy view that such peculiarly philosophical points serve as antidotes to a πρωτον ψ&epsilonυδος such as the "'idea' idea." We might, however, take this particular philosophical point as offering an antidote against, if anything, the notions of "ontology" and of "reference." That is, we might fall back on the more old-fashioned view that just as the behaviorist approach to "truth by virtue of meaning" in "Two Dogmas" left us with no notion of "sameness of meaning" save (as Harman says) the commonsensical and philosophically uninteresting one in which "The president went to Vietnam" and "Johnson went to Vietnam" mean the same thing, so the behaviorist approach to "ontology" of "Ontological Relativity" leaves us with no notion of "sameness of reference" save the common-sensical and philosophically uninteresting one in which talk about rabbit-stages and talk about rabbits are talk about the same [197] things (in different ways).³¹ The philosophical notion of "reference" seems to Quine to contrast with that of meaning because:

Reference, extension, has been the firm thing; meaning, intension, the infirm. The indeterminacy of translation now confronting us, however, cuts across extension and intension alike. The terms "rabbit," "undetached rabbit part," and "rabbit stage" differ not only in meaning; they are true of different things. Reference itself proves behaviorally inscrutable.³²

But this relative firmness was itself merely the product of Quine's claim that intensions, for which there were no criteria of identity, were flabbier entities than extensions, for which there were. The problem about identity-conditions for intensions boils down, Quine thinks, to that of now "two eternal sentences should be related in order that, where 'p' and 'q' stand for them, we be entitled to say that [p] is the same proposition as [q] rather than another."³³ But to think that this question can be answered is to think, Quine says, that there is some synonymy relation which makes a sentence of one language the right translation of a sentence of another.³⁴

We have now, however, come full circle. The firmness of reference is what it is because of a putative contrast with an infirmness about meaning. But this infirmness is only present if translation is indeterminate in some way in which physics is not. So if we accept the standard criticisms of Quine's "double" indeterminacy of translation (an indeterminacy which differs from that of physical theory in [198] that there is no "matter of fact" in the former case), then we have no reason for being startled at reference's faring no better, and no reason for thinking that the behavioral inscrutability of reference leads to any conclusions save "so much the worse for reference" or "rabbit-stages and rabbits are just the same things." Since "reference" here means a specifically philosophical notion, whose inscrutability is a specifically philosophical point which depends upon holding rabbits and rabbit-stages further apart than any scientific or practical need would hold them, we might feel entitled to adopt the same insouciant attitude toward this inscrutability which Quine adopts toward the specifically philosophical notion of synonymy and toward Brentano's thesis of the irreducibility of the intentional.

We should indeed adopt this attitude,³⁵ but not before looking more closely at Quine's vacillation on the subject of ontology. To say that the philosophical notion of reference is one we can well do without is, as Quine would agree, to say that ontology is also. Since it is because of a concern for ontology that Quine takes reference seriously, it will help to see how hard it is for him to reconcile this concern with his holistic claim that there is no "first philosophy" higher than and prior to ordinary scientific inquiry.³⁶ This latter view would seem to incline him toward Sellars's view that "science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not."³⁷ Nevertheless, Quine claims that the practical indispensability of intentional idioms should not blind us to the fact that:

If we are limning the true and ultimate structure of reality, the canonical scheme for us is the austere scheme that knows no quotation but direct quotation and no [199] propositional attitudes but only the physical constitutions and behavior of organisms.³⁸

This project, he claims, is continuous with that of science because:

Each elimination of obscure constructions or notions that we manage to achieve, by paraphrase into more lucid elements, is a clarification of the conceptual scheme of science. The same motives that impel scientists to seek ever simpler and clearer theories adequate to the subject matter of their special sciences are motives for simplification and clarification of the broader framework shared by all the sciences. . . . The quest of a simplest, clearest overall pattern of canonical notation is not to be distinguished from a quest of ultimate categories, a limning of the most general traits of reality. Nor let it be retorted that such constructions are conventional affairs not dictated by reality; for may not the same be said of a physical theory? True, such is the nature of reality that one physical theory will get us around better than another; but similarly for canonical notations, (p. 161)

The catch, of course, comes in knowing what "obscurity" and "clarity" are. The Geisteswissenschaften, Quine thinks, employ notions which are so unclear that we must simply rub them out when limning the structure of reality. All is clear, however, in the physical sciences save when these, invoke numbers, functions, properties, etc., in which case we interpret these as sets, an interpretation which the physical scientist can regard with sublime indifference. But the unclarity of "belief," "meaning," "translates as. . . ," etc. are irredeemable; there is nothing on hand in set theory to replace them with; they can survive only on grounds of practical convenience.³⁹ [200]

Why, however, do "believes in . . ." and "translates as. . ." owe more to the necessities of practice than "is the same electron as . . ." and "is the same set as . . ."? Why do the Naturwissenschaften limn reality while the Geisteswissenschaften merely enable us to cope with it? What is it that sets them apart, given that we no longer think of any sort of statement having a privileged epistemological status, but of all statements as working together for the good of the race in that process of gradual holistic adjustment made famous by "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"? Why should not the unit of empirical inquiry be the whole of culture (including both the Natur- and the Geisteswissenschaften) rather than just the whole of physical science?

Trying to answer these rhetorical questions leads us to a genuine contradiction in Quine's view. It comes out most clearly in a passage in which he is trying to argue that the practical dictates of translation have no epistemological implications:

"Save logical truth" is conventional in character because of the indeterminacy of translation. . . . The very want of determinacy puts a premium on adhering to this strong and simple rule as a partial determinant. . .. "Save logical truth" is both a convention and a wise one. And we see also that it gives logical truth no epistemological status distinct from that of any obvious truths of a so-called factual kind.⁴⁰

[201]

But if conventionality depends upon a special indeterminacy of translation, then we may not say, as Quine does in a passage quoted previously, that physical theory is a "conventional affair not dictated by reality." If the permanence of logical truth is merely a practical rule, rather than an insight into the nature of reality, then if physical theory is such an insight, it cannot also be a practical rule.

To sum up his vacillations, we may note that Quine wants to assert all the following:

1. There is such a thing as ontology, governed by "scruples about what objects one may assume" and based on a distinction between "irresponsible reification and its opposite."⁴¹
2. There is no special epistemological status which any sentence has apart from its role in the maintaining that "field of force" which is human knowledge and whose aim is coping with sensory irradiations.
3. So there is no such thing as direct acquaintance with sense-data or meanings which would give inviolability to reports by virtue of their correspondence to reality, apart from their role in the general scheme of belief.
4. So epistemology and ontology never meet, since our scruples about what objects to assume are not dictated by our acquaintance with either universals or particulars.
5. But there is nevertheless a distinction to be made between those parts of the web of belief which express matters of fact and those which do not, and ontology insures that we can detect this difference.

If he is to assert (5) as well as (1)-(4), Quine must give a sense to the distinction between "matter of fact" and "convention" which has no links with the usual instrumentalist-phenomenalist distinction -- that between what we are really acquainted with and what we "posit" to cope with stimuli. [202] The only way he can do so, as far as I can see, is simply to pick out the elementary particles of contemporary physics as paradigmatically matter-of-factual and explain that the sense in which there is no matter of fact about meanings or beliefs is that different things can be said about what a sentence means or a man believes without any implications for the movements of these particles. This tactic makes his preference for physics over psychology, and thus his concern about "irresponsible reification," purely aesthetic. Further, it will not work. For alternative biochemical (e.g.) as well as alternative psychological theories will be compatible with all and only the same movements of the same particles. Unless and until there is a genuine deduction of all true nomological statements from the laws of physics (which no one seriously expects), there will be no complaint to be made about intentions which cannot be made about mitochondria.⁴² [203]

Quine is led into these difficulties, I think, by an attempt to preserve the view which he, like Sellars, inherits from Carnap and ultimately from Wittgenstein's Tractatus: the view that the world can be "completely described" in an extensional language. It is intensionality rather than intentionality which is the real bugbear, for only the non-truth-functional character of intentional discourse makes its presumed subject more disreputable than, say, irreducibly biochemical talk of mitochondria. Reducibility to talk of particles is only a cover for reducibility to truth-functional discourse. The particles do not matter, but logical form does. The lack of clear identity-conditions for intentions is a disaster not because of some ghostliness which ensues, but simply because this lack leaves certain sentences non-extensional. But if this is so, then we can achieve Quine's ends without employing his means. We can do so by granting that the world can be completely described in a truth-functional language, while simultaneously granting that pieces of it can also be described in an intensional one, and simply refraining from invidious comparisons between [204] these modes of description. To say that it can be completely described is to use a notion of completeness defined in terms of spatio-temporal extent, not in terms of either explanatory power or practical convenience. If we could not refer to intentions, we might be hard put to it to cope with the world, but we should -- for whatever this is worth -- still be able to describe every bit of it, and even make an accurate prediction about the content of any space-time region of any desired minuteness.

The way to apply this point to the vocabulary of beliefs and desires has been shown by Davidson, who puts the matter in terms of a distinction between homonomic and heteronomic generalizations:

On the one hand, there are generalizations whose positive instances give us reason to believe the generalization itself could be improved by adding further provisos and conditions stated in the same general vocabulary as the original generalization. Such a generalization points to the form and vocabulary of the finished law; we may say that it is a homonomic generalization. On the other hand there are generalizations which when instantiated may give us reason to believe there is a precise law at work, but one that can be stated only by shifting to a different vocabulary. We may call such generalizations heteronomic.

I suppose most of our practical lore (and science) is heteronomic. This is because a law can hope to be precise, explicit, and as exceptionless as possible only if it draws its concepts from a comprehensive closed theory. . . . Confidence that a statement, is homonomic, correctible within its own conceptual domain, demands that it draw its concepts from a theory with strong constitutive elements. . . .

Just as we cannot intelligibly assign a length to any object unless a comprehensive theory holds of objects of that sort, we cannot intelligibly attribute any propositional [205] attitude to an agent except within the framework of a viable theory of his beliefs, desires, intentions, and decisions.⁴³

Davidson goes on to say that purported psychophysical laws are like "All emeralds are grue." They combine terms taken from disparate vocabularies. We may talk about emeroses and grueness, or about emeralds and greenness, but not about both at once (at least not if we want a useful comprehensive theory). Even so, we may talk about actions and beliefs, or about movements and neurons, but not (comprehensively) both at once. But there is an obvious sense, in the former example, in which we are talking about the same things, whichever set of predicates we choose. Even so, Davidson says, in the latter case. The difference in choice of vocabularies is not a mark of the difference between the real and the ontologically disreputable, nor of that between the factual and the mythical, but is on all fours with the difference between talking of the activities of nations-as-such and talking of the activities of ministers and generals, or between talking of mitochondria as such and talking of the elementary particles they contain. We may usefully and truly say things like "If Asquith had remained prime minister, England would have lost," or "If there had been a few more neutrons in there, the mitochondrion would not have survived," or "If we had just stuck in an electrode in the right place in the cortex, he would never have decided he was Napoleon," or "If we could get hold of an emerose, we should have just the right shade of green," but we cannot (so far as we know now, at least) develop such heteronomic remarks into laws which are parts of comprehensive theories. Nor, on the other hand, need we see such heteronomic remarks as crossing the line between ontological realms -- in particular, the realm of the factual and the realm of the nonfactual. In Davidson's view of the relation between different explanatory [206] vocabularies, there is no reason whatever for thinking that those vocabularies which lend themselves to truth-functional formulations "limn the true and ultimate structure of reality" in a way in which intensional vocabularies do not. The extensional-intensional distinction turns out to have no more and no less philosophical interest than the distinction between nations and people: it is capable of inciting reductionist emotion, but not capable of providing a special reason for embarking on reductionist projects.

Davidson's distinction gives us a way of seeing that an intentional vocabulary is just one more vocabulary for talking about portions of a world which can, indeed, be completely described without this vocabulary. We can share Carnap's intuition that the movement of anything can be predicted on the basis of the movement of elementary particles, and that if we simply kept track of all those particles we would be keeping track of (though not explaining) all that there is, without speaking, with Quine, of "the baselessness of intentional idioms and the emptiness of a science of intention." One vocabulary -- that of particle physics -- may work for every portion of the universe, whereas talk of mitochondria, emeroses, cabinet ministers, and intentions is called for only here and there. But the distinction between the universal and the specific is not the distinction between the factual and the "empty," still less that between the real and the apparent, or the theoretic and the practical, or nature and convention.

Davidson, however, links his own project to Quine's in a misleading way when he says that "the heteronomic character of general statements linking the mental and the physical traces back to this central role of translation in the description of all propositional attitudes, and to the indeterminacy of translation,"⁴⁴ and also when he cites with approval Quine's remark that "Brentano's thesis of the irreducibility of intentional idioms is of a piece with the thesis of indeterminacy of translation."⁴⁵ Both remarks [207] suggest that the relation between statements which offer translations and behaviorese is special in some way that the relation between statements about mitochondria and those about elementary particles is not. Both suggest Quine's odd doctrine of the "double" indeterminacy of translation. But if what I have been saying is right, irreducibility is always just irreducibility, and never a clue to "ontological" differences. There are lots of vocabularies in the language within which one might expect to get a comprehensive theory phrased in homonomic generalizations, and science, political theory, literary criticism, and the rest will, God willing, continue to create more and more such vocabularies. To abandon the notion that in philosophy we have a discipline which guards against "irresponsible reification" and systematizes our "scruples about what objects one may assume" would be to take irreducibility in our stride and thus to judge each such vocabulary on pragmatic or aesthetic grounds alone. Quine's strictures against Carnap's attempt to divide philosophy from science are just what is needed to help us realize that there is no such discipline, and thus just what is needed to see that the Geisteswissenschaften would have not become more wissenschaftlich, or more ontologically respectable, if Brentano and Dilthey had turned out to be wrong about their irreducibility. Unfortunately, however, Quine's enduring conviction that symbolic logic must somehow have "ontological implications" leads him to make more of translation, intentionality, and the "'idea' idea" than needs to be made.

I have devoted this long section to arguing that Quine's attack on "truth by virtue of meaning" as an explanation of putatively necessary truths should not be confused with his attack on "meanings" as ideas in the mind, ideas which determine the accuracy of translations in a way that linguistic behavior cannot. The former is indeed a pseudo-explanation; there are, for the holistic reasons given in "Two Dogmas," no privileged representations. But Quine's distrust of privileged representations leads him to distrust all [208] representations, to distrust the "'idea' idea" itself. Yet ideas in the mind are no more or less disreputable than neurons in the brain, mitochondria in the cells, passions in the soul, or moral progress in history. The damage done by the "'idea' idea" in modern philosophy was done by the pseudo-explanation of epistemic authority through the notion of "direct acquaintance" by the "Eye of the Mind" with mental entities such as sense-data and meanings. But this is epistemological damage, not ontological damage. If I am right in the criticisms of Quine I have been making (and in the general line I am taking in this book) the only way in which one can do ontological damage is to block the road of inquiry by insisting on a bad old theory at the expense of a good new theory. It may be claimed that nineteenth-century introspectionist psychology did briefly block the road of inquiry, but even if that were so it would be quite a different thing from saying that the Geisteswissenschaften are preventing us from seeing reality plain, or that their shady ontology must be tolerated for the sake of practical ends. The lesson of epistemological behaviorism is just that there is no "philosophical point" to be made about translation or intentionality, nor about any other "ontological" subject. Rather, it helps us see that explanatory power is where we find it, and that the philosophical attempt to distinguish between "scientific" and "unscientific" explanations is needless.

5. Epistemological Behaviorism, Psychological Behaviorism, and Language

In the previous chapter I said that the epistemological tradition confused the causal process of acquiring knowledge with questions concerning its justification. In this chapter I have presented Sellars's criticism of the Myth of the Given and Quine's criticism of the notion of truth by virtue of meaning as two detailed developments of this more general criticism. If we accept these criticisms, and [209] therefore drop the notion of epistemology as the quest, initiated by Descartes, for those privileged items in the field of consciousness which are the touchstones of truth, we are in a position to ask whether there still remains something for epistemology to be. I want to urge that there does not. To understand the matters which Descartes wanted to understand -- the superiority of the New Science to Aristotle, the relations between this science and mathematics, common sense, theology, and morality -- we need to turn outward rather than inward, toward the social context of justification rather than to the relations between inner representations. This attitude has been encouraged in recent decades by many philosophical developments, particularly those stemming from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and from Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Some of these developments will be canvassed in chapters seven and eight. Before doing so, however, I shall discuss two attempts to preserve something from the Cartesian tradition, attempts which may seem to shed some doubt on our ability simply to drop the image of the Mirror of Nature altogether.

The first of these attempts is the revolt against logical behaviorism in the philosophy of psychology, leading to the development of explanations of behavior in terms of inner representations without, necessarily, any linkup with the justification of beliefs and actions. I have already said that once explanation and justification are held apart there is no reason to object to explanation of the acquisition of knowledge in terms of representations, and that such explanations can be offered without resuscitating the traditional "mind-body problem." But I think that the defense of such explanations against Ryle and Skinner can easily be distorted into a rehabilitation of the traditional seventeenth-century philosophical problematic, and thus I shall devote chapter five to a discussion of such defenses. My aim will be to disassociate empirical psychology from the remnants of [210] epistemology by defending it against both Wittgensteinian criticisms and Chomskyan compliments.

The second attempt to preserve something from the Cartesian tradition which I shall discuss is the effort, within recent philosophy of language, to specify "how language hooks onto the world," thus creating an analogue of the Cartesian problem of how thought hooks onto the world. An attempt to use the notions of the reference of terms and the truth of sentences to aid in understanding the matters which troubled Descartes seems to me doomed to failure, but such a program is very tempting. Because language is a "public" Mirror of Nature, as thought is a "private" one, it seems that we should be able to reformulate a great many Cartesian and Kantian questions and answers in linguistic terms, and thereby rehabilitate a lot of standard philosophical issues (e.g., the choice between idealism and realism). I devote chapter six to various efforts at such rehabilitation, and argue that semantics should be kept as pure of epistemology as should psychology.

Once both the inner representations needed in psychological explanation and the word-world relations needed by semantics to produce a theory of meaning for natural languages are seen as irrelevant to issues of justification, we can see the abandonment of the search for privileged representations as the abandonment of the goal of a "theory of knowledge." The urge toward such a theory in the seventeenth century was a product of the change from one paradigm of understanding nature to another, as well as of the change from a religious to a secular culture. Philosophy as a discipline capable of giving us a "right method of seeking truth" depends upon finding some permanent neutral framework of all possible inquiry, an understanding of which will enable us to see, for example, why neither Aristotle nor Bellarmine was justified in believing what he believed. The mind as Mirror of Nature was the Cartesian tradition's response to the need for such a framework. [211] If there are no privileged representations in this mirror, then it will no longer answer to the need for a touchstone for choice between justified and unjustified claims upon our belief. Unless some other such framework can be found, the abandonment of the image of the Mirror leads us to abandon the notion of philosophy as a discipline which adjudicates the claims of science and religion, mathematics and poetry, reason and sentiment, allocating an appropriate place to each. In chapters seven and eight I develop this point further. [212]

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Notes

1 This question has echoed through our own century, in ways described in the following chapter. Psychology was born out of philosophy in the confused hope that we might get back behind Kant and recapture Lockean innocence. Ever since, psychologists have vainly protested their neglect by neo-Kantian philosophers (of both the analytic and the phenomenological sorts).

2 Cf. Edmund Husserl, "Philosophy as Rigorous Science," in Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, ed. and trans. Quentin Lauer (New York, 1965), p. 120. In this essay (published in 1910), Husserl analyzed both. naturalism and historicism as forms of skepticism and relativism. See, for example, pp. 76-79, 122. He began his criticism of naturalism by repeating the attack on psychological conceptions of logic made in his Logical Investigations. (Cf. pp. 80ff. on naturalism's self-refutation through its reduction of norms to fact.)

3 Bertrand Russell ended the chapter called "Logic as the Essence of Philosophy" in his Our Knowledge of the External World (London, 1914) with the following claims:

The old logic put thought in fetters, while the new logic gives it wings. It has, in my opinion, introduced the same kind of advance into philosophy as Galileo introduced into physics, making it possible at last to see what kinds of problems may be capable of solution, and what kinds must be abandoned as beyond human powers. And where a solution appears possible, the new logic provides a method which enables us to obtain results that do not merely embody personal idiosyncrasies, but must command the assent of all who are competent to form an opinion.

For my present purposes, the standard charge (made, e.g., by Dummett and by Anscombe) that Russell confused the specifically semantical doctrines of Frege and Wittgenstein, which did spring from the new logic, with epistemological doctrines which did not, is irrelevant. The charge is fair enough, but without this very confusion the analytic movement either would not have got off the ground, or would have been quite a different thing. Only in the last two decades has a clear distinction between "linguistic philosophy" and "philosophy of language" begun to be made. See chapter six, section 1, for more on this distinction.

4 See Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World, p. 61 (in the American edition [New York, 1924]), and Husserl, Phenomenology, pp. 110-111.

5 See Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 2d ed. (The Hague, 1965), 1, 275-283, and David Carr's "Translator's Introduction" to Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, 1970), pp. xxv-xxxviii. See also Ryle's reaction to Sein und Zeit, exemplifying the kinship between Anglo-Saxon projects influenced by Russell and Husserl's original project: "It is my personal opinion that qua First Philosophy Phenomenology is at present heading for bankruptcy and disaster and will end either in self-ruinous Subjectivism or in a windy Mysticism" (Mind, 1929; cited by Spiegelberg, 1, 347). Ryle's prescient point was that the coming of "existential phenomenology" meant the end of phenomenology as "rigorous science."

6 I think that in England and America philosophy has already been displaced by literary criticism in its principal cultural function -- as a source for youth's self-description of its own difference from the past. Cf. Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York, 1975), p. 39:

The teacher of literature now in America, far more than the teacher of history or philosophy or religion, is condemned to teach the presentness of the past, because history, philosophy and religion have withdrawn as agents from the Scene of Instruction, leaving the bewildered teacher of literature at the altar, terrifiedly wondering whether he is to be sacrifice or priest.

This is roughly because of the Kantian and antihistoricist tenor of Anglo-Saxon philosophy. The cultural function of teachers of philosophy in countries where Hegel was not forgotten is quite different, and closer to the position of literary critics in America. See my "Professionalized Philosophy and Transcendentalist Culture." Georgia Review 30 (1976), 757-769.

7 I attempted to summarize this literature, up through 1965, in the introduction to The Linguistic Turn, ed. Richard Rorty (Chicago, 1967).

8 For an interpretation of Quine as attacking the explanatory utility of the "philosophical notion of meaning," see Gilbert Harman, "Quine on Meaning and Existence, I," Review of Metaphysics 21 (1967), 124-151, esp. 125, 135-141.

9 Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality (London and New York, 1963), p. 167.

10 For this sort of criticism of Quine's behaviorism, see H. P. Grice and P. F. Strawson, "In Defense of a Dogma," Philosophical Review 65 (1956), pp. 141-156. For such criticisms of Sellars, see Roderick Chisholm's criticisms of his claims about intentionality, in their correspondence printed in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 2 (1958), pp. 521ft.

11 I defend this claim when I discuss empirical psychology in chapter five. Sellars and Quine themselves, unfortunately, do not see the matter in this carefree way. For criticism of Quine's flight from intentions, see , section 3 below. This criticism can be applied, mutatis mutandis, to Sellars's insistence on the claim that "the scientific image" excludes intentions; but Sellars's point is more subtle, and is involved with his Tractarian notion of picturing, criticized below in chapter six, section 5.

12 Unfortunately, both men tend to substitute correspondence to physical entities, and specifically to the "basic entities" of physical science (elementary particles, or their successors). Sellars's (and Jay Rosenberg's) attempt to salvage something from the Platonic notion of knowledge as accuracy of picturing is criticized below (chapter six, section 5). My own attitude is Strawson's (and Heidegger's): "The correspondence theory requires, not purification, but elimination." (P. F. Strawson, "Truth," reprinted in Truth, ed. George Pitcher [Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1964], p. 32) -- or, more mildly, it requires separation from epistemology and relegation to semantics. (See Robert Brandom, "Truth and Assertability," Journal of Philosophy 73 [1976], pp. 137- 149.)

13 Cf. Sellars's claim that "the idea that epistemic facts can be analyzed without remainder -- even 'in principle' -- ijito nonepistemic facts, whether phenomenal or behavioural, public or private, with no matter how lavish a sprinkling of subjunctives and hypotheticals is, I believe, a radical mistake -- a mistake of a piece with the so-called 'naturalistic fallacy' in ethics" (Science, Perception and Reality, p. 131). I would argue that the importance of Sellars's approach to epistemology is that he sees the true and interesting irreducibility in the area not as between one sort of particular (mental, intentional) and another (physical) but as between descriptions on the one hand and norins, practices, and values on the other. (See note 17 below.)

14 Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality, p. 170.

15 W.V.O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 42.

16 Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality, p. 160.

17 Cf. ibid., p. 169: "The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says."

18 See Roderick Firth, "Coherence, Certainty, and Epistemic Priority," reprinted in Empirical Knowledge, ed. Roderick Chisholm and Robert Swartz (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973). Firth attempts to resolve a problem created by the "coherence theory of concepts": viz., since "we cannot fully understand 'looks red' unless we possess the contrasting concept 'is red,' then it would seem that it is not logically possible to have the concept 'looks red' [as C. I. Lewis's doctrine of "sense meaning" would require] before we have the concept 'is red' " (p. 461). Firth says that

the underlying paradox is easily dissolved if we do not confuse concepts with the words used to express them. It is a genetic fact, but a fact with philosophical implications, that when a child first begins to use the word "red" with any consistency he applies it to things, that look red to him. . . . To call this a "primitive form" of the concept "looks red" is to acknowledge that in some sense the child cannot fully understand adult usage until he is able to distinguish things that merely look red from things that really are red; but we must not suppose that the child somehow loses his primitive concept when he acquires a more sophisticated one. (pp. 461-462)

For a more detailed polemic against the Ryle-Wittgenstein-Sellars identification of having concepts with using words, see Brand Blansnard's Reason and Analysis (La Salle, 111., 1962), chap, ix. Somethrng like Firth's notion of a "primitive concept" recurs in a criticism of Sellars| by William S. Robinson, "The Legend of the Given," in Action, Knowledge and Reality, ed. H.-N. Castaneda (Indianapolis, 1975), pp. 83-108.

19 I shall be claiming in chapter eight that this attitude toward the relation between philosophy of mind and epistemology (or, more largely, between any scientific or metaphysical description of man on the one hand and any remark about the justification for his action -- linguistic or otherwise -- on the other) is central to Wittgenstein's efforts in the Investigations. I think that, like Sellars's own application of the distinction between describing men and judging them, it is a natural corollary of the Tractatus's rigorous separation of fact-stating from all other (e.g., ethical) uses of language.

20 For a good explication of the force and ramifications of Wittgenstein's view that the human body is the best picture of the human soul, see Virgil Aldrich, "On What It Is Like to Be a Man," Inquiry 16 (1973), 355-366. See also Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action (London, 1959), chap. 1.

21 See Hilary Putnam, "Robots: Machines or Artificially Created Life?" reprinted in Modern Materialism, ed. J. O'Connor (New York, 1969), esp. p. 262: ". . . the question: Are robots conscious? calls for a decision on our part, to treat robots as fellow members of our linguistic community, or not to so treat them."

22 This does not mean that we are right to be loath, nor that we are wrong. I merely want to call attention to the traditional fear that biologists or psychologists, in their attitude toward their fellow men, may "murder to dissect." We are tempted, when we are particularly good at predicting something's behavior on the basis of its internal structure, to be "objective" about it -- that is, to treat it as an en-soi rather than a pour-soi and "one of us." Philosophers have, I think, nothing much to say about when this temptation is justified or unjustified. Novelists and poets, however, do.

23 It is notorious that moral philosophers are of little help in deciding what is to count as a moral agent, as having dignity rather than value, as among the beings whose happiness is to be maximized, as one of those one must take one's chance on turning out to be while still behind the veil of ignorance, etc. Sellars discusses the topic briefly and inconclusively in terms of the question of whether all members of an epistemic community are members of an ethical community -- whether "the intersubjective intention to promote epistemic welfare implies the intersubjective intention to promote welfare sans phrase" (Science and Metaphysics [London and New York, 1968], p. 225). For the effect of holism on meta-ethics and on the Platonic urge just mentioned, see J. B. Schneewind, "Moral Knowledge and Moral Principles" in Knowledge and Necessity, ed. G. A. Vesey (London and New York, 1970).

24 Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality, p. 148.

25 W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), p. 221.

26 See Words and Objections: Essays on the Work of W. V. Quine, ed. Donald Davidson and Jaakko Hintikka (Dordrecht, 1969), p. 303, where Quine says:

Consider . . . the totality of truths of nature, known and unknown, observable and unobservable, past and future. The point about indeterminacy of translation is that it withstands even all this truth, the whole truth about nature. This is what I mean by saying that, where indeterminacy of translation applies, there is no real question of right choice; there is no fact of the matter even to within the acknowledged under-determination of a theory of nature.

27 The best-known criticism of this sort is Noam Chomsky's "Quine's Empirical Assumptions" in Words and Objections. The point is most convincingly made, however, by Hilary Putnam in "The Refutation of Conventionalism," Nous 8 (1974), 38: "If the adoption of one system of analytical hypotheses rather than another permits a great simplification of such sciences as neurophysiology, psychology, anthropology, etc., then why should we not say that what we mean by 'translation' is translation according to the manuals that have this property?" Putnam rightly diagnoses Quine's doctrine of the special indeterminacy of translation as following from a kind of essentialism. It is, roughly, one in which we know in advance that what cannot be put in the vocabulary of the physics of the day is so inessential as to be merely "in the eye of the beholder," a matter of subjective convenience. See also Christopher Boorse. "The Origins of the Indeterminacy Thesis," Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975), 369-387, and Richard Rortv. "Indeterminacy of Translation and of Truth," Synthese 23 (1972), 443-462.

28 W.V.O. Quine, Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York, 1969), pp. 50-51.

29 See ibid., pp. 47ft. Hartry Field has shown that Quine's notion of "relativization to a background language" and "taking reference at face value" are incompatible with his general line of argument. See his "Quine and the Correspondence Theory," Philosophical Review 83 (1974), 207ft. But this difficulty is not relevant to my present purposes.

30 Quine, Ontological Relativity, p. 34.

31 The example of common-sensical sameness of meaning comes from Harman, "Quine," p. 142. For more on the distinction between the common-sensical and the philosophical senses of "talking about" or referring, see my "Realism and Reference," Monist 59 (1976), 321-340, and chapter six, section 4.

32 Quine, Ontological Relativity, p. 35.

33 Quine, Word and Object, p. 200.

34 Ibid., p. 206.

35 I argue again for doing so in chapter seven.

36 See "On Carnap's Views on Ontology" in Quine, Ways of Paradox (New York, 1968) and "Epistemology Naturalized" in Ontological Relativity.

37 The phrase is from Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality, p. 173.

38 Quine, Word and Object, p. 221.

39 Harman ("Quine," p. 126) puts a more charitable interpretation upon Quine's views on these matters. Accordin to Harman,

It is not that he thinks intensional objects, propositions or meanings, are a queer kind of entity (as one might believe that electrons must be a queer kind of entity). His complaint is not that intensional objects, as something abstract, offend his sensibilities in the way that they no doubt offend the sensibilities of Nelson Goodman. . . . Quine's argument . . . is that the various views in that cluster [which invoke such entities] are theories that don't explain what they purport to explain. So his attitude toward intensional objects is similar to his attitude toward phlogiston or the ether (or witches).

Quine seems blandly to endorse Harman's interpretation at Words and Objections, p. 296. But I do not think that this interpretation can be reconciled with many of the arguments in Word and Object and elsewhere, although I agree that it represents the attitude which Quine should have adopted.

40 Words and Objections, p. 318.

41 Quine, Word and Object, pp. 119-120.

42 Dagfinn Follesdal ("Meaning and Experience" in Mind and Language, ed. S. Guttenplan [Oxford, 1975]) suggests a way of construing Quine's indeterminacy thesis designed to show that "Quine's position is more interesting if his ontological bias towards physicalism is regarded as a consequence of a more fundamental epistemological bias towards empiricism." (p. 33) The suggestion is that

. . . all the truths there are, are included in the theory of nature. As we noted earlier, in our theory of nature we try to account for all our experiences. And the only entities we are justified in assuming are those that are appealed to in the simplest theory that accounts for all this evidence. These entities and their properties and interrelations are all there is to the world, and all there is to be right or wrong about. All truths about these are included in our theory of nature. In translation we are not describing a further realm of reality, we are just correlating two comprehensive theories concerning all there is. (p. 32)

However, I do not see how we can tell when we have stopped describing and started correlating descriptions. Or, to put it in another way, I do not see how we can mark off "nature" from something else save by finding some sense of "account for all our experiences" in which something less than the whole of culture can account for all our experiences.

An alternative way of tracing the indeterminacy thesis to empiricism is offered by John McDowell ("Truth Conditions, Bivalence, and Verificationism" in Truth and Meaning, ed. G. Evans and J. McDowell [Oxford, 1976]). McDowell thinks that Quine may be asserting "a version, not quite happily formulated, of the strong verificationist objection to realism in a theory of meaning." (p. 65) This objection is that to construe an assertion's truth as "underdetermined by what is observable" would, if we construed the statement "realistically," require us to attribute to the speaker "a conception of truth as being independent of what is observable." (p. 64) Since the latter is, for the verificationist, absurd, it shows that we must not construe the statement "realistically." This strategy, however, seems to involve finding a sense for "determination by what is observable" which would keep biology and exclude translation, and, once again, I do not see how this is to be done. So I conclude that the tension between (4) and (5) remains, despite the attempts of friendly critics of Quine to reformulate his point in a way that renders it safe from Chomsky's criticism that the only indeterminacy in the area is the familiar underdetermination of theory by observation (a criticism which both Follesdal and McDowell refer to, and wish to circumvent).

43 Donald Davidson, "Mental Events" in Experience and Theory, ed. L. Foster and J. W. Swanson (Amherst, Mass., 1970), pp. 94-96.

44 Ibid., p. 97.

45 Ibid., p. 9711., quoting Quine, Word and Object, p. 221.

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