Science and Philosophy

Contemporary analytic philosophy is dominated by metaphilosophical naturalism, the view that philosophy ought to be in some sense continuous with science. According to contemporary naturalists, we cannot study the nature of mind, knowledge, language, meaning, and reality without taking into account the results from physics, linguistics, and the cognitive sciences. This chapter examines Quine’s evolving views on the relation between science and philosophy in 1950s and 1960s. Scrutinizing both the development of and the external responses to Word and Object, it examines how Quine became increasingly aware of the metaphilosophical implications of the views he had first developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the final sections, this chapter offers a detailed reconstruction of Quine’s decision to label his position “naturalism.”

Analytic and Synthetic

This chapter examines Quine’s evolving views on the analytic-synthetic distinction. Following Quine’s two-tiered argument in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” it answers three questions: (1) When did Quine start demanding a behavioristically acceptable definition of analyticity? (2) When did he stop searching for such a definition? and (3) When did he reject the dogma of reductionism, concluding that there is no need for an analytic-synthetic distinction in the first place? This chapter argues that it is impossible to identify a specific moment at which Quine definitively rejected the analytic-synthetic distinction; from a developmental perspective, all three questions require an independent answer. The second part of this chapter reconstructs Quine’s evolving views on the analytic-synthetic distinction after 1951 and challenges the common misconception that he changed his mind about logic, holism, and analyticity in the later stages of his career.

Introduction

During the past few decades, a radical shift has occurred in how philosophers conceive of the relation between science and philosophy. A great number of analytic philosophers have adopted what is commonly called a “naturalistic” approach, arguing that their inquiries ought to be in some sense continuous with science. This chapter sketches the history of naturalism, distinguishes between different types of naturalism, and shows that contemporary naturalists in the analytic tradition typically view Quine as the intellectual father of their position. Furthermore, this chapter introduces Quine’s naturalism and examines the status of contemporary Quine scholarship, arguing that although many excellent papers have been written about Quine’s philosophy, little work has been devoted to reconstructing Quine’s naturalism and/or its historical development. The chapter ends with an overview of the structure of the book.

Sign and Object

Although Quine was always a science-minded philosopher, he did not adopt a fully naturalistic perspective until the mid-1950s. This chapter examines the evolution of Quine’s epistemology and metaphysics in the first twenty years of his career. Whereas Quine’s published work in the 1930s and 1940s was primarily technical, the Quine archives reveal that he was already working on a philosophical book during the Second World War, a project entitled Sign and Object. This chapter argues that Sign and Object sheds new light on the evolution of Quine’s ideas. Not only does Quine’s book project show that his views were already fairly naturalistic in the early 1940s, Sign and Object also unearths the steps Quine had to take in maturing his perspective.

Naturalizing Metaphysics

Quine’s negative characterization of naturalism as the rejection of first philosophy invites the question of why he believes that first philosophy ought to be dismissed. This chapter discusses Quine’s position vis-à-vis traditional metaphysics. It concludes that Quine’s views on metaphysics are subtler than is often presupposed; both the received view that Quine saved metaphysics and the opposite view that Carnap and Quine are on the same antimetaphysical team are too one-sided if we take seriously Quine’s own pronouncements on the issue. The chapter offers a detailed reconstruction of Quine’s naturalistic perspective on metaphysical existence claims and shows how he is able to both blur the boundary between scientific sense and metaphysical nonsense and to argue that we cannot ask what reality is really like in a distinctively philosophical way.

Naturalizing Epistemology

Quine’s naturalism admits of both a positive and a negative characterization. Positively, naturalism can be defined as the view that reality is to be identified and described within science. Negatively, Quine defines naturalism as the rejection of first philosophy. This chapter offers a reconstruction of Quine’s argument against first philosophy, an argument which is routinely perceived as an argument from despair. According to this standard conception, Quine rejects first philosophy because all attempts to reconstruct our scientific theories in terms of sense experience have failed. This chapter shows that this picture is inaccurate and that Quine’s argument against first philosophy is considerably stronger and subtler than this received view suggests. For Quine, the first philosopher’s quest for transcendental foundations is useless; there is no science-independent perspective from which to validate science.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter argues that at the heart of Quine’s naturalism lies the adoption of a radically immanent perspective. To be a Quinean naturalist is to work from within. Or, as Quine himself describes it in one of his last philosophical papers, to be a Quinean naturalist is to live “within one’s means.” Quine dismisses some traditional philosophical questions because they presuppose an external perspective, not because they cannot be reduced to natural science. This chapter, in sum, argues that Quine’s naturalism is radical not because it is immanent to science, but because it is science-immanent across the board.

In Mediis Rebus

This chapter provides a positive characterization of Quine’s naturalism. It argues that at the most fundamental level, to be a Quinean naturalist is to “work from within.” The chapter characterizes Quine’s naturalism in terms of two components—the principled rejection of transcendental perspectives and the adoption of a perspective immanent to our inherited scientific conceptual scheme—and investigates what arguments, theories, and commitments have led him to adopt these theses. After examining Quine’s own defense of naturalism in “Five Milestones of Empiricism,” the chapter argues that both components—no transcendence and scientific immanence—as well as his deflationary theories of truth and justification, are based on the view that, as inquirers, we all have to start in the middle—in the view that we are always working from within.