Quine`s Epistemology Naturalised

Quine`s Epistemology Naturalised: Out With the Old, In With the New

 Similar to the way Quine tried to sink the analytic/synthetic distinction in Two Dogmas of Empiricism, Quine, in his essay Epistemology Naturalised, assembles in one fell swoop what he believes to be a devastating strike to the Carnapian enterprise. This annihilation would undoubtedly be welcomed provided it was grounded in a solid and revelatory argument. In this essay I will provide a complete analysis of Quine’s Epistemology Naturalised, weigh it against a criticism from Jaegwon Kim’s What Is “Naturalised Epistemology”? and judge whether the criticisms are devastating to Quine’s intrepid position. I will then provide a brief summary on my position concerning naturalised epistemology.

Quine begins with his essay with the claim that Epistemology is “concerned with the foundations of science”. (Sosa & Kim 292) Quine’s claim implies that questions like ‘what gives scientific knowledge certainty’ and ‘what grounds mathematics in certainty’ are epistemological questions. These questions center on the concern of justification in the sciences; what gives one the right to call a belief knowledge? The attempts made my Bertrand Russell and other logicians/mathematicians to ground mathematics in the more certain depths of logic illustrate this thirst for a firm justification.  While this attempt ultimately failed to achieve what it had originally set out to accomplish due to problems with set theory (presumably Russell’s paradox), Quine argues that epistemology could garner much from this attempt.

            Quine advances that one specific distinction made in the epistemology of mathematics is a ‘bifurcation’ between conceptual and doctrinal studies; while the conceptual side is ‘concerned with meaning’, the doctrinal is ‘concerned with truth’ or more specifically: proving things. (292) Within mathematics for example, the conceptual side is manifest when becoming aware of mathematical ideas/objects while the doctrinal is concerned with ‘establishing laws’ by virtue of proof. (292) Quine argues that epistemology can draw this insight to its own benefit; in the same way that mathematics can be grounded in logic and set theory, natural knowledge is ‘based somehow on sense experience’. It then follows for Quine that epistemology can be seen as having, on the one hand, an explanation of ‘body in sensory terms’ as a conceptual side, and on the other hand, a grounding of knowledge of nature in sensory terms as a doctrinal side.

            This distinction, Quine argues, can apply to the concerns of epistemologists in the past. For instance, he claims that Hume can be seen as placing bodies ‘outright with the sense impressions’ in terms of a conceptual aspect. (293) Hume’s doctrinal side faltered however insofar as he was only able to justify statements about immediate sense experience and not more robust scientific claims; grounding predictions based on sense impressions ‘gained no increment of certainty’. (293) The looming problem for Hume, Quine argues, is that it’s a fallacy to think that common sense ideas illustrate truths about the nature of the world. For, as Hume even pointed out himself, common sense’s perspective that there is an apple on the table doesn’t tell us about whether there is anything, in reality, that is anything like what we directly perceive. This is clearly a problem for Quine insofar as he concerned with grounding ‘the fact of natural knowledge’. (292) Quine claims that Hume’s conceptual side condemns us to a Humean, all too human predicament that, even at this point, Quine believes we are still locked into. This predicament is, again for the sake of clarity, the fact that there is no clear logical relation between what we perceive and what is out there as it were; Hume’s conceptual stance condemns one to a life as an epistemological ‘Flying Dutchman’ of sorts; one is destined to sail the vast oceans of impressions in the search for justifications for all eternity.

            Quine follows this by highlighting two possible routes one could embark on to steer around the Humean predicament by altering one’s conceptual assumptions. He highlights Bentham’s attempt to sail around the Humean problem by use of ‘contextual definition’. Instead of explaining bodies by virtue of impressions, Bentham attempted to describe ‘talk of bodies’ by virtue of ‘translating one’s whole sentences about bodies into whole sentences about impressions’. (293) While one could again be certain of basic sense impressions, this epistemological theory did not achieve the correspondence to justify something like “natural knowledge”; contextualism says nothing about ‘the bodies themselves at all’. This attempt can be seen in relation, as Quine states himself, to the work of Frege; while the sense/referent distinction elucidates what is meant and how it is said, it speaks in no way the objects perceived in themselves. (293)

The second attempt to bypass the Humean problem was made by the proponents of set theory; one would adopt set-talk as an ‘auxiliary concept’ in order to categorise impressions into sets that the world itself would be translatable into.  Quine proposes that while this enterprise would commit one to an “abstract ontology” insofar as one would have to posit sets and translatability, the fact that set theory has been shown to be “powerful addition” in mathematics at least justifies one’s hope in it playing a role in epistemology. Quine argues that this hope is ‘probably’ what caused Russell to exclaim that the ‘program’ of metaphysics and epistemology was “to account for the external world as a logical construct of sense data”. (294)

To provide such an account was ultimately the goal of Carnap’s Der Logische Aufbau der Welt. If this attempt had succeeded, the virtue of the account would be the newfound ability to translate any claim about the world into ‘terms of sense data, or observation, plus logic and set theory’. (294) While such a theory sounds promising insofar as it would be grounded in the certainty of logic, the Humean sceptre still looms; there remains no clear link between an observation grounded in set theory and the proof, demonstration of doctrinality (new word), of observations. Quine cites the major hole within this enterprise as the implicit assumption that one could “endow the truths of nature with the full authority of immediate experience”. This assumption, which Quine traces back to the Cartesian enterprise of epistemology, is what he calls a “forlorn hope” (294). Why then would Carnap persevere? Quine argues that the prospects of such “heroic efforts” (294) would be: a) a rational reconstruction of science, and b) such a success would “deepen our understanding of discourse about the world”, not to mention provide a clear basis for “cognitive discourse” (294). While this further made explicit the failure of epistemology in the spirit of Hume (sense data), Quine argues that two ‘cardinal tenets of empiricism” still stand: a) any evidence there is for the existence of science is based on sensory evidence, and b) the meanings of words ultimately have a basis in sense experience. (294)

At this point Quine argues that a rational reconstruction of science in Carnap’s terms is problematic; could there be a right reconstruction? The fact is that any account would be right if it was rational and matched “physicalist discourse” (294). This makes the program too arbitrary; the program reeks of “make-believe” as it were.  This is where Quine’s notion of naturalised epistemology first comes to the surface. Quine argues that instead of appealing to reason we should resort to the evidence; “The stimulation of (one’s) sensory receptors” is the basis of anyone’s experience of the world and a study of this would explain the relation between the input of sense experience in relation to its output. This leads Quine to ask: “(w)hy then not settle for psychology”? (294) Does Quine succumb to circularity? More explicitly, does Quine presuppose scientific knowledge in explaining scientific discourse? Quine doesn’t see this as a problem; “we are well advised to use any available information” if one takes the 1^st cardinal tenet seriously.

Quine digresses a bit to elucidate the further virtues of Carnap’s rational reconstruction if it had been completed. What a rational reconstruction would have opened the door for is a complete translation of science into logic and set theory. This, while it would have been an amazing human achievement, would also help clean up science of useless theoretical sentences. Unfortunately his attempt did not fulfill translatability; Quine argues that Carnap gave arbitrary criteria which, “however illuminating, does not provide any key to translating…”. (295) Quine argues that Carnap himself “despaired” of this when he put forth a new criterion in Testability and Meaning. Instead of sticking with analytic confirmation rules (c-rules), what would have been a strict but revelatory criterion insofar as it implies complete verification, Carnap posited a synthetic notion of C-rules which committed him to meaning holism. This, Quine argues, was the last breath of the Carnapian attempt at a rational reconstruction of science; what would have given this view any leverage was its promise of translatability; the death of this promise meant the edge over psychology was lost. Quine nails the final nail in the coffin when stating that we should opt for an explanation of “how science is in fact developed and learned (rather) than fabricate a fictitious structure to a similar effect”. (295)

            After deducing non-translatability, Quine unpacks the implications of a non-translatable view of epistemology in relation to science. Quine argues that if we side with Peirce and claim that “the very meaning of a statement consists in the difference its truth would make on possible experience” (295), would this not imply that if we note in observational language all of the effects that this statement makes on experience that we have successfully translated said statement? Quine raises the problem of the endless consequences of any statement, but then claims that in mathematics one can “axiomatize an infinity of theorems” (295); this makes a complete translation, if it were possible, at least conceivably effective for now.  However, giving up translation by reducing c-rules to synthetic status means this is all vacuous, and secures, Quine argues, an empiricist commitment to the “inaccessib(ility) and ineffab(ility)” of typical statements. (295)

 Quine explains this inaccessibility by virtue of the fact that only theories and not typical statements have “experiential implications” (296) they can call their own; while statement S could imply E, it is also true that S1, S2, S3 etc. could also imply E. Theories on the other hand do possess their own implications.  When these theoretical implications (experiences) don’t cash out, it becomes clear that part of the theory becomes falsified. Quine points out that while one or more of the statements that make up the theory are surely wrong, it isn’t possible to tell which aspect of the “conjunction of many statements” (296) is the culprit. The theory has to be analysed as a whole; single statements don’t have implications, wholes do. Quine claims further that by Pierce’s notion of meaning the “components simply do not have any empirical meaning”; they have no effect on experience. This implies, Quine argues, that if we were to achieve a Carnapian rational reconstruction, it would have to include “broad theories taken as wholes” rather than singular statements as theories have experiential implications of their own. This would imply that, if one were to translate general theories, any translation would leave out the particulars of theory and instead translate the theory as a whole.

Quine claims furthermore that question of translatability in science has effects on translation in general. For could it not be the case, Quine argues, that you could have different translations of a single text which, while they would conceivably possess different “component sentence”, would provide the same implications as a whole; T1 (translation one) could be composed of [ a, b, c,…] (component sentences a, b, and c) and as long it implies I, it would be equivalent, by Pierce’s standard, to T2, which, while possessing [ d, e, f…] would also imply I. This leads Quine to conclude there could be ‘no ground for saying which glaringly unlike translations of individual sentences is right”. (296) This has devastating effects for verificationism as well as propositional meaning in general according to Quine insofar as it implies the “indeterminacy of translation of theoretical sentences”. 

Then should we, as Quine asks, abandon verification? Quine argues that we should not go so far; empirical meaning is key to translation and language acquisition; language presupposes external stimuli insofar as language requires sound in order for one to link sentences with shared stimulation; language is “socially inculcated” (296),Quine argues, by a community which instils a certain sentence to identical stimuli. The empirical basis of language is also made clear by linguists who either resorts to a previous language to learn the meaning of new sentences or instead builds new associations by virtue of empirical work in the field.

The loss of hope in a rational reconstruction signalled a defeatist wave within epistemology and metaphysics. Quine claims that in the same way metaphysics was turned into a “pejorative” term, philosophers were beginning to think of epistemology as defunct; Wittgensteinian Quietism was “curing philosophers of … epistemological problems”. (297) Quine, however, begs to differ.

Quine argues that epistemology has a new horizon; it has left the murky waters of rational reconstruction and has anchored anew as chapter of psychology and thereby becomes a natural science.  Epistemology is now concerned with a human subject that, given an “experimentally controlled input” generates an output that is a “description of the three dimensional external world and its history.” (297) Epistemology, argues Quine, needs to analyse the way in which “meagre input” becomes a “torrential output” in order to finally settle the relationship between theory and evidence; how does input become theory? Quine claims that an analysis centered on a naturalised epistemology could even improve science insofar as one could conceivably see aspects of science that transcend available evidence. Quine is so charitable as to even allow some room for a Carnapian reconstruction of psychology insofar as it could offer “hints” as to how psychology is played out. While it would remain below psychology because of its distance from evidence, the relationship between psychology and epistemology should be mutually supportive in a way much like, Quine claims, Neurath’s boat analogy.

Quine then compiles a list of what he argues are immediate virtues of adopting a naturalist epistemological framework. For one, the epistemological problem of “epistemic priority” is thrown away when he establishes a criterion of epistemological priority wherein “A is epistemologically prior to B if A is causally nearer than B to the sensory receptors”. (298) Hence, whereas the aforementioned debate consisted in a tension between whether a two-dimensional irradiation of the retina or a three-dimensional “conscious apprehension” should have epistemic privilege, the debate is now solved insofar as two-dimensional irradiation is epistemologically prior.  This implies a “deactivat(ion)” of the Gestalt conception of psychology (there are a priori structures of the mind that shape experience), Quine argues, insofar as sensory stimulation is epistemologically prior to the role of consciousness in relation to sense perception.

The second immediate contribution from this framework, he argues, is clarification concerning the nature of observation sentences and protocol sentences; are they the form of sense impressions, a report on the relation between an observer and the external world, or are they statement of the elementary sort concerning pure perception? Quine argues that within his new framework any notion of observation sentence would have to be in “closest possible proximity to sensory preceptors”. (298) Quine first comes to a strong definition of observation that reads thusly: “(O.S.) is an observation sentence if our verdict depends only on the sensory stimulation present at the time”. (298) This definition seems unattainable Quine argues insofar as it seems unlikely that O.S. can occur without the use of prior information whatsoever. He then proposes a revised definition: “(O.S.) is an observation sentence if all verdicts on it depend on present sensory stimulation and on no stored information that goes beyond what goes into understanding the sentence.” (298) This updated criterion for O.S. only leads to another problem however due to the difficulty in distinguishing between information that is the sentence, and information that is beyond it. Quine then unearths the very distinction he laid to rest in 1951 and straps a new character to it to solve this problem: an analytic sentence is defined as a sentence that its meaning would be accepted by all fluent members of a community.  Thus Quine derives a positive and a negative notion of O.S.; the positive being: O.S. is an observation sentence if all fluent members of a community would agree on its meaning given the same input, and the negative being: O.S. is an observational sentence if it is “not sensitive to differences in past experience within the speech community”. (299)

Quine argues that his notion of O.S. reduces the prior notion to irony insofar as it is not to be regarded as subjective in the slightest. Quine’s notion of O.S. is in fact objective because it relies on an objective criteria; one that shapes the “intersubjective tribunal of scientific hypothesis”; this marks a shift from the Carnapian project that intended to ground science in immediate subjective certainty. Quine states that philosophers have debated the utility of O.S in the past; while Kuhn disregarded O.S. because of the importance of cultural relativity, Hanson was also critical of O.S. because he believed they were difference from person to person. This, Quine argues, is exactly why clarification of the nature of O.S is crucial. Quine goes even further and establishes a conceptual and doctrinal distinction based on O.S; the doctrinal sees the O.S. as the “repository of evidence for scientific hypotheses” (299), while the conceptual sees O.S. as that which we must understand first in order for language to be possible.

Quine concludes the article by stating the field in which he thinks epistemology will prove its worth; perceptual norms. Perceptual norms could work similarly, Quine argues, to the way phonemes shape the structure of language; in the same way that language is made up of unconscious factors that shape its structure, experience could also be made up of similar “epistemological building block”. (300) Furthermore, the shaping of these building blocks could be related to evolutionary principles insofar as the structures of color perception “could have been predicted”, Quine claims, in relation to their contribution to external fitness. Quine finishes by calling for what could even be a clarification of inductive reasoning by virtue of evolutionary psychology.

Of the criticisms raised against Epistemology Naturalised, one of Kim’s criticisms I would argue is the most significant. Kim thinks that Quine has forgotten the normative aspect of epistemology; the Cartesian question of justification, namely: “What conditions must a belief meet if we are justified in believing it is true?” and “What beliefs are in fact worthy of accepting?” (300) Kim argues that while Quine sets up his project against the rational reconstruction project of Carnap, he is in fact indirectly encouraging a moving away from the Cartesian search for justification.; Quine is changing the conversation in epistemology from questions concerning the justification of knowledge and instead asking how does one acquire knowledge. And insofar as justification itself “drops out of epistemology”, then, Kim argues, knowledge itself drops out of epistemology”; knowledge is intrinsically, for Kim, a “normative notion”. (305)

I would argue in relation to this critique that Quine assumes the epistemological framework of empiricism, namely the externalist position, and that this itself is an answer to the justification question Kim is referring to. Empiricism is the view that justification for one’s beliefs is ultimately grounded in sense data; this itself is a normative position in epistemology; scientists, including Quine I’m assuming by virtue of his rigour as a philosopher, take the justification question really seriously. I also think that insofar as Quine allows the attempt at rational reconstruction within epistemology to exist because it could provide useful hints, this would leave room for the normative approach as Kim sees it.

I would argue that epistemology should take science very seriously when developing its concepts because, as Quine would argue, epistemology is concerned with a subject who claims to possess something like knowledge; namely scientific knowledge. The question of how this kind of belief differs from another is an important question (the first question raised by Kim); is this distinction something real or merely a product of convention? If knowledge is to be distinguished from a mere high degree of belief or social convention, I would argue, that it has to be grounded as a natural kind; something that has causal effects and is subject to the laws of nature. Anything other than natural kind status would make it a pseudo concept. Perhaps a useful pseudo concept, but still an illusion; the kind of thing Descartes wouldn’t have been fond of.

Work cited:

Sosa, Ernest, Jaegwon Kim, and Matthew McGrath. Epistemology: an anthology. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. Print.