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Fall 2006
Volume 06, Number 1

Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy

Book Reviews

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Quintessence: Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W. V. Quine
Roger F. Gibson, ed. (Cambridge, MA & London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2004). 416 pp., including credits and index.

Reviewed by Isaac Nevo
Ben Gurion University of the Negev

This new collection of published essays by Willard van Orman Quine (1908-2000) is presented by its editor, Roger F. Gibson (following a suggestion of Nelson Goodman’s), as a "meta-anthology" or "anthology of anthologies," that is to say, an anthology of previously anthologized material. It contains twenty-five original essays by Quine that were published, in various venues, over a span of over sixty years in Quine’s career.1 The editor says he had the ambition to produce a collection useful to the "Quine-specialist" as well as the "Quine-novice." It is questionable, however, whether both these purposes can be served within a single volume. The expert will find the collection lacking in certain important selections, for example, Quine’s chapter on the "Flight from Intension,"2 where Quine famously deconstructs Brentano’s thesis regarding the irreducibility of the mental. And some articles (for example, "Truth by Convention") are included that no beginner should attempt by way of an introduction to Quine’s philosophy and, as it appears as the first essay of the anthology, could well be responsible for many a novice simply giving up on the rest of the volume.

However, a novice who skips the first essay and moves straight to the second and third or, even better, straight to the fifteenth or the eighteenth essays could be in for the intellectual ride of her life. Quine’s sharpness and lucidity, the depth of his confrontation with the empiricist tradition, as well as the strength of his alternative (physicalist and extensionalist) form of empiricism, come across very clearly. Indeed, with some additions—such as short introductions that explain the aims, background, basic terminology, and the theses or arguments of the volume’s essays—the book could well serve as the basis for a class on Quine’s epistemology and philosophy of language to the benefit of many beginners. The volume contains some of the most challenging articles in Analytic Philosophy, but given that these articles sometimes presuppose a fair amount of knowledge in logic or the history of philosophy (or both), the untutored beginner would have benefited from having explanatory introductions accompanying each of these essays. Short introductions to Quine’s historic essays by Roger F. Gibson, the editor of this volume and author of two books on Quine,3 would have made the work of reading through this book easier and more rewarding. In this respect, this book is a missed opportunity as a comprehensive introduction to Quine’s thought. The failure to include short introductions to each of the essays may be seen as another consequence of the desire to serve two very disparate audiences in a single collection.

A heart-warming feature of this collection (one which is likely to help the beginner) is the coupling of some of the classical essays of Quine with all their polemical sharpness, to retrospective essays in which a much older (and kinder) Quine reflects on his past accomplishments, sometimes modifying the sharp edges of his polemical arguments, sometimes taking back excessive formulations, and often acknowledging the strength of his one-time opponents’ views or offering words of self-criticism. The difference between these two "voices" of Quine is most clearly seen in the transition from "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) to "Five Milestones of Empiricism" (1975), where one finds essentially the same argument for epistemological holism and against the "dogmas" of reductionism and analyticity, though the argument is critical and negative in the former case and positive and charitable in the latter. Similarly, in "Progress on Two Fronts" (1996), Quine goes back to his notion of "stimulus meaning" as a basis for translating observation sentences and modifies it in light of criticism leveled at him by such luminaries as Davidson, Dreben, and Follesdal. The criticism of Quine’s "social view" of observation sentences (whereby a sentence is taken to be observational just in case all speakers of a linguistic community, upon having the same stimulations, either assent to or dissent from that sentence) was that sameness of stimulation is not merely a highly theoretical construction but one that cannot do justice to the variety of intra-personal stimulation patterns that can be compatible with "seeing the same thing." This criticism prompted Quine to offer an alternative view (which he dubs "pre-established harmony") that seeks to explain inter-personal observation sentences in terms of intra-personal ones, the latter being accounted for in terms of intra-personal similarity of stimulation patterns, the former being accounted for in terms of natural selection favoring certain innate standards of similarity (thereby creating harmony among different speakers). Such a self-correction shows Quine at his self-critical best: balanced, scientifically-oriented, and conciliatory, but only where the core of his philosophical views can be advanced or, at the least, where they are not seriously threatened.

In "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" Quine’s distinctive philosophical voice first came into a clear expression. This article was an empiricist refutation of two cardinal tenets of traditional and "logical" empiricism. In that article, Quine concluded that both the distinction between analytic and synthetic sentences as well as the belief in "reductionism" were themselves unempirical "dogmas." Quine argued that the bases upon which Hume had dismissed induction and the causal nexus, and the logical positivists had undermined metaphysical claims in general, were, from an empiricist point of view, equally dogmatic. Quine called for a more comprehensive empiricism, accepting only "the whole of science" as the minimal unit of empirical significance within which any sentence could be held "come what may" and wherein no sentence is immune to revision. A more succinct refutation of the doctrines of traditional and positivist empiricism (including those defining the life-work of Quine’s teacher Rudolph Carnap) is hard to imagine. The development of an alternative empiricism, shorn of the two dogmas, was to become Quine’s philosophical task in the decades that followed.

In contrast to logical positivism, Quine’s later version of empiricism was based on a rejection of all intensional claims (that is, claims involving meanings, propositions, modal operators, or propositional attitudes)4 as non-cognitive, while allowing ontology and even an ontology of abstract entities (sets) as a legitimate scientific tool. In Quine’s hands, empiricism became physicalism, intensions were eradicated from the language of science, ontology was streamlined (a streamlining that he summed up with the claim that "to be is to be the value of a bound variable"), and epistemology became separated from foundational pretensions and "naturalized" as itself part of the scientific endeavor. In this naturalized epistemology the link between the "meager input" and the "torrential output" of science—traditionally the concern of skeptics and foundational epistemologists—was to be studied within science itself. The basis for scientific knowledge was no longer to be thought of as firmer than science itself.

Forty years later, Quine’s voice is no longer that of the brash revolutionary hoisting his philosophical mentors on their own petard. "Two Dogmas in Retrospect" offers a "moderate" holism, in place of "the whole of science," while still rejecting the two dogmas. Moderate holism breaks "the whole of science" into various "chunks," and these are analyzed in terms of clusters of theoretical sentences that have "critical semantic mass." The latter metaphor is analyzed in terms of sufficiency for implying "observation categoricals," that is, sentences of the form: "whenever this, that!" where the two sub-clauses are to be replaced by observation sentences. With this picture, science need not be seen as a unified theoretical whole, and room is left for a more historical perspective on the development of science as a combination of "clusters" of such "critical semantic mass." Even Thomas Kuhn—the father of "theory laden observations"—is spoken favorably of (Essay No. 8).

Another significant change upon which Quine elaborates in the late essays concerns a reorientation within logic such that it is no longer conceived as part of revisable science but rather as constitutive of "moderate" holism (and translation practice). The principles of "minimal mutilation" (in the body of theory) and of charity (in translation), defeasable though they are, ensure that logic will not be revised except for very good reasons (for example, pressure from quantum physics), and within certain bounds that build logic into our basic understanding of the logical particles and into translation practice. The two previously conflicting perspectives on logic are thus brought closer together.
In sum, although this collection contains materials that are already well anthologized and collected, its distinctiveness and value lies in its bringing together two distinct voices of Quine’s. In so doing it enriches our perspective on one of the most impressive philosophical oeuvres of the twentieth century.

Endnotes

1. Quine’s "Truth by Convention" was written in 1935 and published for the first time a year later. The latest article in his collection, "Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist," was published (posthumously) in 2001, sixty-six years later. It should be noted that this prolific period of philosophical work is not co-extensive with Quine’s whole career, which started earlier and contains much work in logic and set theory. Quine’s work in those fields in not anthologized in this volume.

2. See W. V Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1960), 216-21.

3. See Roger F. Gibson, The Philosophy of W.V. Quine: An Expository Essay (Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1986), and Enlightened Empiricism: An Examination of W.V. Quine’s Theory of Knowledge (Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1988).

4. In intensional claims, the substitution of co-referential terms does not preserve truth value.

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