APA Newsletters
Fall 1999
Volume 99, Number 1

Many feminist philosophers of science have found Quine’s work appealing, including Sandra Harding, Nancy Tuana, and Lynn Hankinson-Nelson (all of whom completed dissertations on Quine). Quine’s appeal to feminists comes from numerous sources, not the least of which is his rigorous critique of logical positivism. Equally important is the fact that, despite his critical stance, he remains a legitimate and respected participant in analytic philosophy. Indeed, the World Congress of Philosophy (WCP) session where he spoke was packed with admirers, young and old, men and women, from around the world. At ninety years of age, he was able to generate a level of excitement that was testimony to a career dedicated to philosophical mentoring and leadership. His is a model of engagement that inspires and offers hope to many feminist philosophers whose own critical views are too often marginalized.

Other sources of Quine’s appeal to feminists include his naturalist turn in epistemology. He suggests that natural science, rather than a priori metaphysics, is the best source for studying human knowledge. Metaphysical assumptions about knowledge acquisition are seldom friendly to feminists or others interested in questioning the status quo. Certainly scientific studies are no guarantee of improvement, but there at least is a place to start the process of reform and revolution. Another attractive feature is his view that truth and meaning are tightly linked and that the production of meaning is best understood as an external, social process. Feminists know social processes. This is familiar ground. We can work with this.

Quine’s paper at the WCP combined both of these features. How is it, he asked, that a naturalized, e.g., neuroscientific, account of individual sensory stimulation can explain the production of shared (social) meanings? Offering improvements on his earlier discussions in Word and Object (1960), Quine emphasized natural selection to account for why humans have roughly similar perceptions, despite what are bound to be wide varieties of sensory networks. Humans must have an "induction instinct" that allows us to notice patterns and generate implications. The inscrutability of reference, the difficulty of identifying what it is exactly to which our individual sensory networks refer, is not a problem so long as our overall patterns of response have been selected, over the generations, to keep us from harm. Given that humans have roughly the same survival worries, our perceptions, too, must be similar.

Davidson (a much younger eighty-one) responded gracefully, acknowledging that "I have been following Quine for sixty years and today is no exception." Indeed, Davidson has spent the better part of his academic career writing critically of his teacher. On Davidson’s view, Quine has not been faithful enough to the externalist model of meaning. Quine still insists on locating (part of) the production of meaning at the level of individual neurological mechanisms, which means that he has to respond to worries about skepticism (just as he did earlier when he asked the question "how can we know that we share perceptions?"). Quine answers by invoking evolution. But Davidson suggests the question is misplaced. If we paid more attention to the external nature of language learning, skepticism would not arise as a concern. Nor would concerns arise about conceptual relativism. The stimulus that matters is not some internal feature of each speaker, it’s the nearest mutual cause noted by two (or more) speakers.

Because Davidson’s is a more external/social hypothesis than is Quine’s, I think it leaves more room for feminists who then want to go ahead and examine the social interplay of meaning. At the same time, Davidson’s account does not engage in debates about skepticism and relativism that sometimes can be turned against feminists. Davidson also has an interesting account of error/idiosyncrasy, inspired by both Quine and Wittgenstein. This is an important addition to social theories of knowledge, for without it we could not account for how deviant meanings (such as feminism) ever arise.