In a sense, traditional empiricists were often almost as aprioristic (in a loose non-Kantian way) as any rationalist. The prime difference is that rationalists often had the unseemly habit of revelling in their secluded existence and rarefied ratiocinations. They consequently turned their noses up at as much experience as they could safely get away with. In addition, presumably they never denied themselves the empirical experience that they needed to show them that what they were almost about to drink was poison not water. At the least when they were being philosophically pure they didn’t even need these kinds of experience.
We must also remember, in this context, that many rationalists were also scientists. Descartes and Leibniz are just two famous examples. We must therefore recognise and distinguish rationalists - or at least some of them - as they are both in their philosopher mode and as they are in their scientist mode. Empiricists, on the other hand, often sat at their desks more and for longer than some of the best rationalists ever did. However, empiricists did indeed take on board the ‘deliverances of the senses’, as it was often put. They did not spit on experience as Plato did; and Descartes only did - relevantly if not literally speaking - when formulating his philosophical method in front of the fire. Nevertheless empiricists never went out of their way to experience or observe as much as they possibly could; at least not quaphilosopher or epistemologist. What they knew about experience, or sense impressions, could easily have been passed onto them by any individual they cared to pluck off the street. Neither did they need vast amounts of empirical data or fashionable scraps of scientific fact for their philosophical pursuits. What was empirically true for many empiricists remained true regardless of any more experiential refills they might have thought they needed in order to back-up their empiricism; or to prove - to other empiricists - just how hands-on they were. In that sense they didn’t require any more experience than, say, Kant required when establishing the nature and possibility of synthetic a priori truths.
As for Quine, just as the sharpest and most effective critics of logical positivism turned out to be (ex) logical positivists and their sympathisers (including Quine), so Quine - who has classed himself as a ‘logical empiricist’ - has turned out to be one of the sharpest and most effective critics of (traditional) empiricism. Specifically, Quine wrote that empiricism has
taken five turns for the better since the 17th century. (1981)
Quine might well have seen his own work as part of this tradition of up-grading, clarifying and strengthening empiricism. He might have even deemed his own work to be a contribution to the last and most conclusive chapter on empiricism, its limits and philosophical benefits.
Part One: Quine, Empiricism and Science
The abstract entities which are the substance of mathematics – ultimately classes and classes of classes and so on up – are another posit in the same spirit. Epistemology these are myths on the same footing with physical objects and gods, nether better nor worse except for differences in the degree to which they expedite our dealings with sense experience. (Quine, TDE, 74
Questioner: How do empiricists get to know about the world?
Empiricist: Hume, for example, would have said that is only through our experiences or sense impressions that we do so.
Questioner: So what is ‘experience’?
Empiricist: It is what is given to us, according to the terms of the modern empiricist Quine, when our ‘sensory receptors’ receive ‘sensory stimulations’ which, in turn, cause mental ‘sense-events’.
The Traditional Empiricism-Science Relationship and Quine’s Later Additions
It may seem strange to tie traditional empiricism so tightly to science if we at first came only to recognise its subjectivism or internalism; even if it were only partly Cartesian in nature.
We will start, then, by stressing the four-part configuration and inter-relationships between ‘reality’ (or ‘the world’), science, mind and philosophy. This can be schematicised – if only in its bare bones - thus:
science↔epistemology
ml
↑
world
↕
mind
↕
world
↑
sensory stimulations and sense-events
If now we keep in mind the idea that science’s primary aim is to understand the nature of the world (i.e., not only to predict and control things), we can clarify the above configuration.
We must note here that - despite the use of Quine’s words above - by the late 1940s virtually no important philosopher was a pure empiricist in the Humean or even Millian sense. However, it is still the case that even science - although still primary in Quine’s overall scheme - still depends upon and is determined by the sensory stimulations that affect individual scientists and therefore of scientists collectively. More specifically, even when a physicist scrutinises an atom under a powerful microscope he does not see or observe the atom. Instead he ‘infers’ its nature and existence from the things he does indeed see through the microscope. Even micro-nature is sense-dependent in these and in virtually all scientific cases. And on, for example, the massive scale of cosmology and astrophysics, astronomers and astrophysicists, as with atomic and sub-atomic scientists, still rely upon - and their findings are determined by - what they experience through the telescope. In the more abstract case of theoretical physicists, such things have at least some importance and relevance to them. No matter how theoretical, mathematical and abstract the findings and workings of theoretical physicists are, their results must still come down to earth, in the end, and congregate and join bonds with the findings, workings and results of the empirical mind and its experiences. The physicists must affect at least some kind of connection with mental experience; even if only at the end of their work… Actually, this is not quite right. What has just been said must surely be the case at the beginning of their work as well – and for fairly obvious reasons.
The logical positivists, for example, acknowledged this dependence of science on empirical experience - even if they still placed physics at the top of the intellectual hierarchy. Carnap, for instance, believed that the whole of science ultimately depends and rests upon, and is also determined by, what he called ‘cross-sections of experience’ (Carnap, 1935) Not only that, but scientific propositions, he thought, must be amenable to a philosophical and logical reduction to these cross-sections of experience. And post logical positivism many philosophers still held such a view; even though Carnap’s ‘foundationalist’, ‘reductionist’ and simplistic claims were suitably amended and made more sophisticated.
Quine too, right up till his death, owed much to the logical positivists and especially to Carnap; as he also did to those earlier empiricists like Mill and, before him, Hume. In Quine’s case, that experiential determinant of all science is a question of what he calls ‘sensory stimulations’ and their resultant ‘sense-events’ on which the whole of natural science ultimately depends and is also thoroughly determined by. This is still the case with Quine, we may now say, despite his anti-atomistic holism and sophisticated revisions and replacements of the work of the logical positivists and the earlier empiricists.
The primary principle which Quine has taken on board from empiricism is the fact that philosophers have always taken science very seriously - but not always ‘deferred’ (as Quine puts it) – to it. (If sometimes only in fairly limited or peripheral ways.) Even if science problematices experience and reality, as, say, in the cases of quantum mechanics, it is and was still deemed to offer us the best view on or of the world (or reality). Science is, after all, on that front line between the world of objects, events, processes, etc., and the philosophers and non-philosophers on the other side of the divide. It is scientists, not philosophers, who experiment with chemical compounds, trace the movements - and finds the nature - of atoms and particles with their microscopes and experiments. It is scientists who observe those physical reactions and forces deep under the earth. It is they who fly to the moon. And so on. Philosophers, on the other hand, sit at their desks and cogitate awhile (when not at conferences or teaching their students). Even the most extreme empiricist will never get his hands dirty or carry out a single scientific experiment. Indeed he needn’t do so!
It was still the case, however, that empiricists did rely on and deem important the accounts and explanations of science - or those that were couched in terms of science - that could only have come from science or scientists; not from the local landlord, chimney sweep or Rationalist. Scientists were taken, by the majority of empiricists, as being capable of seeing through, as it were, the experiential flux or manifold to perceive the structures and laws of nature underneath the simulacra. Scientists, or, at the least physicists, were often deemed to have had a superior and privileged take on reality that was, in many ways, similar to that of the arch and proto-rationalist Plato. But such philosophers, unlike the empiricists, nevertheless relied on what was sometimes called ‘intuition’ (or ‘direct insight’ in Husserl’s case), not on experience and observation. And scientists, unlike Plato, were helped along their way with things like microscopes and experimental contraptions that worked upon and dissected the macro-world to get at the underlying and true micro-world . We should stress here that many scientists - not even in the 17th and 18th centuries - did not rely exclusively on pure experience, the pure accounts of pure experience, or on the pure experiential mental states that they got themselves into during working hours. In an ironic sense, they did not really need Quinian holism (or Popper, Kuhn and the rest) at the time!
Quine’s Journey Through the Philosophical Disciplines
In the later Quine’s words he wrote that
epistemology is a part of science and science is a part of epistemology.
The precise direction of the arrows, in these reciprocal relationships, matters little to Quine, the naturalist and neo-empiricist. What matters are these mutual inter-dependencies themselves; as schematically pictured above. This happy coalition, to give one clear example, resulted in Quine calling one of his philosophical stances ‘semantic behaviourism’. In all this, again, the mind is still of primary importance to both science and philosophy. In Quine’s case, we see this in his stress on sensory stimulations and sense-events - even if not seen as foundationalist in the tradition epistemic sense (contra Davidson). They still act as the starting and end points of philosophy and science and that thereby still determine (almost) all the findings, positions and propositions of both disciplines.
At least since the 17th century, there has been this three-place mutual relationship that has been of importance to pure empiricists and their successors. Such a set of relations can be schematised thus:
To make matters clear, we can start by saying that science often puts science first – before Quinian philosophy or any other cognitive disciplines does. We must qualify this potentially philosophically deflationary position immediately. Quine wrote that
science is a part of epistemology, and epistemology is a part of science.
Not only that, Quine also wrote that
[naturalised] epistemology should fall into place as a part of psychology.
Can we turn the latter around? Should psychology also ‘fall into place’ as part of philosophy? Perhaps not. Quine might have replied that
if epistemology is part of science, then, by inference,it is – or could be - also be a part of psychology.
What of the other philosophical disciplines? What about the philosophy of mind?
From what Quine has said about this discipline, and what he has said about the scientific mind, it leads me to conclude that he would also have thought that the philosophy of mind is part of science - or, at the very least, that it should be. Can we revert this also, as with epistemology and psychology earlier? The first claim, that of the philosophy of mind being part of science, is certainly the case when one considers Quine’s attitude to, for example, neuroscience (unlike to cognitive science) and its perceivedimportance to the philosophy of mind. In addition, Quine comes close to being an eliminative materialist. Eliminative materialism, famously and controversially, denies the existence and nature - as well as their efficacy - of the propositional attitudes in both science and philosophy. To a lesser extent, his logical position on the place of belief-contexts in philosophical logic and philosophy of mind leads to a ‘scientistic’ position; primarily because he tries to stop any reference to belief contexts in philosophical logic and in the philosophy of mind. Quine could takes this position on belief-contexts to be either a result of such an acceptance and use would on needlessly complexifing philosophical logic or the philosophy of mind; or, instead, that qua eliminative materialist, he simply denies the existence of folk psychology’s propositional attitudes in the first place. What then of ontology?
In terms of ontology, we can say, to put it very simply, that Quine sees its prime concern to be one of what the logical ‘regimentation’ of all talk about the world and its objects, events, etc. He thereby turned the said regimentation into a fully ‘canonical’ philosophical logic of both ontology and potentially all the claims of science. More basically, for example, when quantificational logicians quantify over individuals, classes and kinds, such things have already been past onto them, as it were, by scientists. That is, when a Quinian logician ‘commits’ himself existentially, say to classes or their members qua individuals, he dos so to only those things that have already recognised by science even when not logically systematised and clarified.
The actual commitment to such existents above is a very good example of certain logics turn away from all things merely and exclusively formal – like the syntactic manipulations of symbols loved by all brainy people. There has been, in the first half of the 20th century and after, an important movement towards a more genuinely philosophical logic that not only accepts scientific classes, kinds and individuals, but also commits itself to both the existence - and the logical codification - of all scientific claims about such things. In short, roughly the same task Wittgenstein and the logical positivists set themselves in the 1920s and 30s.
And what is the more specific case of Quine’s position on ontology. He believes that ontology must be logical, scientific, naturalistic, physicalist and loosely empiricist in nature. This also true of his positions on other metaphysical areas more generally, if to a lesser extent. Quine said that science has always borrowed from and accepted certain metaphysical findings and beliefs; so this should go on. More to the point, there is a strong sense in which we can say that science is a metaphysical system, or, as Popper says about Darwinism, a
metaphysical research project (Popper, 19)
By now, however, scientists should have become more honest and less naïve about science’s close relation to metaphysics. In certain cases, contemporary and 20th century scientists have out rightly denied that science has any connections whatsoever with metaphysics or even to philosophy generally. Lewis Wolpert, for example, is keen to stress what he takes to be a fact as well as hectoring us about science’s complete lack of need for a philosophy of any description. In addition, many scientists (but not that many physicists, which Wolpert is not) are still ignorant of the metaphysical status of much, if not all, science. They are similarly ignorant of the long tradition of this science-metaphysics relationship. Some scientists, however, have been very much aware of the importance of philosophy to science and its claims. What about the philosophy of science itself?
One can one must assume that Quine thinks that the philosophy of science, if it is distinguished at all from naturalised epistemology, should be far more of a ‘descriptive’ rather than ‘revisionary’ (1959, Strawson) discipline when it comes to science, its findings and methods. But here again Quine would say, as he has said, about epistemology’s relation to science, that such a commitment to science and scientific description does not automatically mean that the philosopher of science and the philosophers generally should simply mindlessly describe and explain what goes on in science. It should add to the collective intellectual world that is part of science. Take here the logical positivists. In their case they believed that their primary role was to simply explain and analyse scientific propositions or, in certain cases, perhaps add a little to its knowledge on and positions towards scientific method. This early Wittgensteinian attitude on the relation of science over philosophy certainly went further with its deflationary attitude toward philosophy and is certainly not accepted as it stood by Quine. For example, Quine has done much work on ontology and metaphysics generally. Many logical positivists, if not all of them, on the other hand, either said that ‘metaphysics is dead’ or went out of their way to show philosophers how ‘meaningless’ it is.
Part Two: Kantian and Davidsonian Arguments against Quine’s Logical Empiricism
Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, Science and Quine
[transcendental idealism] is the most famous form of subjectivism about reason in the history of philosophy… Kant argued that ordinary scientific reasoning applies only to the phenomenal world. (Tomas Nagel, The Last Word, 198)
Many scientists, if primarily only in the 17th and 18th centuries, were deeply puzzled, or even saddened, by the prison-houseof the mind metaphor of mind and knowledge in philosophy. This subjectivist prison is of our own making, as it were, because it is our minds that we are trapped in and which subsequently determine our knowledge and possibly are responsible for small or massive falsehoods and misrepresentations of the world and the nature of our real relation to it. It is not only the philosopher who can’t escape this mental prison of ours, but also the scientist. Scientists can no more escape from the mind’s limits and inbuilt contingencies than can a mystic, visionary, artist or theoretical physicist or mathematician.
Consequent to the sceptical scenarios and possibilities that go hand in hand with the prison house metaphor, a number of scientists made the same kind of points about the mind-world, internal-external, divide And they sometimes did so in terms as forceful as any philosopher had previously done so or could manage in the near future. We can consider here the case of Hume.
So because of science and philosophy’s slavery to mind and experience, all the big epistemic and sceptical questions remained open during the time of Hume and, indeed, thereafter:
1)Does the human mind distort reality in any or some way?
2)Does the mind reconstitute or censor the sense impressions, or other kinds of representation, that are delivered to our minds or, perhaps more correctly, that result from the world’s ‘stimulations’ of our ‘sense modalities’ (to use Quine’s later terms) that arise come from them?
3)Or, on the other hand, does the mind really faithfully simply replicate - or reflect - the world as it genuinely is in itself as naïve and other kids of realists have always believed? That is, is mind a genuine ‘mirror of nature’ (to use Rorty’s effective metaphor)?
The answers to these philosophically and scientifically self-referential or reflexive questions about mind’s role when, say, it interprets, infers, conjectures, observes, experiences, or when it theorises about the deliverance of the senses, can only be answered by a fully regimented by a systematic scrutiny of the mind itself, or, for example, so Hume, Kant and, later, Husserl believed. Such a scrutiny, in the tradition, was not always taken to be necessarily Cartesian or introspectivist in nature. In the 19th century, for instance, it became an empirical and observation-based‘research project’ instead – or this was the case, at the least, when it came to the late 19th centurynaturalistic and empiricist scientific psychology and the resultant - and also the antecedent determining - philosophies that stood besides it, if only to a mitigated degree.But well before all this, for example, Kant had formulated mind-way position between psychological rationalism and empiricism had provided an alternative that also stressed the evidently un-ignorable importance and determining affects and effects on the nature of mind and its supposed mirroring – but actually constitution of ! - the world. Kant’s effect on the scientific mind,its self-views and truth claims have lasted until the present day. They had a particularly strong, interesting and informative effect on early 20th century German and Central European physics*. However, on our terms, we find Nagel, for example, pontificating on the profoundly anti-realism effects of Kant’s otherwise seeming objectivist transcendental idealism (Nagel, 1986). It does so, one must assume, because even though Kant’s philosophy is transcendental and objectivist in nature, it still remains, nonetheless, a transcendental idealism. That is enough of a reason, Nagel believes, to reject Kantianism outright.
Even if the Kantian discovered and then explicated the precise nature of the mind’s a priori knowable, and therefore necessary, transcendental faculties, concepts and categories. This objectivist slant to Kant’s stance, with the status and priority it gives to the a priori features of the mind, was still not taken to be objectivist enough, or sufficiently non-subjectivist, by many rationalists in his day and, for example, Husserl at the end of the 19th century. It was not seen, therefore, as being capable, ultimately, of securing and determining certainty, truth, and the true nature of reality. It could not do so because, rationalists claimed and have claimed ever since (see, again, Nagel’s 198), the world and everything else in it is still seen through an objectionable thing – the mind1 And all this even if the mind does indeed always wear the transcendental spectacles that Kant argues it does, and; as, he also stresses, that we can never take off. This still does not allow us to perceive or cognise a concept-less world as it would be cognised and perceived from Tom Nagel’s‘nowhere’; or from God’s infinite and utterly comprehensive mode of presentation (i.e., if such a presentation could ever really be taken as, well, a Fregean presentation).
Again, Kantian scientists realised, just as did Humean philosophers and scientists, that the mind is the first port of call when it comes to both science and philosophy. However, in Kantianism, unlike in Humeanism, what the mind is taken to do to the world, as it were, it did so necessarily. In Kant’s own terms, it does things to our incoming ‘intuitions’ that consequently create just the kind of experiences that we not only have, but must have. They set, that is, the ‘conditions of all possible experience’ (of every rational homo-sapien), as it has often been put. Our experiences are determined and shaped by the mind’s - a priori knowable - categories and concepts, as well as its ‘laws’ and law-governed ‘judgements’ and cognitions - which are also the necessary determinants of the ultimate conditions of experience.
All this was Kant’s nod of approval, as it were, to the rationalists and rationalism’s previously profoundly important position within both western philosophy and Western thought as a whole. However, Kant also tried to, in a manner of speaking, please Hume and the Humeans by acknowledging the importance of experience or what Hume called ‘sense impressions’. Kant did so, in a sense, by turning Hume’s ‘sense impressions’ into ‘intuitions’ and then ‘phenomena’. According to Kant and the later Kantians, then, the mind did indeed play a fundamental role in constituting and structuring, but not ‘organising’(this word has unwanted volitional and cognitive connotations), our knowledge and experience of the world. However, unlike the contingent, uncertain, and even sometimes arbitrary items and faculties of the mind and experience that the empiricists accepted, Kant’s universal mind, or transcendental ego, is utterly determined by its a priori set of categories, concepts and its Aristotelian logical faculties. All of which provides us with an utterly determinate, fully constituted and structured world of objects, substances, properties, space, time, causal laws and so on.
Hume’s rationalist contemporaries, as well as Kant later, might well have asked him:
Can your empiricism provide science and philosophy with all the fundamental and vital determinants of all our claims to truth and knowledge as well as the necessary and vital nature and constitution of the mind?
The above, of course, begs the question in favour of both the mind having anything within it that is necessary, as well as the rationalist – and, then, sometimes scientific - assumption that certainty is both possible in science (outside maths and logic) and essential to it. Kant’s transcendental ego, or non-empirical self, specifically, does not, then, belong to only one man, or even to every or any man. In a sense it belongs to no man. It is, instead, a universal and a, as it were, ‘necessary being’; or, at the least, it is necessary something. It is something that lies at a transcendental angle, as it were, to the empirical world. In all these senses, then,Kant’s posited TE is quite similar to the case of the later ‘the Absolute’, spoken of by Hegel, Bradley and many other 19th century idealists. More specifically, to our scientific concerns, the objectivities and necessities of the TE provided science with its own objectivities and necessities in a kind of isomorphic, recursive/enteric and casual kind of a way. At the least, this was what many philosophers and scientists believed to be the case, at least up until the early 20th century (as already mentioned)
Kant believed that through understanding and then reason, and when suitably under-impressed by any strongly anti-sensualist rationalism, we could still get to know the mind in its fullness and complexity. By doing so, reason could see if the mind and the sense modalities do indeed distort reality; just as the rationalists and sceptics claimed. In addition, classical representationalisms, of all kinds, too inevitably brought about very real sceptical possibilities (see the later Section on Davidson). (Alternatively, perhaps the mind censors in certain ways instead.) Hopefully, however, scientists and philosophers, especially of the empiricist non-rationalist kind, still believed, or perhaps simply hoped, that the mind represented nature or reality faithfully; and they did so no matter how counter-philosophical or even naïve such a positive stance might have seemed to Kant and others.
Thus both Hume and Kant, as well as many later scientists and philosophers, accepted - if not happily - the fact that the mind, in so many important ways, is an unavoidable medium - or, indeed, obstacle - through which the world must pass. Many also believed that Hume, in broad detail, was right – the ‘science of Man’ is - or should be - First Philosophy. (Many also believed that Kan was right.) In fact they believed that it is or should be First Science as well. Even when philosophers and scientists rejected the precise nature of Hume’s empiricist emphasis on mind, its relation to world and its sceptical implications, they might have accepted, instead, a Kantian position that equally stressed the mind’s prime role. But, yet again, it is still the mind that is of vital importance in Kantianism. Right up to and beyond Quine, these - sometimes subjectivist, sometimes Kantian – admissions (if they are admissions) are not necessarily ones of our scientific failure when it comes to the desired supreme prizes that are true third-person objectivity and certainty. Instead, they may only be admissions that stress or explicitly recognise that the mind still has, ultimately, the last word on all issues scientific and, indeed, non-scientific (as is evident to most non-scientists anyway). How could it be otherwise? And , in any case, what’s so bad about this?
To get back to Quine.
Although Kant is often said to have ‘fused’ empiricism and rationalism together, Kant’s transcendental idealism is still not one of the ‘five points’ (7) at which empiricism took ‘a turn for the better’, in Quine’s eyes (7). No. If Kant did not throw the baby, Empiricism, then he did throw out too much of its empirical bath water. Kant too still remained far too rationalistic for the likes of J.S. Mill,the logical positivists and neo-empiricists (as well as the traditional ones), as well as to Quine, one must presume, himself. Kant might have found room in his philosophy for ‘phenomena’, ‘intuitions’ and experience, but all these things were strictly regulated by a transcendental ego with its own transcendental structures, faculties, concepts and categories that are far from being empirical or empiricist in any manner whatsoever. Experience in and of itself might still have been empirical and contingent to the Kantian, but it would have still come under the guidance of its strict and demanding master – the transcendental ego. However,this empiricist distinction (or the scheme/content distinction to use Davidson’s terms) between the trans ego and empirical experience was thought bogus by Kant (as it is to Davidson). There would be no experience, contingent or otherwise, Kant argues, if the ground rules for all possible experience were not already laid down, aprioristically, by the non-empirical ego. Even if the Kantian acknowledged empirical and contingent phenomena, he still believed that the experience or cognition of such things in the first place is a matter of the mind as it is at all times and in all places. It is a matter of how we perceive or experience the world through the crystal light – haze! - generated by the logical, nomological and metaphysically telescopic lenses of the trans ego.
So Kant did not provide empiricism, the empiricists thought, with any ‘turn for the better’, as Quine puts it.
However, Kant’s philosophy of an a priori constituting, structuring, categorising and conceptualising ego provided a much needed kick up the backside for both naïve realists and extreme empiricists, just as Hume had done to Kant himself (and indeed various total rationalists), thus knocking him out of his prior ‘dogmatic slumber’. From Kant onwards, empiricists could not ignore the numerous Kantian challenges to - and problematisations of - pure empiricism. When they did ignore them, or ignore the many consequences of Kantianism, such empiricists simply appeared, to Kantians and also certain empiricists, as naïve realists appear to the empiricists themselves. The Kantian challenge to pure empiricism continued into the 20th century and, many would argue, is still with us today. (We have already mentioned the interesting case of the good Kantians Mach and Einstein.)
Again, many empiricists, though they often took on board Kant, did not exactly become Kantians or adopt Kantianism in any strong form – they simply took notice of it (if only, sometimes, surreptitiously).
Davidson on Quine’s Scientism and His Not So Superior Empiricism
We can partly clarify Quine’s mitigated empiricism, or logical empiricism, by bringing in his fellow American philosopher and near-contemporary Donald Davidson. We can say here that Davidson’s work is in many ways of vital importance to any thorough attempt to grasp and understand Quine’s overall philosophy and its commitments.
One of the most important ways in which Quine goes against the pure empiricism of the tradition is seen in the case of his view on conceptual schemes. Traditionally, from Hume to sense-data theorists, many philosophers took experience, sense impressions or sense-data to be what was once called ‘the Given’ (see….) Such data or impressions were seen as being pure in nature - untouched by our prior concepts, beliefs and bits of established evidence. Quine does not believe that there is such a pure relation between the observer, as tabula rasa, and pure representations or impressions. Instead Quine thinks that when we
talk about the world we must already impose upon the world some conceptual scheme peculiar to our own special language. (FLPV, 53)
In that sense, then, this is a slightly Kantian, as it were, position on experience. It is worth stressing, then, that Davidson, nonetheless, still believes that Quine, and other logical empiricists, still places too much emphasis on ‘sensory stimulations’ and their resultant ‘sense-events’ within consciousness. Perhaps Davidson believes that Quine still treats them as either his own supra-scientific version of the Given or that - considering his general position on this - he may as well do so.
However, we can also stress, on Quine’s behalf, important point here is that although he does indeed see sensory stimulations and sense-events as being of primary importance in both empiricist philosophy and science, and indeed to be the very starting point of all the natural sciences, it is still nevertheless the case that sensory stimulations are not seen to come to us untouched or unpolluted by prior concepts, categories, beliefs, theories and by bits of prior evidence. Instead, according to Quine we ‘impose upon the world’ our concepts or conceptual schemes. So although sensory stimulations and sense-events are important in science, and, indeed, evidently so, in Quine’s naturalistic philosophical scheme such things still do not come to us as epistemically pure virgins. But even though they are conceptually organised, structured or categorised, either non-consciously (in the brain and general nervous system) or consciously, Quine still sees them as being of primary importance in both philosophy and natural science.
Davidson nonetheless still believes that Quine is far too atomistic, scientistic and empiricist (in other ways as well) in his work. More importantly, he strongly rejects his aforementioned stress on sensory stimulations, sense-events and the resultant ‘positings’ - of objects and events - from them. Moreover, Davidson completely rejects all the implications of this. He takes one such implication to be a continued belief in - and reliance upon-representations. This, according to Davidson, he takes us right back to the ‘ideas’ of Locke and the ‘sense impressions’ of Hume; even if only in certain and particular ways.
Not only all that, and also more importantly, Quine’s potion brings along with it a parallel belief in - and acceptance of – relativistic conceptual schemes. Quine has made much of conceptual schemes; especially and usually when taken in their scientific guise. More specifically, we can express Quine’s non-Davidsonian position thus:
conceptual schemes
↑
representations
↑
sense-events
↑
sensory stimulations
↑
world and its objects and events
If we accept representations we are also very likely to accept Davidson’ well-known ‘scheme/content’ distinction. This stresses the difference between representations-brought about by ‘sensory stimulations’ in Quine’s case - and the conceptual scheme which organises them in a seemingly almost aprioristic way. Davidson rejects this scheme/content distinction completely. What he rejects is not only the plurality of conceptual schemes and the resultant problems that their existence could create for philosophers (indeed, for all of us), but the ‘very idea’ ( Davidson, 19) ofthe ‘conceptual scheme’ in the singular. Davidson’s primary targets are the conceptual relativists who believe that conceptual schemes are, or could be, utterly prior to what Davidson calls ‘content’. Thus we have the outcome of conceptual relativism and everything that comes along with the belief in conceptual schemes.
Davidson denies this temporal and conceptual hierarchy in which the conceptual scheme is primary and the most important part of the scheme/content distinction. Davidson loosely accepts the idea of conceptual schemes in the plural - but if and only if such schemes are not seen as either coming before ‘content’ or sensory stimulations or seen as being more important than them. Davidson thinks that objects and events come to us immediately. They don’ come first because there is no first (or second for that matter). There can be no genuine or effective division of scheme from content if one believes that the conceptual scheme does not come first (or come second. It comes along with our direct and immediate experience of - and cognitions about – objects and events. In fact, the metaphor ‘coming along with’ doesn’t even make sense either in this Davidsonian context. Again, we do not ‘infer’ or ‘posit’ objects and events. And neither do we mechanically somehow apply our conceptual scheme to the world and thus have its objects and events determined by it.
Davidson does not deny the existence of concepts. How could he? He does not deny that we can apply, adopt and change our concepts over time. What he doesn’t accept is that there is ever a time when we do not experience objects and events as objects and events. If we do any applying, adopting and changing of our concepts it will always be from the position of an already-conceptualised world of objects and events. So Davidson is not a conceptual reactionary. Thus he accepted, loosely, the plurality of conceptual schemes. But he only does so if and only if they are not perceived as the relativist and others perceive them – as part of the scheme/content distinction just described. That is, if we do not think of the conceptual scheme as the exclusive determinant of our views of the world and its objects. If we do see them in this way, then we will believe, as many have and still do believe, that there are or could be massive differences between certain conceptual schemes. Philosophers and social theorists have made much of this distinction and these differences. We are told, for example, about conceptual schemes, Foucauldian ‘epistemes’, Kuhnian ‘paradigm shifts’ and the like. Many philosophers also often stress, for example (as is well known), the fact that Eskimos have fifty words or so for fifty different types of snow*. Davidson (see also Haak 19 and Strawson, 1959), on the other hand, happily accepts many differences between cultures. But he does not accept the metaphysical and epistemic scheme/content distinction and the supposedly radical ontological differences between certain given conceptual schemes that engender the consequential belief in the radical mutual un-translatability or incompatibility between them. Even in the case of Davidson’s well-known ‘radical interpretation’ scenario (Davidson,198) we can trust our Quinian ‘analytic hypotheses’ and must also ultimately assume the natives to be rational – at least in a minimum sense. It also follows, to Davidson, that they must also have largely true beliefs about their environment. That is, they must berational like us. And have largely true beliefs like us. If we believe in the relativist’s notion, on the other hand, of radically divergent conceptual schemes, this could - or would - not always or necessarilybe the case.
Even if there were huge differences between conceptual schemes, the differences would not be due to the scheme/content distinction as it is seen and worked upon by relativists and others. However, if one does accept Davidson’s position on conceptual schemes (therefore also the non-factuality of the scheme/content distinction), then we will believe that the relativist’s extreme differences between cultures will not be as likely or as frequent as relativists believe. If massive disjunctions and even logical contradictions were the case, however, then the result would indeed be a radical un-translatability and therefore, potentially, mutual incompatibility. Surely this would be a negative result for the relativist (and the rest of us); not the positive one (in various philosophical and political ways) often claimed by them.
Davidson, like Nelson Goodman (see his 19 ), is a conceptual-scheme pluralist; not a conceptual scheme relativist. He happily accepts the plurality of conceptual schemes. Indeed, perhaps contrary to Quine, he does not appreciate any ‘scientistic’ talk about the ‘ultimacy’ of the scientific scheme in relation to, for example, political schemes or the Wittgensteinian ‘language-games’ of art, religion and the rest.
Now we need to ask:
i) Does Quine himself believe in the radical divergences of such conceptual schemes?
ii) Does he believe, like the relativist, ‘in the very idea’ of relativistic and massively divergent conceptual scheme?
He certainly believes in the primacy of sensory stimulations and the parallel importance of the conceptual-scheme role of physics in philosophical, if not all, matters and disputes:
i) Does Quine believe that Davidson is right in his anti-representationalism?
ii) How does he reject Davidson’s negative position on his own sense-events and sensory stimulations?
The problem is that because Quine thinks that sensory stimulations are primary and required of necessity, as it were, by science, then this could and often does result, Davidson sometimes obliquely argues, in the resultant ‘scientistic’ and positivistic desire to make the scientific ‘conceptual scheme’ ultimate and fundamental. And this as a direct result of sensory stimulations being taken as fundamental - or perhaps even foundational -by Quine and others. This would indeed have negative results, in Davidson’s eyes*. Davidson, however, not only rejects Quine’s sense-events, but also his ‘scientism’ and his– mitigated – (logical) positivism.
If one believes that the scheme-content distinction is false; and that all cultures, including our own, must therefore perceive the world and its contents directly, as it is often put; then not only would we reject the fantastic claims of Difference by conceptual relativists, but we would also have good reasons to reject the desired primacy of science or of its scientific scheme/s. If we were Davidsonian, on the other hand, we would not even try to make physics king. We would not, in parallel, then go on and make Quinian logical empiricism, naturalism and physicalism the lords and princes of a new scientific Monarchy. Thus, we would disclaim, like Nelson Goodman has done, the ‘scientistic’ or positivistic attempts to become the explanatory monopolists for this whole and new kingdom. We would see this monopolist endeavour for what it truly is: a self-aggrandising attempt - taken solely on behalf of science and physics (more precisely) - to put their own precious schemes on top. Davidsonians would be, on the other hand, just good conceptual scheme pluralists; not conceptual scheme relativists.
