Robert Sinclair

Quine’s references to his “pragmatism” have often been seen as indicating a possible link to the American pragmatism of Peirce, James, and Dewey. In Quine, Conceptual Pragmatism, and the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction, I argue that the influence of pragmatism on Quine’s philosophy is more accurately traced to C.I. Lewis’s conceptual pragmatism. Quine’s epistemology shares many affinities with Lewis’s view, which depicts knowledge as a conceptual system pragmatically revised in light of future experience. This claim is defended through an examination of several key episodes in Quine’s philosophical development, including his graduate work for Lewis, critical transition in the 1940s, midcentury criticisms of analyticity, and later turn to naturalized epistemology. This historical account highlights an underappreciated element of the epistemological background to Quine’s criticism of the analytic–synthetic distinction. It is further argued that Lewis’s view provides the central epistemological framework for understanding the form and content of Quine’s later naturalized epistemology.

Alex Orenstein: “Inscrutability Scrutinized”: This is a reply to Quine's comments on an earlier paper. In his comments on that earlier paper Quine acknowledged that distinguishing the inscrutability of reference from the indeterminacy of meaning might be preferable to other of his ways of referring to this distinction. He also agreed that inscrutability of reference is a strong claim, a “thesis”, proven as per model theory. His examples of inscrutability are examined and supplemented with other examples. By contrast, indeterminacy of meaning is merely a “conjecture,” a product of Quine's distinctive behaviorist approach. It is made clear that Quine's distinctive ‘stimulus meaning’ is a non‐decomposable idiom. Stimulus meaning is no more a species of meaning than toy horse is a species of horse. I exploit a view he introduced elsewhere when discussing choosing between intuitionist and classical logic. Quine's ersatz conception of meaning and its byproducts should be regarded along similar lines as the intuitionism versus classical logic debate: not as “denying a doctrine but as changing the subject.”

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy, 'reification'. A relative newcomer to the world of logical fallacies, reification is difficult to place and its status as a fallacy not that well understood. In general, reification involves taking something that is abstract, like an idea or concept, and making it concrete, or assigning it a concrete, 'real' existence. The standard analysis of reification presents it as a fallacy of presumption, which can be avoided by minimizing the assignment of causal agency to the abstractions used in logical reasoning. However, the perhaps deeper and more serious consequences of what has been called “pernicious reification” have been further explored by the pragmatist philosophers William James and John Dewey. Both philosophers emphasize the indispensable value found through the use of abstract thought.

These introductory remarks provide an overview of the project Quine develops in his Kant lectures. Much of the lectures are aimed at locating mentalistic discourse within a scientific, physicalist framework, where this forms part of a scientific, if abstract, explanation of how we come to know the external world and other minds without an appeal to mental entities or other sensibilia. I further attempt to illuminate Quine’s physicalist rendering of perception through a comparison with Austin’s ordinary language approach to perception. I conclude with a brief description of the essays found in section II.

Recent trends in philosophical naturalism have their chief source in Quine's influential call to 'naturalize' epistemology, which recommended that philosophical concerns be seen as simply one part of a scientifically informed attempt to understand the natural world. The result is the view described as 'scientific naturalism' where philosophy now must defer to science when addressing questions of knowledge, meaning and existence. This naturalist turn is sometimes portrayed as a novel and radical transformation of philosophy, one that holds the promise of genuine philosophical progress. However, there have been many other twentieth century American philosophers trained in different contexts and issues who have been..

In comparing his conception of empiricism with that of other like-minded philosophers at the end of his 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism,' W. V. Quine famously emphasized the broader scope of his pragmatist commitment in these terms:Carnap, Lewis, and others take a pragmatic stand on the question of choosing between language forms, scientific frameworks; but their pragmatism leaves off at the imagined boundary between the analytic and the synthetic. In repudiating such a boundary I espouse a more thorough pragmatism.Such remarks have resulted in Quine's work being associated with the American pragmatist tradition, where he is viewed as either continuing or reviving some of the main themes and issues representative of..

In this book, W. V. Quine’s Immanuel Kant Lectures entitled Science and Sensibilia are published for the first time in English. These lectures represent an important stage in the development of Quine’s later thought, where he is more explicit about the importance of physicalist constraints in his account of the steps from sensory stimulation to scientific theory, and in further using them to assess the extent to which mental vocabulary is defensible. Taken as a unit, these lectures fill an important gap in our understanding of his philosophical development from his 1973 work The Roots of Reference to his later work. The volume further contains an introduction that outlines the content and philosophical significance of the lectures. In addition, several essays written by leading scholars of Quine’s philosophy provide further insight into the important issues raised in the lectures.

This essay explores the tension between those who find value in the example of the religious life and others who take the intellectual bankruptcy of religious doctrines as recommending the complete abandonment of religion. It briefly describes John Dewey’s attempt to overcome this tension through a rethinking of the religious life and the sources of its continuing value and purpose. Dewey responds to this conflict over religion by attempting to emancipate its fundamental valuefrom the constraints of any supernatural affiliation. He thereby suggests a more inclusive conception of the religious experience that permeates all aspects of social life. It is argued that Dewey’s attempt to find alternative outlets for religious values within our larger social community provides a better platform for dialogue across social divisions, since it does not begin from a secular standpoint that simply rejects the import of any sort of religious value.