Abstract
Quine’s views on ontology and naturalism are well-known but rarely considered in tandem. According to my interpretation the connection between them is vital. I read Quine as a global epistemic structuralist. Quine thought we only ever know objects qua solutions to puzzles about significant intersections in observations. Objects are always accessed descriptively, via their roles in our best theory. Quine’s Kant lectures contain an early version of epistemic structuralism with uncharacteristic remarks about the mental. Here Quine embraces mitigated anomalous monism, allowing introspection and the availability in principle of full physical descriptions of perceptual events. Later versions abandon these ideas. My epistemic-structural interpretation explains why. I argue first-person introspective access to mental states is incompatible with global epistemic structuralism.
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Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to the editor of this volume, Robert Sinclair, and to the organizers of the Quine symposium at the 2018 APA-Central conference in Chicago where I presented a version of this paper, with special thanks to Sander Verhaegh and his head of department. I am also indebted to the audience at that symposium for their questions, especially to Peter Hylton, and to Fraser MacBride. This research was supported by the AHRC project grant ‘The Age of Metaphysical Revolution: David Lewis and His Place in the History of Analytic Philosophy’.
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Janssen-Lauret, F. (2019). Quine, Ontology, and Physicalism. In: Sinclair, R. (eds) Science and Sensibilia by W. V. Quine. History of Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04909-6_10
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