Underdetermination, Realism, and Transcendental Metaphysics in Quine

Abstract

A certain variety of anti-realist thinks of accepted natural science, or significant portions of it, as not literally true, or as in some sense not measuring up to the standards for realism revealed by philosophers. By contrast, the naturalism that Quine so persistently espoused is by its own lights a species of scientific realism. It holds that there is no point of view that stands above science — the various sciences including mathematics and logic — from which one could gainsay or substantially re-interpret large swaths of its findings. It is naturalized epistemology, but also naturalized metaphysics, even if Quine did not call it that.¹ Quine is explicit that the very ideas of truth, reference, objectivity and so on have only the sense afforded to them within natural science itself (or rather: regimented natural science — roughly, the most streamlined version of it as represented in the first-order predicate calculus with identity). Realism about the external world, about the past and future, and about induction, to take the most general examples, are by and large assumed by science (and by common sense); there is no other point of view, no higher standard, no further question with respect to such commitments. To be sure, they are factual assumptions that could conceivably be overturned, but are as well-founded as any part of the general naturalistic world view.