Abstract
Did Quine respond to the Kant-like question of what makes objectivity possible? And if so, what was his answer? I think Quine did have an answer, which is in fact a central theme in his philosophy. For his epistemology was not concerned with the question whether we have knowledge of the external world. His philosophy takes for granted that physics provides the most fundamental account of reality that we have. And like many positivists including Carnap, he takes that sort of question to have a fundamentally changed and newly tractable character. His more general epistemological question is what is actually involved in a human subject coming to have knowledge of the objective world, when limited to the deliverances of his or her own senses. Most of the story is well-known, but an essential link was not fully explicit until 1990s: the doctrine of Pre-Established Harmony.
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Notes
- 1.
The question has been examined before by Peter Hylton (2013). His discussion is superb, but his angles differ—his discussion of Carnap goes further than what I have attempted here, and his topic of logic versus psychology is also absent here. Instead, I emphasize the situation of science—physics and mathematics, primarily—that was the principal motivation for Logical Empiricism and, I suggest, for Quine. I then closely examine the central role of Pre-Established Harmony in Quine’s system, and close by addressing a couple of worries.
- 2.
Actual proofs of their consistency came somewhat later, we are told. Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), is known to have made the same discovery (‘Hyperbolic Geometry’) somewhat earlier, but he did not publicise the result. Elliptic geometry was advanced by Bernard Riemann (1826–1866).
- 3.
You could say that where Kant has transcendental logic, Carnap has mere logic, and Quine has psychology; see Hylton (2013) for more on this theme.
- 4.
Andrew Lugg says that this was also Russell’s stance. I have downplayed comparisons with Russell not because they are not interesting or relevant—far from it—but because Russell’s views changed so often (a sign of intellectual honesty, Lugg points out). I haven’t the space necessary to do them anything like justice.
- 5.
The argument by ‘proxy-functions’ (as at Quine 1968a) is that for any one-to-one function f which is not identity, then for any sentence ‘Fa’, ‘The f of a is the f of an F’ will have the same truth-value; similarly for two-place predicates etc. Sentence-connectives and quantifiers are unaffected.
- 6.
In the Kant Lectures Quine elaborates: ‘These soon reach a point where the term “similarity” becomes incongruous. For the dog that has learned to salivate at the sound of the dinner bell, the sound has come to induce the same response that might be induced by the smell of meat; but it would be queer to call the sound and the smell similar. Let us use Roger Shepard’s more neutral word: proximity (1962). When we come to recognize someone’s voice, his voice becomes proximate to the sight of his face. The ground of stimulus generalization is proximity, not just subjective similarity. Proximate perceptual events are ones that are similar in respect of the responses elicited’ (Quine, This volume, 29).
- 7.
In the Kant Lectures—in 1980—Quine was right at the verge of the doctrine of Pre-established harmony. He writes: ‘We noted earlier that mental terms publicly learned come to apply to private cases by extrapolation along similarity lines. The continued application of terms to publicly accessible cases proceeds in the same way, but these cases are happily open to continuing check. The widespread success of such checks testifies to a general intersubjective harmony in standards of perceptual proximity: people generally come out alike in extrapolating their terms from one checkpoint to another’ (Quine, This volume, 31). But he does not mention Darwin or any possible explanation. He does have a Kant-like thought: ‘It is a pre-established harmony without which the learning of words would be impossible.’(ibid.) But he runs off the rails slightly in appealing if conditionally to neurological similarity, which both earlier and later he thought was a mistake: ‘If similarity or proximity of perceptual events is neural similarity, then this preestablished intersubjective harmony of standards is a matter of anatomical similarity in the main, and stands to reason. Community of training in a shared environment has also of course contributed.’(ibid)
- 8.
See Quine (1996, 476–477); also in an unpublished letter to Davidson Quine worries whether his own philosophy can be called ‘Empiricist’ (MS Am 2587) rather than something like, one gathers, ‘Idealist’.
- 9.
- 10.
Work on this paper was supported by the Visiting Professorship provided by the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Hradec Králové in Summer Term 2018. For comments I thank Peter Hylton, Andrew Lugg, Jaroslav Peregrin and Robert Sinclair.
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Kemp, G. (2019). Quine and the Kantian Problem of Objectivity. 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_6
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