Quine

Works

One short paper did most of the damage.

• “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) attacks the analytic and synthetic distinction and the reductionist claim that each statement has its own range of confirming experiences.
• Word and Object (1960) develops the indeterminacy of translation through radical translation and the gavagai case.
• “Epistemology Naturalized” (1969) proposes that epistemology become a chapter of psychology, abandoning the search for a foundation outside science.
• Ontological Relativity and later essays develop the inscrutability of reference and ontological commitment.

Central ideas

Four, and the first is what makes the rest follow.

• Confirmation holism: statements face the tribunal of experience as a corporate body rather than individually. Any statement can be held true come what may, if sufficiently drastic adjustments are made elsewhere in the system.
• Against the analytic and synthetic distinction: attempts to define analyticity circle through synonymy and definition without escaping the circle, so the supposed class of truths-by-meaning is not marked off by anything.
• The indeterminacy of translation: rival translation manuals can fit all possible behavioural evidence equally well and disagree with each other, which makes meaning underdetermined by everything that could count as evidence for it.
• Naturalised epistemology: there is no first philosophy outside science from which to certify science, so the study of how belief is actually produced replaces the search for foundations.

Distinctive vocabulary

Three terms whose casual use flattens them.

• Holism, in his sense: a thesis about how confirmation and disconfirmation distribute across a system. Not the general idea that things are connected.
• Indeterminacy of translation: rival manuals fitting all the evidence and conflicting with each other. Not the observation that translation is hard.
• Web of belief: a figure for a system with observation at its periphery and logic near its centre. Not a network of ideas in the loose sense.

Debates and disagreements

The arguments run both toward and away from the conclusions he drew.

• Whether holism is compatible with the analytic and synthetic distinction after all. Grice and Strawson argued that a distinction can be real and useful even when no non-circular definition is available, which is a general objection to the form of the argument.
• Whether indeterminacy of translation follows from underdetermination, or whether it depends on a behaviourism about meaning that was independently abandoned.
• Whether naturalised epistemology abandons the normative question — how beliefs OUGHT to be formed — or relocates it inside the sciences.

Intellectual relationships

He ends one programme and starts several.

• Carnap was his teacher and the target: logical empiricism's analytic framework is what the 1951 paper takes apart.
• Duhem's underdetermination of theory by evidence is the predecessor, and the joint thesis usually carries both names.
• Popper, a reference elsewhere in this work, is the position holism most directly damages: if no hypothesis faces experience alone, the decisive falsification his method requires is rarely available.
• Davidson developed the interpretive consequences; Putnam, in this same lens lineage, accepted the holism and rejected the behaviourism it arrived with.
• The naturalising move opened the way for cognitive science to be treated as epistemology's evidence base.

How it changes this reading

Quine is named in the lineage of the Epistemological lens.

• Holism supplies the reason a reading cannot be refuted by a single detail, and cannot be secured by one either. Adjusting an assumption elsewhere will always absorb an inconvenient fact, which is a property of interpretive systems and not a flaw in any particular one.
• That is the honest counterweight to the falsifiability discipline this work borrows elsewhere. Naming what would change a reading is still worth doing; expecting that a single observation could settle it is not something Quine's picture supports.
• Indeterminacy adds a second caution about recovering meaning: rival interpretations can fit everything available and still disagree, so a reading's fit with the evidence is weaker support than it feels like.
• It is not evidence about anyone's beliefs or meanings.

Useful comparisons

The lens names four references who each deny the self-sufficient knower.

• Michael Polanyi: tacit knowing, and the collapse of a performance when its subsidiaries are made focal.
• W. V. O. Quine: confirmation holism, and the web that meets experience only at its edges.
• Hilary Putnam: externalism, with reference fixed by world and community.
• Lorraine Code: the situated knower, and the question of whose knowledge is credited.

Where the ideas meet

All four refuse foundations.

• None treats knowledge as resting on a base of individually certified statements.
• All four hold that something beyond a single mind checking a single proposition does necessary work.
• Each treats the conditions of knowing as belonging to epistemology rather than preceding it.

Where they part

The four refusals are not the same refusal.

• Quine's holism is logical and systemic: it concerns how confirmation distributes. Polanyi's is phenomenological: it concerns how a performance is structured. Neither entails the other and they are frequently merged.
• Putnam accepted the holism and rejected the behaviourism about meaning that the indeterminacy argument depends on, so citing the two as one epistemology skips a real disagreement.
• Code's situated knowledge is about power and credibility, a normative and political question that naturalised epistemology has been charged with losing rather than answering.

Limits

• Holism is a thesis about the structure of confirmation in systems of belief and establishes nothing about any person's beliefs.
• Indeterminacy concerns translation between languages under behavioural evidence; extending it to interpretation generally is an extension rather than an application.

Criticisms

The objections are strong and long-standing.

• The argument against analyticity is charged with demanding a standard of definition no useful distinction could meet, which would guarantee too much.
• The indeterminacy thesis leans on a behaviourism about meaning that the field abandoned on independent grounds.
• Naturalised epistemology is charged with dropping the normative question rather than relocating it.
• Holism taken strictly makes it hard to explain why science ever revises anything in particular, since the choice of what to adjust is left unconstrained.

Common misreadings

Four uses this placement does not license.

• Using holism to mean that everything is connected, which drops the specific claim about how confirmation distributes.
• Reading indeterminacy of translation as the observation that translation is difficult or lossy.
• Treating holism as a licence to hold any belief, when the point is that revision is always possible somewhere rather than that no revision is ever required.
• Citing him and Putnam as a single epistemological position.

What remains outside this idea

• It cannot establish anything about any person's beliefs or meanings.
• It cannot convert a thesis about systems of belief into a fact about a life.