Publications
Books
Abstract
During the past few decades, a radical shift has occurred in how philosophers conceive of the relation between science and philosophy. A great number of analytic philosophers have adopted what is commonly called a ‘naturalistic’ approach, arguing that their inquiries ought to be in some sense continuous with science. Where early analytic philosophers often relied on a sharp distinction between science and philosophy—the former an empirical discipline concerned with fact, the latter an a priori discipline concerned with meaning—philosophers today largely follow Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) in his seminal rejection of this distinction.
This book offers a comprehensive study of Quine’s naturalism. Building on Quine’s published corpus as well as a thousands of unpublished letters, notes, lectures, papers, proposals, and annotations from the Quine archives, this book aims to reconstruct both the nature (chapters 2-4) and the development (chapter 5-7) of his naturalism. The appendix collects five previously unpublished notes, letters, and papers—documents which shed new light on Quine's revolutionary ideas about the relation between science and philosophy.
Reviews: NDPR Review (here), BJHP (here), PhilQuarterly (here), PhilReview (here), Metascience (here).
Edited volumes
American Philosophy and the Intellectual Migration: Pragmatism, Logical Empiricism, Phenomenology, Critical Theory
Abstract
How did immigrant scholars such as Rudolf Carnap, Max Horkheimer, and Alfred Schütz influence the development of American philosophy? Why was the U.S. community more receptive to logical empiricism than to critical theory or phenomenology? This volume brings together fifteen historians of philosophy to explore the impact of the intellectual migration.
In the 1930s, the rise of fascism forced dozens of philosophers to flee to the United States. Prominent logical empiricists acquired positions at prestigious U.S. universities. Critical theorists moved their Frankfurt School to Columbia University. And a group of phenomenologists taught at the New School for Social Research. Though many refugee scholars acquired some American following, logical empiricism had the biggest impact on academic philosophy. The exiled empiricists helped the country turn into a bastion of ‘analytic philosophy’ after the war. Phenomenology and critical theory became prominent schools from the 1970s onwards and continue to be influential in American philosophy today.
This is the first book to investigate to the migration from an integrated perspective, bringing together historians of American philosophy, logical empiricism, phenomenology, and critical theory.
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Abstract
This book contains a selection of papers from the workshop *Women in the History of Analytic Philosophy* held in October 2019 in Tilburg, the Netherlands. It is the first volume devoted to the role of women in early analytic philosophy. It discusses the ideas of ten female philosophers and covers a period of over a hundred years, beginning with the contribution to the Significs Movement by Victoria, Lady Welby in the second half of the nineteenth century, and ending with Ruth Barcan Marcus’s celebrated version of quantified modal logic after the Second World War. The book makes clear that women contributed substantially to the development of analytic philosophy in all areas of philosophy, from logic, epistemology, and philosophy of science, to ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. It illustrates that although women's voices were no different from men's as regards their scope and versatility, they had a much harder time being heard. .
Papers and Book Chapters
The Analytic Turn in American Philosophy: An Institutional Perspective
Part I: Scientific vs. Humanistic Philosophy
Abstract
This two-part paper reconstructs the analytic turn in American philosophy through a comparative longitudinal study of three major philosophy departments: Princeton, Yale, and Columbia. I trace their hiring policies, tenure decisions, curriculum designs, and the external pressures that forced them to continuously adapt their strategies; and I use those analyses to distill some of the factors that contributed to the rapid growth of analytic philosophy between 1940 and 1970. In this first part, I show that philosophers at Princeton, Yale, and Columbia actively tried to promote a ‘humanistic’ conception of philosophy until the early 1950s. I argue that logical positivism and related ‘scientific’ approaches were seen as a fundamental threat to the discipline and that this opposition influenced decision making at all three institutions. While many students and recent graduates saw philosophy as a scientific discipline, senior members of the community deplored the decline of the humanities and appointed mostly humanistic philosophers. I show that this generational conflict was reinforced by demographic, political, and economic developments and argue that these discriminatory practices helped forge a coalition between logical empiricists, scientific pragmatists, and ordinary language philosophers, who all began to identify as ‘analytic’ philosophers after the war.
The Analytic Turn in American Philosophy: An Institutional Perspective
Part II: Analytic vs. Continental Philosophy
Abstract
This paper continues a reconstruction of the analytic turn in American philosophy between 1940 and 1970. The first part of this paper argued that philosophers at Princeton, Yale, and Columbia sought to stimulate ‘humanistic’ approaches to philosophy in their hiring policies and tenure decisions, thereby marginalizing the ‘scientific’ philosophies that were in vogue among their students. This second part unearths some of the mechanisms that contributed to the analytic turn once the movement’s fiercest opponents retired. I argue that a new generation of deans and chairmen initially tried to craft ‘balanced’ departments but that various external variables— competition between elite universities, a shortage of graduates with training in modern logic, and the explosive growth of American higher education—eventually led to major policy shifts. Within a decade, I show, the distorted job market helped tip the balance into the other direction, strongly advantaging departments that had invested in analytic philosophy. By the late 1960s, the movement became so successful that the traditional division between humanistic and scientific approaches began to be replaced by a distinction between analytic and ‘continental’ philosophy, referring to the schools of philosophy that were popular across the Atlantic. American philosophy, by then, just was analytic philosophy.
Justified True Belief: The Remarkable History of Mainstream Epistemology
Abstract
This paper reconstructs the origins of Gettier-style epistemology, highlighting the philosophical and methodological debates that led to its development in the 1960s. Though present-day epistemologists assume that the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge began with Gettier’s 1963 argument against the JTB-definition, I show that this research program can be traced back to British discussions about knowledge and analysis in the 1940s and 1950s. I discuss work of, among others, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, A. J. Ayer, Norman Malcom, and A. D. Woozley, showing how exchanges between different schools of analytic philosophy gave rise to new ideas about the nature of knowledge and analysis. Finally, I turn to Gettier's intellectual development and argue that his paper was influenced by some of these debates, suggesting that even his interpretation of Plato’s definition of knowledge can be traced back to discussions in this period.
Carnap and Reichenbach
Abstract
Hans Reichenbach (1891-1953) was a German scientific philosopher and founder of the Berlin Society for Empirical Philosophy. He was one of the leading logical empiricists and helped spread the movement to Turkey and North America after the Nazi government dismissed him from his position at the University of Berlin. His major works include Philosophie der Raum-Zeit-Lehre (1928), Wahrscheinlichkeitslehre (1935), and his more popular Experience and Prediction (1938) which provides an overview and introduction to his “probabilistic empiricism” (p. viii). Reichenbach’s contributions to probability, epistemology, and philosophy of physics were closely studied by Carnap, who regarded him as his “best critic” (Carnap 1963, 14). The two had similar conceptions of philosophy but disagreed about the details, witnessing their frequent discussions and voluminous correspondence.
Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s lives bear a remarkable resemblance. The two were...
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Carnap and Quine
Abstract
W. V. (“Van”) Quine (1908-2000) was an American philosopher and logician who spent his entire career at Harvard University. He was influenced by Carnap’s work, especially The Logical Syntax of Language, and dedicated his magnum opus Word and Objectto his “teacher and friend” (1960, v). Quine’s central program was to develop a naturalistic orientation to philosophy, which led him to rethink traditional views about truth, justification, meaning, and existence. In addition to Word and Object, his major works include The Roots of Reference (1973) and Pursuit of Truth (1990). Yet he is perhaps best known for his paper “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951a) which argues against several key commitments of the positivist framework. Though Quine’s objections to the analytic-synthetic distinction have contributed to the declining influence of logical empiricism in analytic philosophy, recent scholarship questions the traditional narrative surrounding the Carnap-Quine debate, emphasizing the continuity between their work.
Carnap and Quine first met in Vienna in December 1932, when...
Columbia Naturalism and the Analytic Turn: Eclipse or Synthesis?
Abstract
Historical reconstructions of the effects of the intellectual migration are typically informed by one of two conflicting narratives. Some scholars argue that refugee philosophers, in particular the logical positivists, contributed to the demise of distinctly American schools of thought. Others reject this ‘eclipse view’ and argue that postwar analytic philosophy can best be characterized as a synthesis of American and positivist views. This paper studies the fate of one of the most influential schools of U.S. philosophy—Columbia naturalism—and argues that both narratives are part of a larger story. First, I reconstruct the rise of the Columbia school, focusing on its naturalist analyses of science, morality, and religion as well as its contributions to the history of ideas. Next, I trace some of the naturalists’ contacts with German philosophers and show that they encountered a strong bifurcation between historical and scientific philosophy in their discussions. I argue that a similar distinction gradually infected debates between naturalists, eventually resulting in a split within the Columbia school itself. The historically-oriented naturalists, I argue, were overshadowed by the analytic movement, whereas the science-minded naturalists were able to incorporate the views of the émigrés, thereby developing the tradition in new directions.
Bibliometrics Beyond Citations: Introducing Mention Extraction and Analysis
Scientometrics
Abstract
Standard citation-based bibliometric tools have severe limitations when they are applied to periods in the history of science and the humanities before the advent of now-current citation practices. This paper presents an alternative method involving the extracting and analysis of mentions to map and analyze links between scholars and texts in periods that fall outside the scope of citation-based studies. Focusing on one specific discipline in one particular period and language area—Anglophone philosophy between 1890 and 1979—we describe a procedure to create a mention index by identifying, extracting, and disambiguating mentions in academic publications. Our mention index includes 1,095,765 mention links, extracted from 22,977 articles published in 12 journals. We successfully link 93% of these mentions to specific philosophers, with an estimated precision of 82% to 91%. Moreover, we integrate the mention index into a database named EDHIPHY, which includes data and metadata from multiple sources and enables multidimensional mention analyses. In the final part of the paper, we present four case studies conducted by domain experts, demonstrating the use and the potential of both EDHIPHY and mention analyses more generally.
The Reception of Relativity in American Philosophy
Abstract
Historians have shown that philosophical discussions about the implications of relativity significantly shaped the development of European philosophy of science in the 1920s. Yet little is known about American debates from this period. This paper maps the first responses to Einstein’s theory in three U.S. philosophy journals and situates these papers within the local intellectual climate. We argue that these discussions (1) stimulated the development of a distinctly American branch of philosophy of science and (2) paved the way for the logical empiricists, who emigrated to the United States in the years before World War II.
Logical Positivism: The History of 'Caricature'
Abstract
Logical positivism is often characterized as a set of naïve doctrines on meaning, method, and metaphysics. In recent decades, however, historians have dismissed this view as a gross misinterpretation. This new scholarship raises a number of questions. When did the standard reading emerge? Why did it become so popular? And how could commentators have been so wrong? This paper reconstructs the history of a ‘caricature’ and rejects the hypothesis that it was developed by ill-informed Anglophone scholars who failed to appreciate the subtleties of European scientific philosophy. I argue that the received view has a more complicated history and was frequently promoted by the European positivists themselves. I show that it has roots in both American and European scientific philosophy and emerged as a result of the complex interplay between the two communities in the years before the intellectual migration.
Susanne K. Langer and the Harvard School of Analysis
Abstract
Susanne Langer was a student at Radcliffe College between 1916 and 1926---a highly transitional period in the history of American philosophy. Intellectual generalists such as William James, John Dewey, and Josiah Royce had dominated philosophical debates at the turn of the century but the academic landscape gradually started to shift in the years after World War I. Many scholars of the new generation adopted a more piecemeal approach to philosophy---solving clearly delineated, technical puzzles using the so-called “method of logical analysis”. Especially at Harvard, the intellectual climate rapidly changed. The department hired several philosophers who had contributed to the development of symbolic logic---H. M. Sheffer, C. I. Lewis, and A. N. Whitehead---and Harvard quickly began to be viewed as a central hub for analytic philosophy in the United States. This chapter contextualizes Langer’s earliest work by reading it through the lens of this shifting academic environment. Though Harvard did not allow women to take its courses until 1943, Langer is one of the most significant fruits of this period. Her dissertation “A Logical Analysis of Meaning” and her first publications are all illustrations of the approach that came to dictate the American philosophical conversation. By exploring the increased focus on the logical-analytic method and Langer’s attempts to expand the new approach to what she later called “non-discursive” symbolisms, I situate her publications in the intellectual context of the 1920s.
Lewis and Quine in Context
Abstract
Robert Sinclair’s Quine, Conceptual Pragmatism, and the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction persuasively argues that Quine’s epistemology was deeply influenced by C. I. Lewis’s pragmatism. Sinclair’s account raises the question why Quine himself frequently downplayed Lewis’s influence. Looking back, Quine has always said that Rudolf Carnap was his “greatest teacher” and that his 1933 meeting with the German philosopher was his “first experience of sustained intellectual engagement with anyone of an older generation” (1970, 41; 1985, 97-8, my emphasis). Quine’s autobiographies contain only a handful of biographical references to Lewis and he regularly soft-pedaled the latter’s influence in private correspondence. In this note, I discuss some archival evidence that helps us better understand Quine’s reluctance to acknowledge Lewis’s influence. I contextualize the relation between Lewis and Quine and argue that the latter viewed his teacher as a retrograde force in modern epistemology, impeding the more rigorous approach that Carnap had been developing in Europe. Next, I briefly discuss Lewis’s contribution to the development of scientific philosophy in the United States and argue that Quine underestimated his teacher’s role in this process. In doing so, I hope to show that Quine’s zealous commitment to Carnap’s approach negatively affected his assessment of Lewis’s influence, thereby supplementing Sinclair’s praiseworthy reconstruction with an explanation of why Quine himself underestimated Lewis’s role.
A Bibliometric Analysis of the Cognitive Turn in Psychology
Perspectives on Science, 31:3, 324-59.
Abstract
We analyzed co-citation patterns in 332.498 articles published in Anglophone psychology journals between 1946 and 1990 to estimate (1) when cognitive psychology first emerged as a clearly delineated subdiscipline, (2) how fast it grew, (3) to what extent it replaced other (e.g., behaviorist) approaches to psychology, (4) to what degree it was more appealing to scholars from a younger generation, and (5) whether it was more interdisciplinary than alternative traditions. We detected a major shift in the structure of co-citation networks between approximately 1955 and 1975 and draw novel conclusions about the developments commonly referred to as ‘the cognitive turn’.
Carnap and Quine: First Encounters (1932-1936)
Abstract
Carnap and Quine first met in the 1932-33 academic year, when the latter, fresh out of graduate school, visited the key centers of mathematical logic in Europe. In the months that Carnap was finishing his Logische Syntax der Sprache, Quine spent five weeks in Prague, where they discussed the manuscript “as it issued from Ina Carnap’s typewriter”. The philosophical friendship that emerged in these weeks would have a tremendous impact on the course of analytic philosophy. Not only did the meetings effectively turn Quine into Carnap's disciple, they also paved the way for their seminal debates about meaning, language, and ontology---the very discussions that would change the course of analytic philosophy in the decades after the Second World War.
Yet surprisingly little is known about these first meetings. Although Quine has often acknowledged the impact of his Prague visit, there appears to be little information about these first encounters, except for the fact that the Quines “were overwhelmed by the kindness of the Carnaps” and that it was Quine’s “most notable experience of being intellectually fired by a living teacher”. Neither their correspondence nor their autobiographies offer a detailed account of these meetings. In this paper, I shed new light on Carnap’s and Quine’s first encounters by examining a set of previously unexplored material from their personal and academic archives. Why did Quine decide to visit Carnap? What did they discuss? And in what ways did the meetings affect Quine’s philosophical development? In what follows, I address these questions by means of a detailed reconstruction of Quine’s year in Europe based on a range of letters, notes, and reports from the early 1930s.
Susanne Langer and the American Development of Analytic Philosophy
Abstract
Susanne K. Langer is best known as a philosopher of culture and student of Ernst Cassirer. In this paper, however, I argue that this standard picture ignores her important contributions to the development of analytic philosophy in the 1920s and 1930s. I reconstruct the reception of Langer’s first book The Practice of Philosophy---arguably the first sustained defense of analytic philosophy by an American philosopher---and describe how prominent European philosophers of science such as Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, and Herbert Feigl viewed her as one of the most important allies in the United States. In the second half of this paper, I turn to Langer’s best-selling Philosophy in a New Key (1942) and reconstruct her attempts to broaden the scope of the, by then, rapidly growing U.S. analytic movement. I argue that her book anticipated important developments in analytic philosophy but was largely ignored by her former colleagues. I end the chapter by offering some clues as to why New Key did not incite the same laudatory responses from analytic philosophers as her earlier work.
Nagel's Philosophical Development
Abstract
Ernest Nagel played a key role in bridging the gap between American philosophy and logical empiricism. He introduced the European analytic approach to the American philosophical community but also remained faithful to the naturalism of his teachers. This paper aims to shed new light on Nagel’s intermediating endeavors by reconstructing his philosophical development in the late 1920s and 1930s. This is a decisive period in Nagel’s career because it is the phase in which he first formulated the principles of his naturalism and spent a year in Europe to visit the key centers of logical empiricism. Building on a range of published and unpublished papers, notes, and correspondence---including hundreds of pages of letters to his close friend Sidney Hook---I reconstruct Nagel’s philosophical development, focusing especially on the philosophical influence of John Dewey, Morris R. Cohen, Rudolf Carnap, and Hans Reichenbach.
Psychological operationisms at Harvard: Skinner, Boring, and Stevens
Abstract
Contemporary discussions about operational definition often hark back to Stanley Smith Stevens’ classic papers on psychological operationism (1935ab). Still, he was far from the only psychologist to call for conceptual hygiene. Some of Stevens’ direct colleagues at Harvard---most notably B. F. Skinner and E. G. Boring---were also actively applying Bridgman’s conceptual strictures to the study of mind and behavior. In this paper, I shed new light on the history of operationism by reconstructing the Harvard debates about operational definition in the years before Stevens published his seminal articles. Building on a large set of archival evidence from the Harvard University Archives, I argue that we can get a more complete understanding of Stevens’ contributions if we better grasp the operationisms of his former teachers and direct colleagues at Harvard’s Department of Philosophy and Psychology.
Coming to America: Carnap, Reichenbach and the Great Intellectual Migration. Part I: Rudolf Carnap
Abstract
In the years before the Second World War, Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach emigrated to the United States, escaping the quickly deteriorating political situation on the continent. Once in the U.S., the two significantly changed the American philosophical climate. In this two-part paper, I reconstruct Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s surprisingly numerous interactions with American academics in the decades before their move in order to explain the impact of their arrival in the late 1930s. Building on archival material of several key players and institutions in the development of scientific philosophy, I take some first steps toward answering the question why logical empiricism became so successful in the United States after the War. Part I reconstructs Carnap’s development between 1923, when he first visited New York, and 1936, when he was offered a position at the University of Chicago. Part II traces Reichenbach’s development and focuses on his frequent interactions with American academics throughout the 1930s. In both parts, special attention is paid to the zealous efforts of a number of American academics (most notably Edward Allen, Sidney Hook, C. I. Lewis, Charles Morris, Ernest Nagel, and W. V. Quine) to market the work of Carnap and Reichenbach in the United States.
Coming to America: Carnap, Reichenbach and the Great Intellectual Migration. Part II: Hans Reichenbach
Abstract
In the years before the Second World War, Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach emigrated to the United States, escaping the quickly deteriorating political situation on the continent. Once in the U.S., the two significantly changed the American philosophical climate. In this two-part paper, I reconstruct Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s surprisingly numerous interactions with American academics in the decades before their move in order to explain the impact of their arrival in the late 1930s. Building on archival material of several key players and institutions in the development of scientific philosophy, I take some first steps toward answering the question why logical empiricism became so successful in the United States after the War. Part I reconstructs Carnap’s development between 1923, when he first visited New York, and 1936, when he was offered a position at the University of Chicago. Part II traces Reichenbach’s development and focuses on his frequent interactions with American academics throughout the 1930s. In both parts, special attention is paid to the zealous efforts of a number of American academics (most notably Edward Allen, Sidney Hook, C. I. Lewis, Charles Morris, Ernest Nagel, and W. V. Quine) to market the work of Carnap and Reichenbach in the United States.
The American Reception of Logical Positivism: First Encounters (1929-1932)
Abstract
This paper reconstructs the American reception of logical positivism in the early 1930s. I argue that Moritz Schlick (who had visiting positions at Stanford and Berkeley between 1929 and 1932) and Herbert Feigl (who visited Harvard in the 1930-31 academic year) played a crucial role in promoting the Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung, years before members of the Vienna Circle, the Berlin Group, and the Lvov-Warsaw school would seek refuge in the United States. Building on archive material from the Wiener Kreis Archiv, the Harvard University Archives, and the Herbert Feigl Papers, as well as a large number of publications in American philosophy journals from the early 1930s, I reconstruct the subtle transformation of fhe American philosophical landscape in the years immediately preceding the European exodus. I argue that (1) American philosophical discussions about meaning and significance and (2) internal dynamics in the Vienna Circle between 1929 and 1931 significantly impacted the way in which US philosophers came to perceive logical positivism.
The Rise and Fall of Behaviorism: The Narrative and the Numbers
History of Psychology, 23:3, pp. 1-29
Abstract
The history of twentieth-century American psychology is often depicted as a history of the rise and fall of behaviorism. Although historians disagree about the theoretical and social factors that have contributed to the development of experimental psychology, there is widespread consensus about the growing and (later) declining influence of behaviorism between approximately 1920 and 1970. Since such wide-scope claims about the development of American psychology are typically based on small and unrepresentative samples of historical data, however, the question rises to what extent the received view is justified. This paper aims to answer this question in two ways. First, we use advanced scientometric tools (e.g. bibliometric mapping, co-citation analysis, and term co-occurrence analysis) to quantitatively analyze the metadata of 119.278 papers published in American journals between 1920 and 1970. We reconstruct the development and structure of American psychology using co-citation and co-occurrence networks and argue that the standard story needs reappraising. Second, we argue that the question whether behaviorism was the ‘dominant’ school of American psychology is historically misleading to begin with. Using the results of our bibliometric analyses, we argue that questions about the development of American psychology deserve more fine-grained answers.
The Behaviorisms of Skinner and Quine: Genesis, Development, and Mutual Influence
Abstract
B. F. Skinner and W. V. Quine, arguably the two most influential proponents of behaviorism in mid-twentieth century psychology and philosophy, are often considered to be brothers in arms. They were close friends, they had remarkably parallel careers, and they both identified as behaviorists. Yet, surprisingly little is known about the relation between the two. The question as to how the two influenced each other often comes up, but is standardly dealt with by rehearsing the few remarks on the issue in Skinner’s and Quine’s autobiographies. How did Skinner and Quine develop their varieties of behaviorism? In what ways did they affect each other? And how similar are their behaviorisms to begin with? In this paper, I shed new light on the relation between Skinner and Quine by infusing the debate with a wide range of new and previously unexamined evidence. Examining a large set of documents— correspondence, notes, datebooks, drafts, lectures, and teaching material—from the personal and academic archives of Skinner and Quine, I reconstruct (1) how they acquired their ‘behaviorisms’ in their student years, (2) how they developed their views in the first three decades of their careers, and (3) the ways in which they were influenced by the psychologists and philosophers of their time.
Sign and Object: Quine's Forgotten Book Project
Abstract
W. V. Quine’s first philosophical monograph, Word and Object (1960), is widely recognized as one of the most influential books of twentieth century philosophy. Notes, letters, and draft manuscripts at the Quine Archives, however, reveal that Quine was already working on a philosophical book in the early 1940s; a project entitled Sign and Object. In this paper, I examine these and other unpublished documents and show that Sign and Object sheds new light on the evolution of Quine’s ideas. Where “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” is usually considered to be a turning point in Quine’s development, this paper redefines the place of ‘Two Dogmas’ in his oeuvre. Not only does Quine’s book project reveal that his views were already fairly naturalistic in the early 1940s (sections 3-5); Sign and Object also unearths the steps Quine had to take in maturing his perspective; steps that will be traced in the second half of this paper (sections 6-9).
"Mental States are Like Diseases": Behaviorism in the Immanuel Kant Lectures
Abstract
One of the great values of the Immanuel Kant Lectures is that it sheds new light on the nature of Quine’s views about behaviorism. Where Quine’s linguistic behaviorism is well-known, the Lectures contain one of his most detailed discussions of behaviorism in psychology and the philosophy of mind. Quine clarifies the nature of his psychological commitments by arguing for a view that is quite modest: he argues against ‘excessively restrictive’ variants of behaviorism while maintaining that ‘a good measure of behaviorist discipline is still needed to keep [our mental] terms under control’. In this paper, I use Quine’s comments in the Lectures to reconstruct his position. I start by distinguishing three types of behaviorism in psychology and the philosophy of mind: ontological behaviorism, logical behaviorism, and epistemological behaviorism. Next, I reconstruct Quine’s perspective on each of these views and argue that he does not fully accept any of them. Finally, I combine these perspectives and reconstruct Quine’s surprisingly subtle view about behaviorism in psychology.
Setting Sail: The Development and Reception of Quine's Naturalism
Abstract
Contemporary analytic philosophy is dominated by metaphilosophical naturalism, the view that philosophy ought to be continuous with science. This naturalistic turn is for a significant part due to the work of W. V. Quine. Yet, the development and the reception of Quine’s naturalism have never been systematically studied. In Verhaegh (2017; forthcoming), I reconstructed the early development of Quine’s naturalism (1930-1952). This paper continues this story and examines the development and the reception of Quine’s evolving naturalism after 1952. Scrutinizing a large set of unpublished notes, correspondence, drafts, papers, and lectures as well as published responses to Quine’s work, I show how both internal tensions and external criticisms forced him to continuously develop, rebrand, and refine his metaphilosophy before he explicitly decided to label his view ‘naturalism’ in the late 1960s.
Boarding Neurath's Boat: The Early
Development of Quine's Naturalism
Abstract
W. V. Quine is arguably the intellectual father of contemporary naturalism, the idea that there is no distinctively philosophical perspective on reality. Yet even though Quine has always been a science-minded philosopher, he did not adopt a fully naturalistic perspective until the early 1950s. In this paper, I reconstruct the genesis of Quine’s ideas on the relation between science and philosophy. Scrutinizing his unpublished papers and notebooks, I examine Quine’s development in the first decades of his career. After identifying three commitments supporting his naturalism---viz. empiricism, holism, and realism---I piece together the evolution of Quine’s position by examining the origins of these commitments one by one, showing how his early views gradually evolved into the mature naturalistic position that would have such an enormous impact on post-war analytic philosophy.
Blurring Boundaries: Carnap, Quine,
and the Internal-External Distinction
Abstract
Quine is routinely perceived as saving metaphysics from Carnapian positivism. Where Carnap rejects metaphysical existence claims as meaningless, Quine is taken to restore their intelligibility by dismantling the former’s internal-external distinction. The problem with this picture, however, is that it does not sit well with the fact that Quine, on many occasions, has argued that metaphysical existence claims ought to be dismissed. Setting aside the hypothesis that Quine’s metaphysical position is incoherent, one has to conclude that his views on metaphysics are subtler than is often presupposed; both the received view that Quine saved metaphysics and the opposite view that Carnap and Quine are on the same anti-metaphysical team seem too one-sided if we take seriously Quine’s own pronouncements on the issue. In this paper, I offer a detailed reconstruction of Quine’s perspective on metaphysical existence claims. Scrutinizing his published work as well as unpublished papers, letters, and notebooks, I show how Quine is able to both blur the boundary between scientific sense and metaphysical nonsense and to argue that we cannot ask what reality is really like in a distinctively philosophical way. I argue that although Quine’s position is much closer to Carnap’s than the received view suggests, it still differs in two crucial respects.
Abstract
Quine’s metaphilosophical naturalism is often dismissed as overly ‘scientistic’. Many contemporary naturalists reject Quine’s idea that epistemology should become a “chapter of psychology” (1969a, 83) and urge for a more ‘liberal’, ‘pluralistic’ and/or ‘open minded’ naturalism instead. Still, whenever Quine explicitly reflects on the nature of his naturalism, he always insists that his position is modest and that he does not “think of philosophy as part of natural science” (1993, 10). Analyzing this tension, Susan Haack has argued that Quine’s naturalism contains a “deep-seated and significant ambivalence” (1993a, 353). In this paper, I argue that a more charitable interpretation is possible; a reading that does justice to Quine’s own pronouncements on the issue. I reconstruct Quine’s position and argue (i) that Haack and Quine, in their exchanges, have been talking past each other and (ii) that once this mutual misunderstanding is cleared up, Quine’s naturalism turns out to be more modest, and hence less scientistic, than many contemporary naturalists have presupposed. I show that Quine’s naturalism is first and foremost a rejection of the transcendental. It is only after adopting a broadly science-immanent perspective that Quine, in regimenting his language, starts making choices that many contemporary philosophers have argued to be unduly restrictive.
Quine's 'Needlessly Strong' Holism
Abstract
Quine is routinely perceived as having changed his mind about the scope of the Duhem-Quine thesis, shifting from what has been called an ‘extreme holism’ to a more moderate view. Where the Quine of ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ argues that “the unit of empirical significance is the whole of science” (1951, 42), the later Quine seems to back away from this “needlessly strong statement of holism” (1991, 393). In this paper, I show that the received view is incorrect. I distinguish three ways in which Quine’s early holism can be said to be wide-scoped and show that he has never changed his mind about any one of these aspects of his early view. Instead, I argue that Quine’s apparent change of mind can be explained away as a mere shift of emphasis.
Suspension and Disagreement
Abstract
Some sceptics claim that we ought suspend judgment whenever an epistemic peer disagrees. In this paper we argue that the sceptic’s conclusions are only correct in a limited number of scenarios. We show that sceptic’s conclusion is built on two premises---viz. the principle of evidential symmetry and the principle of evidentialism---and show that both premises are incorrect. First, we argue that peer disagreements are not symmetrical. Next, we show that even if one assumes that peer disagreements are symmetrical, it might still be rational to stick to one’s guns in the light of peer disagreement.
Abstract
Quine’s argument for a naturalized epistemology is routinely perceived as an argument from despair: traditional epistemology must be abandoned because all attempts to deduce our scientific theories from sense experience have failed. In this paper, I will show that this picture is historically inaccurate and that Quine’s argument against first philosophy is considerably stronger and subtler than the standard conception suggests. For Quine, the first philosopher’s quest for foundations is inherently incoherent; the very idea of a self-sufficient sense datum language is a mistake as there is no science-independent perspective from which to validate science. I will argue that a great deal of the confusion surrounding Quine’s argument is prompted by certain phrases in his seminal ‘Epistemology Naturalized’. Scrutinizing Quine’s work both before and after the latter paper provides a better key to understanding his remarkable views about the epistemological relation between theory and evidence.
Katz's Revisability Paradox Dissolved
Abstract
Quine’s holistic empiricist account of scientific inquiry can be characterized by three constitutive principles: noncontradiction, universal revisability and pragmatic ordering. We show that these constitutive principles cannot be regarded as statements within a holistic empiricist’s scientific theory of the world. This claim is a corollary of our refutation of Katz’s [1998, 2002] argument that holistic empiricism suffers from what he calls the Revisability Paradox. According to Katz, Quine’s empiricism is incoherent because its constitutive principles cannot themselves be rationally revised. Using Gärdenfors and Makinson’s logic of belief revision based on epistemic entrenchment, we argue that Katz wrongly assumes that the constitutive principles are statements within a holistic empiricist’s theory of the world. Instead, we show that constitutive principles are best seen as properties of a holistic empiricist’s theory of scientific inquiry and we submit that, without Katz’s mistaken assumption, the paradox cannot be formulated. We argue that our perspective on the status of constitutive principles is perfectly in line with Quinean orthodoxy. In conclusion, we compare our findings with van Fraassen’s [2002] argument that we should think of empiricism as a stance, rather than as a doctrine.
Quine, Putnam, and the Naturalization of Metaphysics
Abstract
Naturalists argue that metaphysics ought to be in some sense continuous with science. Putnam has claimed that if we push naturalism to its limits, we have to conclude with Quine that reference is indeterminate. Since Putnam believes Quine’s thesis to be utterly absurd, he regards naturalism to be an unsatisfactory approach to metaphysics. In this essay, I show that Quine’s ideas about reference do not necessarily follow from his naturalism and that, as a result, Putnam’s reductio argument against naturalism breaks down. In addition, I argue that Putnam’s pluralistic alternative to Quine’s views is perfectly compatible with a naturalistic perspective and that, in consequence, the relation between science and metaphysics is less straightforward than it might initially seem to be.