Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine on Reference and Ontology 117
scientific questions, they are answered in terms of the effects that the
world has on us and of our responses to those effects. Various forms
of energy, most obviously light, sound, and heat, impinge on the
surfaces of our body; in some cases, a person responds differentially to
such impingements. Thus we may respond in one way when a certain
pattern of light is impinging on our eyes and in another way when
it is not. The body contains sensory surfaces that are stimulated
by impingement of the relevant forms of energy; these stimulations
affect behavior.
It is a long way from forms of energy impinging on the body to our
discourse and our thought being about the world. We need to see,
in broad outline, how Quine thinks we get from one to the other.
This discussion will take us, for a couple of pages, completely away
from the subject of reference; this fact, that we can discuss Quine’s
views on this subject without talking about reference, is of great
significance.
Our present concern, then, is Quine’s account of the transition
from the impingement of energy on our sensory surfaces to the empirical
content of our theories. The key here is Quine’s notion of an
observation sentence. An observation sentence satisfies three conditions.
First, it is a complete utterance whose truth-value varies
with the occasion of utterance (‘There’s milk in the glass’ rather
than ‘Milk is good for young children’). Second, for each individual,
it is directly tied to stimulation of the sensory surfaces: The individual’s
willingness to make the utterance, or to agree with it when
another makes it, depends only on which of that individual’s sensory
surfaces are being stimulated at that time. Third, from the point of
view of the community of language speakers, the observation sentences
are utterances about which there will be general agreement
in any given circumstances. If I am in a situation that stimulates
my sensory surfaces in such a way as to lead me to agree or disagree
with a particular observation sentence, then any other speaker of the
same language in the same situation would have his or her sensory
surfaces stimulated in a way that results in the same verdict. Quine
speaks of “projecting ourselves into the witness’s position” (PTb 43;
there is some vagueness in this idea, as Quine himself points out).
Observation sentences will thus be uncontroversial, to the point
of banality. ‘It’s raining’, ‘It’s red’ (or just ‘Red’), and ‘There’s a horse’
might count as examples. Not by chance, these are the sorts of
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