Willard Van Orman Quine

158 robert kirk
adequately summarized in terms of such dispositions. Such things as
our abilities to follow directions in the street, look up words in dictionaries,
and count the fish in a pond reflect our grasp of language
without being exhaustively representable by dispositions to respond
to queried sentences. As Quine himself remarked, “[I]t would be
wrong to suppose that learning when to volunteer statements of fact
or to assent to them is all or most of what goes into language learning.
Learning to react in appropriate non-verbal ways to heard language
is equally important” (RR 45–6).
Another important reason can be introduced by considering the
problem of discovering which program is running on a computer on
behavioral evidence alone. If we confined ourselves to considering
its dispositions to respond to relatively short inputs, we should be
denying ourselves vital evidence. A program, as well as equipping
the machine with dispositions to respond in certain ways to short
inputs, typically provides for those “first-order” dispositions to be
modified on the basis of more or less extended sequences of inputs
whose members each activate further operations by the program.
Such changes are like learning. To have any serious chance of discovering
what the program was, we should have to attempt to find
out what effects whole ranges of different types of input sequences
had on its “higher-order” dispositions to change its first-order dispositions
– on its “learning capacity.” Of course, there is no guarantee
that we could succeed: The point is that we would pretty certainly
fail if we limited ourselves to first-order dispositions. Comparably,
we would be ignoring relevant facts about language if we confined
ourselves to dispositions to assent or dissent to queried sentences:
We would be ignoring the role of language in learning. It is relevant
to our knowledge of our language that we are disposed to modify our
existing dispositions to assent or dissent in certain ways. For example,
we are apt to revise our attitudes, including our beliefs, as a result
of reflection and deliberation. Quine often writes quite generally of
“all dispositions to behavior” as embodying the facts that schemes
of translation must fit, and that is surely a better way of putting his
point.
Why stop at dispositions? What about events inside our heads?
Here is what some regard as a genuine possibility. Behavioral dispositions
alone do not determine a uniquely correct scheme of translation,
but the churnings of the neurons together with relevant
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