Willard Van Orman Quine

262 daniel isaacson
problem of how sensory experience, which is by its nature subjective,
can provide a basis for objective science, persisted as an issue for Quine
(it had also exercised Carnap and Neurath). Quine discusses the Vienna
Circle debate on Protokollsätze in “Epistemology Naturalized”
(p. 85). Some key texts for this later development are the following:
Davidson 1974, VITD, Davidson 1990, TI, Bergström 1990, CB, PTa,
and FSS. For an excellent brief account of Quine’s notion of observation
sentences from Word and Object onward, see Gibson 1998, 672–6.
For an exhaustive discussion of the original debate between Neurath
and Carnap over protocol sentences, with some discussion on its relation
to Quine’s subsequent philosophy, see Uebel 1992. It has been
suggested, e.g., by Koppelberg (1990), that “there exists a close systematic
affinity between the naturalistic attitudes and arguments of Quine
and Neurath” (p. 204). Quine pronounces himself “impressed by the extent
of agreement between Neurath and me that Koppelberg has found”
(CK 212) but notes that “there was little scope for influence,” as Neurath
was in Moscow while he was in Vienna during 1932–3. I note also
that Neurath’s physicalism did not chime with Quine predilection for
behaviorism in the manner of Watson: “Physicalism allows us to formulate
more than one behaviouristics [actual methodologies of science]
and can be in agreement with more than a single type of scientific psychology,
as it is represented on the whole, for example by American
‘behaviourism’. It is precisely the Vienna Circle that stresses that behaviourism
as formulated by Watson seems too narrow from the standpoint
of a pure special science and also contains all sorts of things that
cannot withstand physicalist criticism” (Neurath 1983b, 164). Neurath,
following Carnap, did embrace a holistic view of verification, at the
level of theories rather than sentences: “However, as has already been
shown by Duhem, Poincaré and others, we cannot say of isolated positive
statements that they are ‘valid’; this can be said only in connection
with masses of statements to which these positive statements belong”
(p. 161).
28. For perceptive discussion of the role of Carnap’s and Quine’s differing
conceptions of philosophy in their philosophical disagreements, see
George 2000 (the whole of that paper deals with this issue) and Hacker
1996, 195.
29. Note that the principle of logical tolerance, which Carnap adopts in
his Logical Syntax of Language, remains a central principle in his later
espousal of semantics: “The principle of tolerance (perhaps better called
‘principle of conventionality’), as explained in §17 [of The Logical Syntax
of Language], is still maintained. It states that the construction of a calculus
and the choice of its particular features are a matter of convention”
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