Willard Van Orman Quine

Aspects of Quine’s Naturalized Epistemology 29
external world and its history. The relation between the meager input and
torrential output is a relation that we are prompted to study for somewhat
the same reasons that always prompted epistemology; namely, in order to
see how evidence relates to theory....(EN82–3)
Passages of this sort suggest that Quine might be interested in going
behind sensory surfaces in order to understand the “inner loop”
of brain structures that link hits on sensory surfaces with linguistic
expressions emitted, for example, by mouths. That would be
epistemology naturalized with a vengeance. But despite his general
commitment to physicalism, Quine does not opt for physiological
psychology as his methodological standpoint. His writings contain
no serious considerations of such things as “assorted frequencies,”
rods and cones, brain regions, or articulatory mechanisms. Instead,
he adopts a behaviorist approach that explores the “outer loop” between
publicly observable stimulatory situations and the publicly
observable linguistic utterances that occur in such situations. The
structures under consideration are not brain structures but sociolinguistic
structures. As a product of his century, Quine replaces the
way of ideas with the way of words; the way of things, though officially
endorsed, is enshrined as a far-off ideal.
Just as a naturalized epistemology can take various forms depending
on the empirical disciplines on which it relies, a naturalized empiricism
can itself be developed in a variety of ways. Put perhaps too
simply, Quine’s version of naturalized empiricism, though deeply
indebted to Hume, arose primarily from his critical reflections on
the work of the logical empiricists, most notably Rudolph Carnap.
Quine’s most famous assault on logical empiricism is found in his
essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Despite what the title may
seem to suggest, the aim of this essay is not to reject empiricism but
instead to argue that the logical empiricists were not themselves sufficiently
empirical in their outlook. Though it would scan less well,
“Two Dogmas of Empiricism” would have been more accurately titled
“Two Nonempiricist Dogmas Surviving in Logical Empiricism.”
Broadly speaking, what Quine rejected as being antiempirical were
the a priori conceptual methods embodied in the use of the analyticsynthetic
distinction and, as noted earlier, the attempt to give reductive
(or even quasi-reductive) analyses of empirical concepts. Quine,
we might say, rejected the lingering apriorism of logical empiricism.
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