Willard Van Orman Quine

Aspects of Quine’s Naturalized Epistemology 31
� Naturalized empiricism. The traditional empiricist view
that all knowledge of the world around us is derived from information
provided by the senses is transformed into a claim
about hits on sensory surfaces. (Here we could also speak of
empiricism externalized.)
� Naturalized logical empiricism. This is the logical empiricist’s
view that the philosophy of empirical science takes as
its subject matter the language of empirical science, with
the difference that this enterprise is taken to be itself empirical
rather than merely conceptual and is pursued in a holist
rather that in a reductionist manner.
Returning to “Epistemology Naturalized,” we might note that the
transition from a general defense of naturalized epistemology to a defense
of his own naturalized version of logical empiricism occurs in
a rather subtle fashion. Having recorded the failure of reductionist
programs in both their strong and weak forms, Quine pauses to reflect
on the reasons for this failure. One possibility, he tells us, is
that “the implications of a typical statement about bodies are too
complex for finite axiomatization, however lengthy” (EN 79). This
is the view that reductionism, though theoretically sound, is in fact
impossible to carry through to completion. Rejecting this, Quine offers
his own diagnosis of the failure of reductionist programs of the
kind put forward by logical empiricists:
I have a different explanation. It is that the typical statement about bodies
has no fund of experiential implications it can call its own. A substantial
mass of theory, taken together, will commonly have experiential implications;
this is how we make verifiable predictions. We may not be able to
explain why we arrive at theories which make successful predictions, but
we do arrive at such theories. (EN 79)
In this passage, Quine returns to one of the fundamental themes
of “Two Dogmas,” but now expressed with more modesty. In “Two
Dogmas,” Quine famously declared,
The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science....Any statement
can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments....Conversely...nostatement
is immune to revision. (TDEb 42–3)
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