Willard Van Orman Quine

Aspects of Quine’s Naturalized Epistemology 39
and turn his attention to issues where empirical evidence makes a
difference.
Quine’s commitment to a version of antirealism is connected with
another central feature of his position: his distinctive account of observation
sentences. At first, observation sentences were primarily
intended as a replacement for sense-data statements (and the like)
favored by the logical empiricists. In “Epistemology Naturalized,”
Quine defines an observation sentence as “one on which all speakers
of the language give the same verdict when given the same concurrent
stimulation” (EN 86–7). He then goes on to say,
There is generally no subjectivity in the phrasing of observation sentences,
as we are now conceiving them; they will usually be about bodies. Since the
distinguishing trait of an observation sentence is intersubjective agreement
under agreeing stimulation, a corporeal subject matter is likelier than not.
(EN 87)
A bit later he says, “The observation sentence, situated at the sensory
periphery of the body scientific, is the minimal verifiable aggregate;
it has an empirical content all its own and wears it on its sleeve” (EN
89). Treating observation sentences as publicly observable entities
generated under publicly observable conditions is an understandable
line to take for one committed to naturalizing epistemology.
As regards ontology, there seems to be nothing in this account of
observation sentences that concerns ontological relativity one way
or another. Both RP and ARP can equally incorporate this notion of an
observation sentence as their starting point. Later, however, Quine
added, or at least made explicit, a further aspect to his account of
observation sentences that did have strong ontological implications:
Conceptually, observation sentences must be taken as unsegmented
wholes. They must be taken, as Quine puts it, holophrastically. Pursuit
of Truth provides a good guide to these matters. In the opening
chapter of this work, Quine is concerned with a traditional problem
for empiricism, namely, that observation sentences seem themselves
to be theory-laden and thus cannot serve as an independent
basis for theory evaluation. Quine’s ingenious response is that observation
sentences are not theory-laden because they contain no
internal conceptual structure at all. They are, in their way, brute responses
to the world a person encounters, responses later shaped by
social reinforcement yielding the command of a highly structured
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