Willard Van Orman Quine

42 robert j. fogelin
this would be on a par with conjoining bird calls. If conjoining just
means concatenating, then it would be possible to conjoin two bird
calls, getting a longer bird call or a repetition of a bird call. But an
‘and’ signifying concatenation is not the kind of ‘and’ that is needed,
and it is unclear how, at this level, anything more than this could
be supplied. Although the words that occur in observation sentences
holophrastically conceived may reappear later in sentences that are
genuine truth-bearers, it does not seem that observation sentences
are truth-bearers at all. If they are not, then they simply are not the
right sorts of things to serve as an epistemological starting point. 11
Given Quine’s avowed commitment to a naturalistic standpoint,
another perplexing feature of his position is this: His attempt to
trace a pathway from stimulation to observation sentences and ultimately
to theoretical sentences was carried out with virtually no
concern for the psychological reality of the process he claimed to
be examining. The reason for this, I suggest, is that Quine’s reflections
were not driven or constrained by the exigencies of empirical
research in psychology; his primary concerns were internal to a particular
philosophical tradition, specifically, logical empiricism. This
becomes clear in his essay “In Praise of Observation Sentences,”
where Quine enumerated the advantages of observation sentences
holophrastically understood:
1. They provide an observational starting point that is not
theory-laden (POS 110).
2. They are the “infant’s entry into language” (POS 110).
3. They are the “radical translator’s way into language” (POS
110).
4. They are “vehicles of evidence for our knowledge of the external
world” (POS 110).
5. They provide a way of dealing with the supposed incommensurability
of competing theories (POS 111).
6. They are primitive sources of idioms of belief (POS 112).
7. They play a central role in diffusing ontology (POS 112).
If we judge the character of a theory by the problems it is intended
to solve, then, with the possible exception of (2) and (3), none of the
items on this list is closely associated with experimental activities.
Even with respect to (2) and (3), Quine showed little interest in pertinent
experimental results. Quine’s goal in naturalizing epistemology
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