Willard Van Orman Quine

44 robert j. fogelin
I got into the conversation, and the exchange continued as follows:
Fogelin: Is it fair to say that your answer is grounded in a kind of theory of
inquiry...[atheory of] what honest inquiry looks like?
Quine: Very good, yes.
Fogelin: And these [Cartesian] doubts simply don’t have a place in honest
inquiry?
Quine: Yes. 14
Quine’s refusal to be concerned with problems that are not empirically
motivated emerged again with his quick dismissal of the brainin-the-vat
problem.
My attitude toward [this] is the same as my attitude toward more commonplace
situations where the thing is not quite so unthinkable from a naïve
point of view. Namely, I would think in terms of naturalistic plausibility.
What we know, or what we firmly believe,...is that it would really be an
implausible achievement, at this stage anyway, to rig up such a brain. And
so I don’t think I am one [i.e., a brain in a vat]. 15
The clear implication of this passage is that naturalized epistemologists,
like scientists generally, will only concern themselves with
matters having a suitably high degree of “naturalistic plausibility.”
It is, of course, entirely possible that with the advance of technology
brains could be rigged up in the way envisaged in skeptical scenarios.
They might be featured in science museums. In that world, Quine’s
response would be inadequate. And there is some chance that we are
in such a world. Quine would not have denied this. Furthermore, he
did not, as others have, attempt to find some purely conceptual argument
(or transcendental argument) intended to rule this possibility
out. Such arguments have no place in the naturalized epistemological
arsenal.
But, alas, Quine was not always as fully committed to a naturalistic
standpoint as he might have been. This comes out in two ways.
First, in the development of his own views he tended to move at
a very high level of theoretical generality, rarely touching down at
empirical checkpoints. He often seemed more concerned with the relationship
between his philosophical position and the philosophical
positions of others than with the relationship between his position
and the data needed to support it. As a result, contrary to Quine’s
stated intentions, his theory sometimes looks more like an “a priori
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