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This chapter considers a tension between Quine's naturalism and his confirmational holism that has been pointed out by Penelope Maddy, amongst others. Naturalism requires us to look to science to discover what we ought to believe, and holism requires us to accept the truth of our best scientific theories. But as Maddy has pointed out, there are cases where scientists hold back from believing all the claims of their theories. Scientists might simply be wrong here—our naturalism does not require us to accept, uncritically, the attitudes scientists take to their own theories. However, it is argued that reflection on the role various theoretical assumptions play in our scientific theories shows that the attitude taken by these scientists may be reasonable. Confirmational holism is therefore rejected—the question of which among our theoretical assumptions becomes a question of how best to understand the successful use of these assumptions.

This chapter discusses the achievements of W. V. O. Quine and his place in analytic philosophy. It begins with Carnap’s logical empiricism, which set the context for Quine’s first major article in philosophy, “Truth by Convention” (1935). It explains both Quine’s largely effective critique of analyticity and the problems that plagued his combination of holistic verificationism with an underdetermination thesis that paired each consistent empirical theory T with alternative theories logically incompatible with, but empirically equivalent to, T. It discusses the impetus for Quine’s movement from his critique of analyticity to his later doctrines of the Indeterminacy of Translation and the Inscrutability of Reference. The chapter closes with an explication of these radical doctrines, the role played by Quine’s physicalism, and his ineluctable march to a so-called radical and self-undermining semantic eliminativism.

The last chapter is an interview Ernest Lepore, Director of the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science and a friend of the Davidson family, has conducted with the author in 1988. In this interview, the author speaks of his childhood, his student years at Harvard, and his service in the navy in the Second World War. He describes his academic career, which took him from Queens College to Stanford, Princeton, and Rockefeller University, and illuminates his personal and philosophical relationships with contemporary philosophers and logicians such as Quine, Dummett, Carnap, and Tarski. He finally clarifies Lepore's questions regarding the development of and relations between his philosophical programmes in the philosophy of action and the philosophy of language.

This chapter clarifies and motivates the naturalist premise of the indispensability argument, which holds that we should look to our best scientific theories to discover what we have reason to believe. It distinguishes Quinean naturalism from an even more modest form of naturalism, according to which philosophers should hold back from questioning the truth of utterances made in the context of successful scientific theorizing. And it considers the debate between Carnap and Quine over ontological questions, following Quine in accepting that practical reasons to speak as if there are Fs can sometimes be viewed as providing evidence for the existence of Fs. It notes that Quine's claim that practical reasons are always evidential can only be plausible when applied to our best scientific theories, from which merely practical ways of speaking have been ironed out, hence the focus on the indispensability of mathematics to our best theories.

This chapter is devoted to one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century, David Lewis. The key to understanding this author of so many works in so many areas of philosophy is to see how his views are related to those of his colleague Saul Kripke as well as to those of his teacher W. V. O. Quine. Like Kripke, Lewis embraced the modalities (necessity and a priority) that Quine rejected. Also like Kripke, Lewis had no sympathy for Quine’s early verificationism or his flights from intension and intention, and he was straightforwardly a realist about science in general. However, despite these similarities with Kripke, Lewis’s analysis of necessity could not be more different from Kripke’s. Quine taught that vindicating naturalism and extensionalism required eliminating intensional facts and rejecting intensional constructions, his student Lewis, however, tried to show that intensional facts are just a species of extensional facts, and that intensional constructions in language are no threat to the integrity of an austere, naturalistic vision of reality.

Some pragmatists, Quine and Rorty for instance, have tried to follow the classical disquotationalist and say that there is nothing more to truth than what is captured by the schema: ‘p’ is true iff p. In this chapter, it is argued that we ought to learn a lesson from one of the best pragmatists—Frank Ramsey. He argued that while we must accept truisms such as that captured by the disquotational schema, we must then go on to fully explore what is entailed in asserting p. There is more to truth than what is captured by disquotation—as Ramsey (and Peirce) argued, true beliefs are those that would stand up to experience, evidence, and argument. Disquotationalism cannot account for this fact.

Chapter 5 provides a discussion of Quine and Russell on non-existent objects. Their arguments aim to show that Meinong’s notion of such objects is incoherent. Quine’s well known argument about the fat man in the doorway is discussed and rejected.

This essay was inspired by Philip Kitcher's suggestion that in the first Critique Kant came close to anticipating Quine's “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” It claims instead that Kant can more accurately be said to have written a critique of the “two dogmas of rationalism,” namely, the propositions that the predicate in every true proposition is contained in the concept of the subject (called the “predicate‐in‐notion principle”) and that sensible cognition is reducible in principle to purely conceptual or intellectual cognition (termed the “reducibility principle”). It is further claimed that these are mirror images of Quine's famous dogmas and that they reciprocally imply each other. Finally, it is argued that reading Kant in this ways shows that the fundamental problem with which the Critique deals is not how synthetic judgments are possible a priori but the possibility of a synthetic judgment as such.

Descartes realized that the retinal image would have to be transformed into Amovements of the brain@ and then into ideas before it could become material for sensory or mental operations; he discovered what today is called Atransduction@. The current neurocomputational paradigm goes further: it sees sensory systems as processing transduced signals in the search for the occurrence of specific events or conditions and discarding all information irrelevant to these. When a particular feature is detected, the system enters into a characteristic state: for instance, a neuron might fire to signal the detection of a particular feature. A perceiver gains access to this event through a conscious sensation, which is in no way an image or picture. The features that a system detects in this way are often objective characteristics of external things. This opens the door to realism with respect to sensory classification.

While Cold War philosophy itself was relatively short lived, its repercussions continued in American intellectual life, Later representatives of analytical philosophy such as Donald Davidson, David Lewis, and W. V. O. Quine appropriated insights from it piecemeal into their own programs; others, such as John Rawls, gave it a more central place. But it was never faced and critically discussed as a whole, which meant that some of its basic premises stayed in place. As the academy at large emerged from the Sixties, Cold War philosophy’s dispassionate and ahistorical view of reason came under attack in from feminists and members of minority groups, who asserted that their particular identities went all the way to their cores; reason was not merely mathematical but to some degree partisan. A quote from UCLA chancellor Franklin Murphy shows how the departments of American universities, shaped by Cold War philosophy, were unable to accommodate this, resulting in a proliferation of programs such as those in African-American, Chicano, LGBT, and Women’s Studies, as women and minorities sought places to articulate their standpoints.

Beginning with Nelson Goodman’s notion of exemplification, the possibility of using non-word objects (where ‘objects’ include events, states of affairs, situations and the like) to fulfil the predicative function ordinarily accomplished by words and expressions in language is described. It is shown that there are in fact many kinds of cases in which this function called ‘qualification’ does figure, albeit unnoticed, in dealings with objects. This notion of qualification is intended to be correlative with, and of the same generality as, reference, and with reference it enables a better understanding of the primitive structure that Quine and Strawson call the ‘basic combination’. Aside from its importance to philosophical logic, qualification serves as one of the main ingredients in the account of metaphor.

The notion of semantic descent made familiar by Quine is extended to a movement from the first-floor level of language use to the level of objects that language typically describes; descent here is to a basement level. The idea of such a descent is combined with the idea of qualification to produce what is called the ‘Semantic Descent’ account of metaphor. According to this account, metaphor first requires semantic descent to a level of (appropriate) non-linguistic objects, and these objects then fulfill the predicative function described as qualification. The account is presented in a relatively minimalist way, to show how it copes with the features of metaphor discussed in Chapter 1, as well as provide a clear view of the obvious objections that might be raised against it. The latter centrally includes the fear that the use of objects as qualifiers might be too indeterminate. This is countered with a discussion of a notion called ‘attunement’.

This chapter looks at a pair of related short stories, one by Perec, one by Mathews. Both concern South Seas ethnographers who stumble upon languages with highly limited vocabularies. These stories draw on the analytic philosopher W. V. O. Quine’s example of the gavagai language, by which he illustrates the indeterminacy of translation, and Perec and Mathews use their stories to similar ends. Perec’s story, from his novel Life A User’s Manual, encodes allusions to Wittgenstein’s ‘slab’ language from Philosophical Investigations, as well as to Borges’s famous Chinese encyclopaedia, in order to reflect on how the categories by which we understand the world, and which are so important to translation, are culturally specific. Mathews’s story meanwhile ends with a riposte to Quine: pure translation may not be possible, but we do as well as we can do.

Naturalism has numerous varieties. Rather than survey them all, I briefly mention Quine's contribution, as well as a nonscientific ("liberal") version of naturalism. The main target of the book is scientific naturalism, which has two important varieties—reductive and nonreductive naturalism; I discuss these in detail. In addition, I consider different reactions to naturalism—disenchantment and optimism.

The problem of de re modality is how, if at all, one can make sense of it. Most who have discussed this problem have assumed that modality de dicto is relatively unproblematic. It is, rather, the interpretation of sentences involving, within the scope of modal operators, singular terms or free variables which is thought to give rise to grave—and in the view of some, insuperable—difficulties. Quine has two arguments against the intelligibility of de re modality: a “logical” and a “metaphysical” one. That the “logical” argument is central to Quine’s attack is surely indisputable. But my claim that it is his basic argument is, in effect, denied by Kit Fine. I can (and do) agree with Fine that there are some significant differences between the two arguments. The most important question, for my purposes, is whether he is right to claim that the two arguments have force independently of one another.

This chapter examines conditions which make translation possible, coming to the conclusion that translation can never be completely successful. Returning to his initial experiences translating the bible for the Pirahã as a missionary, as well as to problems in biblical translation in general, the author describes the ways in which a process of translation which tasks the translator with finding an equivalent word or phrase in the target fails. He also discusses Quine’s work on the necessary indeterminacy in any interpretation of the way that another culture uses language, along with the difficulties, emerging in translation, which accord with his views. Finally, the author discusses Quine’s method of “radical translation.”

Chapter IX explores how appeal to intensity and his basic metaphysical machinery gives rise to Garcia’s account of Aquinas’ basic trinity of beauty, truth, and goodness. For Garcia, beauty is an intensified object, truth is a form of intensified comprehension, and goodness understood in terms of relation to beauty. Garcia’s views are developed via comparison with A.J. Ayer and W.V.O. Quine on semantic underdetermination and Graham Harman on beauty.