Linguistique de l’écrit

Revue internationale en libre accès

Revue | Volume | Article

235389

Reclaiming Quine's epistemology

Bredo Johnsen

pp. 961-988

Résumé

Central elements of W. V. Quine’s epistemology are widely and deeply misunderstood, including the following. He held from first to last that our evidence consists of the stimulations of our sense organs, and of our observations, and of our sensory experiences; meeting the interpretive challenge this poses is a sine qua non of understanding his epistemology. He counted both “This is blue” and “This looks blue” as observation sentences. He took introspective reports to have a high degree of certainty. He endorsed outright Hume’s “skeptical” argument concerning induction. His naturalized epistemology is simply naturalistic, or scientific, epistemology stripped of the project of rational reconstruction, and is thoroughly normative. Quine was unconditionally a scientific philosopher who took our theories to be answerable ultimately to our perceptual experiences (sensations)—and conditionally an empiricist, empiricism being a scientific theory that has no competitors worthy of the name. I attempt to make all of this clear, and conclude by offering a concise formulation of his epistemology.

Détails de la publication

Publié dans:

(2014) Synthese 191 (5).

Pages: 961-988

DOI: 10.1007/s11229-013-0302-4

Citation complète:

Johnsen Bredo, 2014, Reclaiming Quine's epistemology. Synthese 191 (5), 961-988. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0302-4.