Treading Water in Neurth's Ship: Quine, Davidson, Rorty

Abstract

This article examines what I take to be some of the wrong turns and false dilemmas that analytic philosophy has run into since Quine's well-known attack on the two `last dogmas' of old style Logical Empiricism. In particular it traces the consequences of Quine's argument for a thoroughly naturalized epistemology, one that would view philosophy of science as 'all the philosophy we need', and that defines `philosophy of science' in narrowly physicalist terms. I contend that this amounts to a third residual dogma of empincism and that its effect has been chiefly to restrict the range of post-Quinean debate by setting an agenda which preemptively excludes all interest in the wider (i. e., critical and normative) dimensions of philosophic enquiry. Its znfluence can be seen In various responses to Quine, among them those of Donald Davidson and Richard Rorty, both of whom adopt a similar, reductively physicalist approach to issues of meaning, knowledge and truth. Where Davidson takes issue with other Quinean doctrines such as framework-relativism and radical meaning-variance, Rorty pushes those doctrines right through to a wholesale relativist (or `textualist´) position according to which interpretation is completely unconstrained by the mere face of a causal 'correspondence' between beliefs and reality. What they both share — and what thus lays Davidson open to a revisionist reading zn Rorty's favoured style — is this Quine-derived notion that beliefs can be explained in terms of a reflex stimulus-response psychology that finds no room for nor mative issues of epistemological warrant or justification. For it will then seem plausible for Rorty to claim that any 'beliefs' acquired by such a rudimentary mechanism are compatible with pretty much any higher-level theory or description that one cares to place upon them. My article goes on to criticize Rorty's most extreme statement of the case — in his essay 'Texts and Lumps' — and (more constructively) to suggest some ways forward from this post-empiricist predicament.