TREADING WATER IN NEURATHS SHIP:QUINE, DAVIDSON, RORTY

CHRISTOPHER NORRISUniveristy of Wales, Cardiff

ABSTRACT

This article examines what I take to be some of the wrong turnsand false dzlemmas that analyttc philosophy lias run into sinceQuine' s well-known attack on the two `last dogmas' of old styleLogical Empznasm In particular it traces the consequences ofQuine's argument for a thoroughly naturalized epistemology,one that would vtew philosophy of science as 'ali the philosophywe need', and that defines `philosophy of science' in narrowlyphysicalist terms I contend that this amounts to a thzrd residualdogma of empincism and that its effect lias been chiefly to re-strtct the range of post-Quinean debate by setting an agendawhich preemptzvely excludes ali interest in the wider (i e, cruz.-cal and normative) climensions of philosophic enquzry Its znflu-ence can be seen In vartous responses co Qutne, among citemthose of Donald Davidson and Rzchard Rorty, both of whomadopt a similar, reductively physicalzst approach co zssues ofmeaning, knowledge and truth Where Davidson takes issuewith other Quznean doctnnes such as framework-relativism andradical meantng varzance, Rorty pushes those doctnnes rightthrough to a wholesale relativist (or `textualise) position according to which interpretation is completely unconstramed bythe mere face of a causal 'correspondence' between beliefs andreal ity What they both share — and what thus lays Davicisonopen to a revisionist reading zn Rorty's favoured style — is thisQuine-derived notion that beliefs can be explained in terms of areflex stzmulus response psychology that finds no loom for normative zssues of epistemological warrant or justification For itwill then seem plauszble for Rorty to claim that any 'beliefs'

Principia, 2(2) (1998) pp 227-79 Published by Editora da UFSC, andNEL — Epistemology and Logic Research Group, Federal University ofSanta Catarina (UFSC), Brazil

228 Chi istopher Norris

acquired by such a rudimentary mechantsm are com patible withpretty much any higher-level theory or description that one caresto place upon them My ande goes on to criticize Rorty's mostextreme statement of the case — zn kis essay Texts and Lumps'— and (more constructively) to suggest some ways forward fromthis post empirmist predtcament

1. Quine: reductwe ph.ysicalism.

For Quine, famously, philosophy of science is ali the phi-losophy we need What he means by `philosophy of science'is basically a strong reducttonist programme for sheddtngali that surplus metaphysical baggage that went along withprevious approaches to issues of knowledge and truth 1Epistemology can be naturalized — rendered properly scien-tific — by cutting out vague mentalist talk of `ideas',`behefs', `concepts', `meanings', `propositional attrtudes',etc , and replacing rt with hard-headed physicalist talk ofassenting or dissenting dispositions `Nly position is a natu-ralistic one', he writes That is to say

I see philosophy not as an a priori propaedeutic orgroundwork for saence, but as contmuous with saence 1see pluiosophy and saence as in the same boat — a boatwhich, to revert to Neurath's figure , we can rebuildonly at sea while staymg afloat in rt There is no externaivantage potnt, no first plulosophy 2

Epistemology must therefore take a lead from behavioralpyschology which in turn takes its methods and investiga-tive hearings from the natural saences Of course episte-mologists have typically supposed themselves to deal in is-sues of knowledge and truth beyond any such merely psy-chological or naturalistic methods of enquiry For Quine,however, this is just an old-style delusion of philosophicgrandeur which should henceforth be abandoned along

Treadzng Water in Neurath's Rip 229

with the residual 'dogmas' (i e, the hngenng metaphysicalcommaments) of logical empincism 3

Philosophy of language falis mto ume by likewtse reject-ing all mentalist predicates, eschewing any notion of privi-leged access to meanings or intentions, and adopting astimulus-response theory of verbal behaviour This despaethe problems that anse from Quine's equally well-knownthesis of ontological relativity, i e, his case that there isroom for doubt with regard to even the most apparentlystraightforward itens of verbal behaviour, as for instancewhen the native informant points toward a rabba andpronounces the word `Gavagal y 4 There is an interestingpassage from Word and Object where Quine actually linksthis problem about the indeterminacy of translanon withBrentano's thesis concerning the irreduabilay of inten-tonal idioms One may accept that thesis, he wraes, `eitheras showing the indispensabilay of intentional whoms andthe importance of an autonomous suence of intention oras showing the baselessness of intentional idioms and theemptiness of the scence of intention My attaude, unlikeBrentano's, is the second' 5 In this respect Quine followsthe dominant lime among Anglo-Amencan analytic phi-losphers for whom the issue was pretty much settled whenFrege took Brentano's student Husserl to task for allowinghis logic to be contaminated by elements of so-called'psychologism' 6 On this view there is no genuine distinc-non — least of ali a transcendentally valid distinction suchas Husserl sought to uphold — between matters of empai-cal psychology and matters of apodicnc warrant 7

Sun there is the question as to whether this charge wasjustified or whether Husserl's logical researches might pos-sess a daim to genume analytic ngour, despae beingcouched in the intentionalist ichom foresworn by Frege'sheas and disoples 8 Just recently some analytical philoso-

230 Christopher N orns

phers, Michael Dummett among them, have suggested thatperhaps the lines of demarcation are not so clearly drawn,even if — as In Dummett's qualifted revisionist account — rtis most often Frege (not Husserl) who predictably has thelast word in matters of logical truth and accountabilayMoreover, this leads on to the issue of just how far — andwith what philosophical warrant — one can rule out inten-tional (or intensional) predicates and contexts in seeking toexphcate the structure and content of truth For there is, Ishall argue, a case to be made that the self-denying orch-nance of Quinean physicalism is such as to foreclose anyadequate account of what is involved in even the most ba-sic fornis of perceptual, cognitive, epistemic, and linguistic-communicative grasp That is to say, intentionality is in-deed `irreducible' in the sense that Bretano (and Husserlatter him) mamtamed, rather than — as Quine would havea — just a remnant of our old psychologistic or pre-scientific modes of thought On the contrary Qutne's re-ductionist physicalism is just what leads to such hypertn-duced problems as that of 'radical translation' between chf-ferent conceptual schemes or of deciding just which amongthe range of possible objects (rabba 7 spatio-temporal rabbit-slice? undetached rabba-part 7) corresponds to some item ofobserved linguistic behaviour In short, this approachmakes no allowance for two main sources of shared andcommunicable knowledge Thus (1) such knowledge pre-supposes the existence of a real-world ob ject domam con-taining manifold distinctive items along with their charac-tenstic attnbutes, property clusters, natural-kind resem-blances, causal dispositions, genotypal features, molecularor subatomic structures, etc And (2) we are able to Iden-tity those objects reliably enough — at least in the majorayof cases — through a process of ongoing causal interactionwith them an.d also through the further understanding that

Treading Water irl. Neurath's Ship 231

is typically acquired in vanous (everyday or specialized)contexts of enquiry 10

With respect to (1) Quine regards such clamas as accept-able on pragmanst grounds — i e, in so far as they playsome role in our present-best sciennfic theones — but seesno reason (convenience aside) for supposing them to cap-ture anything more in the way of reahty or truth With re-spect to (2) he acknowledges the causal component in be-hef-acquisition but treats it in purely physicalist terms — asa matter of reflex responses to incoming sumula — andthereby effecnvely blocks the appeal to those deeper knowl-edge-constitutive features that emerge in our ongoing epis-temic commerce with the world Moreover, Quine has littlechoice but to adopt this approach given both his stnct vetoon `intentionahse talk (which would apply to any save afully naturalized or hardhne physicahst epistemology), andof course his doctnne of wholesale ontological relativity(whtch rules out the prospect of our ever getting thingsright except with reference to the scheme-relative critena ofthinghood and nghtness that happen to obtatn within ourown present-day scientific culture) Thus '[o]ar talk of ex-ternai things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptualapparatus that helps us to foresee and control the tngger-ing of our sensory receptors in the hght of previous tng-gerings of our sensory receptors' 11 However — as I haveargued at length elsewhere — this offers no adequate meansof addressing those well-known problems (of ontologicalrelativity, the nature of scientific paradigm-shifts, the un-derdetermination of theory by evidence, or the theory-laden character of observation-statements) that anse inconsequence of Quine's physicalist-behavionst approach 12That is to say, he pushes so far with the case for a natural-ized epistemology that it leaves no room for any treatmentof issues that must surely be central to philosophy of sci-

232 Christopher NOTTIS

ence and — no less — to related work in philosophy ofmind and language These include the basic question as tojust how far — and on what rational grounds — we canclaim to understand other people's meanings and inten-tions, or can make sense of scientific worldviews(paradigms, theories, conceptual schemes etc ) other thanour own

On Qume's account we have no chotce in the mattersince a behavionst approach is the only viable option oncewe have taken his point about the perfis in store for any-one who rashly has recourse to intentional or other such`mentalise idioms and predicates Thus Iwie depend strictlyon overt behavior As long as our command of languagefas ali externai checkpoints, where our utterance or ourreaction to someone's utterance can be appraised In thelight of some shared situation, so long ali is well' 13 But ifthis were the case then we could never make a start in con-struing other people's utterances, In understanding whatled them to adopt (or to reject) some particular item of be-lief, or again — as concerns philosophy and history of sci-ence — in reconstructing the various interrelated thought-processes (theoretical, observational, hypothetico-deductive, etc ) which produced some particular paradigm-change For, in Quine's view, these are just the sorts of is-sue that we should have left belund -with the passage to anaturalized epistemology, one that is 'continuous with sci-ence' in the sense of rejecting ali normative constraints onthe conduct of enquiry other than those with a directgrounding in the methods of behavioral (stimulus-response)psychology

In philosophy of logic also Quine puts the case that weneed nothing more than the quantified first-order predicatecalculus jorned to a strictly extensionalist semanttcs Inshort 'Mo be is to be the value of a variable There are no

Trearling Water ui Neurath's Ship 233

ultimate philosophical problems concernmg terms andtheir reference, but only concerning vanables and theirvalues, and there are no ultimate philosophical problemsconcernng existence except msofar as existence is expressedby the quannfier (3x) 14 For we shall otherwise run into alisorts of trouble with the axiom of substitutability salva yen-tate for referentially synonymous terms in `opaque' or be-lief-related contexts, that is to say, with the fact that thereis no necessary truth-functional equivalence between pairsof sentences such as 'Mary believes that acero denouncedCanline' and 'Mary believes that Tully denounced Catiline'('acero' and `Tully' being different designations for theselfsame historical person) ' This problem crops up if sheshould happen to not know that both names have an iden-tical referent, so that one sentence is a true description ofwhat Mary believes while the other is either false or lackmgin any determmate truth-value In which case, he advises,we had much better avoid these intentionalist/ intension-alist quagmires and stick to the austere Quinean regimen asdescnbed above

There is a similar objection — Quine maintams — to theidea of quantifying into modal contexts, or supposmg (incompany with philosophers like Knpke) that truth-valuesrange over vanous áternative possible `worlds', some ofthem logically compossible with ours and varymg only Inrespect of connngent details, while others involve a moreradical departure with regard to matters of necessary truthIn the world we actually inhabat 16 I have no room here fora detailed discussion of the far-reaching consequences thatKnpke derives from this modalized theory of naming andnecessity Sufficient to say that Quine views them as asource of yet further `metaphysical' bewilderment whichcan best be got over by returning to the firm ground offirst-order quantified predicate logic, extensionalist sernan-

234 Chrtstopher Norris

tics, and a straightforward physicalist ontology 1 ' For a canalways transpire on Kripke's account, despite bis talk of`rigicl' reference-fixing, that what ought to be synonymous(extensionally equivalent) terms acquire different criteria ofvalid application when translated from one such `world' toanother They thus become °pague or resistant to logicalanalysis in much the same way as those other problemcases that involve various mind-states, beliefs, meanings,ascriptions of utterer's intent, and so forth Moreover thisappltes to any programm.e of epistemological enqutry thatforsakes the narrow Quinean path and raises questionsabout knowledge or truth bevond the strict extensionalistrema

Nevertheless Quine's physicalism goes along with a doc-trine of ontological relativay which appears to undercutany support a might offer for real-1st arguments in philoso-phy of science On this view — as enounced in `Two Dog-mas of Empiricism' — there exist as many objects (putativerealia) as there exist variant ontologies or conceptualschemes for picking them out in accordance with prevalentnotions of realay and truth Thus, ultimately speakmg,there is no difference — in point of ontological status —between brick houses on Elm Street, numbers, mathemati-cal classes, centaurs, and Homer's gods 18 This is not to saythat we should go the whole hog with cultural relativistsand consider them ali equally entaled to endorsement froma present-day informed scientific viewpomt For a isQuine's opinion — speakmg `qua lay physicist' — that thehouses and numbers have a strong ela= to rationally war-ranted behef, as compared with the gods, centaurs, andsuchhke (tu bis view) mythic or nonexistent entales Stillthis preference can only be a matter of what counts for usas 'rational' and `warranted', that is say, whatever has arole in our currently most favoured ontological scheme

Treading Water ta Neurath's Ship 235

Thus

[p]hysical objects are conceptually imported into the situa-tion as convement intermedianes — not by definitionterms of expenence, but simply as irreduable posits com-parable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer Moreo-ver, the abstract entales which are the substance ofmathematics — ultunatelv classes and classes of classes andso on up — are another posit in the same spint Episte-mologically these are myths on the same footing withphysical objects and gods, neither better nor worse exceptin the degree to which they expedite our deahngs withsense expenences 19

So the end-result of Quine's intransigent physicalism andbis vigorous stroppmg of Occam's Razor is to leave usmately bereft of any means for distinguishing real from(say) fictive, imagmary, hypothencal, or non-existentjects Rather, we can and do make such distinctions readilyenough, but only from within a given ontology or concep-tual scheme which itself sets the terms for whatever countsas 'real' by our present best cultural, commonsense, or sci-entific lights

This is — to say the least — an ironic upshot if setalongside Quine's vigorous rejecnon of Brentano's thesisconcernmg the indispensability of intentional iclioms Forone of his chief objections to that thesis, like Russell's be-fore him, is that rt leads to a massively mflated ontologyreplete with ali manner of `intentional objects' whichshould hax,e no place in a physicalist (saence-led) world-view Yet it is just this narrowly physicalist concepnonwhich leads him to place the whole range of above-mentioned items — bnck houses, numbers, classes, cen-taurs, the gods of Homer — on the same epistemologicalfoonng, that is to say, as `myths', 'posits' or `converlientintermedianes' imported in order to `expedite our dealmgs

236 Chnstopher Norns

with sense expenences' Of course it might be said that thegods and centaurs — unlike the numbers and classes — arescarcely the sorts of thing that can be thought to renderany such service in helping us to make better (sciennficallyrespectable) sense of our commerce with physical realityBut this is just as surely to miss Quine's point namely that`reality' is always in the end what we make of it accordingto some given ontological scheme or some existing`canonical notation' for assigning values to vanables

At times Quine desenhes this programme in a way thatmakes it sound perfectly compatible with the sturdiest formof epistemological realism Thus Elle quest of a simplest,clearest overall pattern of canonical notanon is not to bedistinguished from a quest for uh-mate categones, a limn-ing of the most general traits of reality' 20 And againle]ntification begins begins at arm's length, the points ofcondensation in the primordial conceptual scheme arethings glimpsed, not glimpses' However these passagesand others like them must be taken in con junction with hisstatements elsewhere concerning the scheme-relative orpragmancally negonable character of ali such claims For itis a cunous feature of Quine's physicalism that it exerts solittle constraint upon the range of itens that he is willingto admit — In principie at least — as candidates for'entification'

The main reason, I would suggest, is that Quine is him-self sun In the gnp of at least one dogma that charactenzedold-style logical empincism This is the belief — gotng backto Locke and Hume — that there exist certain ulnmateproblems confronting anv realist or causal-explanatory ap-proach to issues in epistemology and philosophy of scienceHence his well-nigh heroic attempt to maintain a hardlinephysicalist or 'scientific' outlook while making such largeconcessions to the case for ontological relativity, ineaning-

Treading Water in Neurath's Ship 237

vanance, underdetermination of theories by evidence, thetheory-laden character of observation-statements, and soforth On Quine's argument there is simply no route —other than the pragmatist une of least resistance — fromthe basic observation-data or physical `stimuli' to the the-ory that best accounts for those data or which provides themost adequate causal-explanatory framework Rather,theories and observation-statements are always sub ject torevision under pressure from conflicts or anomalies at thisor that point in the total `fabric' of currently accrechted be-liefs Thus it follows from Quine's combination of reductivephysicalism and meaning-holism that there cannot be any-thing in the nature of dungs — or in the grounds of ourknowledge concerning them — that could warrant our as-serting some particular claim with respect to some particu-lar (non-scheme-relative) item of physical reality

This is where the doctrtne of ontological relativaystrikes against any kind of realist theorv concerning — say— the constituents of matter, their subatomic structures,molecular compositions, chemical valencies, causal disposi-tions, emergent biological properties, etc It is physicalistjust in so far as it takes sense-data (or unmediated 'sumule)as our sole means of access to the physical world Other-wise it finds no room for any further epistemologicalgrounds of appeal save — in holistic terms — to the no-tonal `entirety' of saence as a ui-tu-nate framework whereinthose data are accommodated through a process of ongoingrevision or pragmatic adjustment What drops out com-pletely on this Quinean account is the concept of episte-mology as a discipline aimed toward providing a normative

and justificatory treatment of seentific knowledge or of thevarious procedures of thought — evidential reasoning, the-ory-construction, and inference to the best explanation —that characterize scientific enquiry For of course it is pre-

238 Chnstopher Nono

asely Quine's ambaion to naturalize epistemology bypurgmg it of ali such intentional or `mentalise residuesThus lolur acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar inprincipie to our acceptance of a scientific theory , weadopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplestconceptual scheme alto which the disordered fragments ofraw experience can be fated and arranged' 2' But in thatcase — it might be asked — what should count as a`reasonable' way of assessing the results given that thiswhole process is somehow thought to transpire In the epis-temologically vacuous space between sensory inputs(physical stimuli) and overall, pragmatically adjusted'conceptual scheme' ? Then again how is a — lacking suchepistemological resources — that the `disordered fragmentsof raw experience' can be somehow transformed into a`scientific theory' (along with as attendant ontology) capa-ble of meeting the basic criteria of scope, specifiaty, empai-cal 'fie, conceptual-explanatory grasp, and so forth?

Quine's theory provides no answer to these questions,premised as it is on a reductive physicalist account ofknowledge-acquisition that excludes them from the rema ofa properly scientific (i e, naturaltzed) approachEpistemology is best looked upon', Quine suggests, 'as anenterprise within natural scence Cartesian doubt is notthe way to begin Retaming our present behefs about na-ture, we can still ask how we have arrived at them ' 23 How-ever this passage also raises more problems than a can pos-sibly resolve For one thmg a sets up the debate in a thor-oughly skewed and unrepresentative way, as if the methodof `Cartesian doubt' — and as supposed issue in certain in-dubitable truths of reason — were the sole alternative toQuine's programme for a thoroughly naturahzed episte-mology But this is to ignore the entre history of post-Cartesian arguments — from Kant to Husserl and beyond

Treading Water in Neurath's Ship 239

— against such narrowly foundationalist ideas of the soli-tary cogito (or first-person knowing subject) as ultimatesource and guarantee of knowledge At very least it may beheld, contra Quine's argument, that epistemology in theother (broadly speaking 'continental') une of descent hasproduced some far more sophisticated analyses of the rela-non between sensory-perceptual experience and the variousforms and modalities of conceptual understanding 24 Also itsignally fails to expiam what is involved in that naturahsticaccount whereby, as Quine says, 'retaining our present be-liefs about nature, we can still ask how we have arrived atthern' For on the physicalist acount such a story wouldlack any kind of normative dimension, amounting to akin.d of natural history of the various beliefs (or disposi-tional states) brought about by direct exposure to incomingphysical stimuli This is a causal-explanatory theory only inthe crudest, most reductionist sense that it 'explains' whatwe know (or think we know) by reference to our history ofbehavioral interactions with objects in the physical worldwhose nature, structure, defirung attributes, causal capaci-ties, etc , are quite beyond reach of any deeper explanationin the causal-realist mode

In short, Quine's behavionsm goes along with his atti-tude of deep-grained Humean scepticism regarding causalexplanations, his aversion to `intentionalise talk In what-ever (semantic or epistemological) guise, and his twin thesesof meaning-holism and ontological relativity For thesedoctrinal commitments ali have their source — as I haveargued above — In Quine's hardhne physicalist approach tomatters of meaning, knowledge, and truth 'Meaning' be-comes just an otiose term, one that can be happily dis-pensed with once we take the behaviorist point'Knowledge' becomes just a matter of pragmatic adjustmentto the incoming `barrage' of sensory stimuli plus whatever

240 Christopher Norris

is needed in the way of theories and (so-called) logical lawsof thought', themselves always open to revision under pres-sure from recalcarant `evidence' And `truth' becomes aconcept entirely devoid of normative or justificatory forcesince, on this view, a is merely the name that attaches towhatever fas in with the rest of our behefs or current(pragmatically adjusted) ontological commaments Thus,despae Quine's avowals of sturdy commonsense reahsmwith regard to the physical sciences, his outlook is thor-oughly anti-realist in the sense that it denies the very pos-sibility of verification-transcendent truths Moreover, un-like Dummett and others who have propounded anti-reahsm as a technical doctrine In philosophy of languageand logic, Quine hnks this argument up with a pragmatistconception of enquiry according to which — in principie atleast — there is nothing (right down to the so-called logical`laws of thought') that might not conceivably have to berevised In response to some recalcarant `expenence' orother 25 In short, Quine's programme is one that would ef-fectively spell an end to the entire enterprise of normativeepistemology and philosophy of science

2. Davidson an.d Rorty

Similar problems can be seen to arise with philospherswho have taken a lead from Quine's thinking but havesought to avoid as more awkward implications Thus, forinstance, Donald Davidson professes the same kind ofbluff, no-nonsense physicalism with regard to behefs andthe real-world objects or events that purportedly causethose behefs, while also rejecting the idea that knowledgemight involve anythmg more — epistemologically speaking —than the right kind of causal relation between them 'Ingiving up the dualism of scheme and world', he wraes, `we

Treadmg Water In Neurath's Slup 241

do not give up the world, but reestabhsh unmediated touchwith the familiar objects whose anncs make our sentencesand opinions true or false '26 The dualism in question is ofcourse Quine's idea of the various frameworks (or concep-tual schemes) which are somehow imposed upon the rawdata of our sensory promptings, an idea which — accordin.gto Davidson — constitutes the third and perhaps last'dogma' of empinasm If Quine had only pushed the ar-gument one stage further and given up this idea also thenhe wouldn't have created ali the well-known problemsabout framework-relativism and radical rneaning-vanance

Still a is hard to see how those problems could ever beresolved by adopting Davidson's direct realist approach,that Is to say, his breezy assurance that there exists an`unmediated' causal link between objects or events in theworld and the content (as well as the truth-value) of ourvanous `sentences and opinions' For this approach rulesout a whole range of salient epistemological dist-met-10ns,among them the difference between perceptual knowledge-by-acquaintance and knowledge arnved at by other, morecomplex or elaborate inferential means It is also 111-equipped to cope with the sorts of difficulty that were firstpointed out by Plato in the Theaetetus and which havelately been developed to a high point of subtlety by Ed-mund Gemer and others 27 These have to do with thequesnon whether 'knowledge' is synymous with `justifiedtrue beher, or whether there are cases — ingenious counter-examples of the type devized by Gemer — where this Iden-tity falis Thus one may hold a behef that is both true (as rthappens) and justified (according to one's best currentknowledge) but where the grounds one adduces for main-taining that behef are In fact unrelated to as truth-conditions as revealed through a more adequate grasp ofthe relevant facts This problem is most often raised in the

242 Chnstopher Norns

context of descriptivist theones of meaning and reference,such that the most promising solution seems to involvesomething more In the way of a direct causal linkage Onthis alternative Creliabihse account, knowledge can indeedbe equated with justified true belief just so long as the justi-fying grounds include some reference to the objects, events,arcumstances, etc , which caused that state of mind in thebeliever and which allowed them to draw the appropnateconclusion 28

Nevertheless, there are senous problems with the causaltheory if it is thought of as providing a full-fledged alterna-tive to the descriptivist model, rather than a means of re-fining that model and closing gaps in the standard ac-count For if beliefs are justified solely in terms of theirhaving been caused in an appropiate way — as with David-son's idea of those 'familiar objects' whose 'antics make oursentences and opinions true or false' — then truth is just amatter of displaying or eliating the right response to thenght kind of stimulus in the nght physical environmentHowever this approach is plainly inadequate to account forother, more complex processes of knowledge-acquisitionsuch as those that occur whenever it is a matter of decidingbetween alternative truth-claims, adjusting theones or pre-dictions in the light of new evidence, or reinterpreting thatevidence so as to conserve some particularly powerful orotherwise well-supported theory In this respect Davidson isno better placed than Quine to expiam what distinguishesgenuine knowledge from true beliefs acadentally arnved atthrough a reflex process of causal triggering devoid of ra-tional warrant or adequate justification Of course David-son differs with Quine on certain points, among them thelatter's great mistake — In Davidson's view — of retaining aversion of the scheme/content dualism, thus opening theway to ali sorts of unnecessary problem 29 But Davidson is

Treading Wctter tn N eurath' s Shit, 243

himself just as prone to veer across from the basic physi-calist doctrine — that true beliefs are caused by directstimulation of our nerve-ends, sensory receptors, opticalcortex, or whatever — to a holistic doctrine of meaning andtruth where equilibrium can always be achieved by makingsuitable adjustments here and there in the overall fabric ofbehefs

This is why, as Davidson. nonchalantly puts it, `truth ofsentences remains relative to language, but that is as objec-tive as can be' 30 'Objective', that is, in so far as language isthought of as comprising a collection of (actual or possible)`sentences' whose truth-conditions are given directly by therole they occupy in the snmulus-response repertoire of thisor that speaker in this or that phvsically specifted contextof utterance However, there is not much left of this pur-ported 'objectivity' if it is always construed as 'relative tolanguage', and if by 'language' is meant the entire range ofthose sentences (or belief-dispositions) that characterize aspeaker — or community of speakers — at any given timeFor in that case the way is wide open for a relativist (or aRorty-type pragmatist) to argue that any `objectivity'thereby secured is 'relative to language' in the full-blownsense of being wholly a product of the vanous rneanings,construais, or interpretations that they happen to placeupon it

Indeed this is just Rorty's point in his essay `Pragmatism,Davidson and Truth' where he tries to coax Davidson backinto the pragmatist fold by drawing out these tensions inhis argument 31 Thus Rorty quotes a passage from David-son's essay 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge'which appears to take the strongest possible une on ob jec-tivity and truth as causal products of our direct encounterwith objects and events in the physical world 'What standsin the way of global scepticism of the senses', Davidson

244 Christopher Norns

wrrtes,

is the fact that we must, ia the plamest and methodol-ogically most basic cases, take the objects of a behef to bethe causes of that behef And what we, as mterpreters,must take them to be is what ia fact they are Commumca-non begms where causes converge your utterance meanswhat mine does if behef in rts truth is systemancally causedby the same events and objects 32

But Rorty can then make the relativist case (at least to hisown satisfaction) that this argument places no limas —other than pragmatic, communal, or localized culture-relative con.straints — on the range of possible interpreta-tions to which ali utterances are subject provided only thatthe sceptic is rebutted by the fact of such causal`convergence' After ali,

this is just what the pragmatist has been telling thesceptic ali the time Both the pragmatist and David-son are saying that if `correspondence' denotes a rela-non between beliefs and the world which can varythough nothmg else vanes — even if the causal rela-tions remam the same — then `corresponds' cannotbe an explanatory term 33

Thus Davidson really has no need to worry about issues oftruth, objectivity, and right mterpretation, despite his con-tinuing to fret about these issues, not least in response toRorty's claim that he (Davidson) is a pragmanst at heartand shouldn't be prey to such needless anxieties For if thecausal theory is enough to secure basic commurucative up-take — or (ia philosophy-of-science terms) the basic possi-bility of trans-paradigm understanding — then no more isrequired ia order to keep the cultural conversation goingOn the other hand this theory is so very basic that It IM-

Treading W ater In Neurath's Slup 245

poses few (if any) ultimate constramts upon the variouswavs the conversation may go while still keeping ali partiessuffiaently in touch with each other That is to say, a givesus pretty much carte blanche to renterpret meanings, re-place old behefs, revise saentific theories, reconfigure thosevarious `metaphors we live by', and constantly re-weave thefabric of belief according to present needs and purposes 34For the causal (reductive-physicalist) theory of meaning,knowledge, and belief-fixation is rtself speafied In just suchterms as to guarantee only the barest necessities of sharedcognitive grasp, and hence to afford the widest possiblescope for creative 'redescription' In Rorty's favoured style

The same trick can just as easily be pulled, as Rortyshows, wah Quine's version of naturalized epistemology, orhis da= that philosophy of saence is ultimately 'ali thephilosophy we need' On this view the language of thephysical saences `limns the true and ultimate structure ofreality' to the best of our current understanding It thusleaves no room for epistemology as traditionally conceived,that is to say, for conceptions of knowledge and truth thatinvolve some reference to mmds, meanings, concepts, be-liefs, or other such `opaque' entales, and which thereforecannot be cashed out in purely extensional or physicalistterms Rorty takes issue with Quine about this — as mightbe expected — and also with regard to his further daimthat 'the unit of empirical inquiry is the whole of saence',rather than particular statements, predictions or theoriestested against particular (well-defmed) items of empiricalevidence 35 But the reason for Rorty's disagreement withQuine is not that this approach would undermine the veryproject of scientific enquiry by allowmg truth-values to beredistributed In whichever way caused least upset to exist-ing habits of thought Rather, he objects that Quine hasstopped short in talking about 'the whole of saence),

246 Chnstopher Noms

whereas he should have pushed right through with the ar-gument and relativized truth to 'the whole of culture', orthe ennre going range of communal beliefs, with no specialpnvilege attaching to the physical scien.ces Thus 'Quine,and many other holists, persisted in the behef that the sa-ence-nonscience distinction somehow cuts nature at aphilosophically significant pine 3' Much better had theysimply let that distinction go, along with the tw o (ar how-ever many) last dogmas of empincism For they could stillhang onto the basic physicalist assurance that our behefsare rehably m touch with the world, or with the vanousobjects whose 'familiar arrues' (In Davidson's phrase) renderthose beliefs true or false But they would also have thefreedom to 'redesenhe' that world In a great vanety of wayssmce the physical data — or sensory promptings — arethemselves under no particular descnpnon and hence inca-pable of fixing the terms or deading the language that best(most accurately) represents them

Thus one might think the language of present-day parti-de physics self-evidently best equipped for picking out justthe sorts of entity — subatomic particles — that physicistsspend so much of their time trymg to detect or desenheBut this is a purely circular argument, Rorty maintams,smce the onlv way of picking out the entales in questton isby using some language (or descnptive scheme) that givesthem a phce In rts range of putative realia 'Normal' scienceis what goes on when scientists stick to conventional habitsof talk and take it that their vanous descnptive schemes arenot just preferential ways of interpreting the data but canactually `cut nature at the joints', or offer some truthful(epistemically privileged) account of how things stand inreality `Revolutionary' saence, on the other hand, is whatoccurs when people cease to abide by the standard rules ofthe game and decide that there is probably more to be

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gamed by crossing disciplines, ming metaphors, or refus-ing to accept conventional ideas as to which sorts of lan-guage best `correspond' to which sorts of notional entay 37Thus there is no reason `in the nature of thmgs' why parti-de physicists shouldn't make a breakthrough — or at anyrate move the conversation along — by pickmg up ideasfrom literary craics, or literary critics from particle physi-cists, or either party from any other discipline (so far asthat term still applies) where there happen to be novel orintrigumg developments afoot

Such a notion will only seem absurd to those other,`Inetaphysical' realist types who want something more thanthe basic Quinean assurance that our beliefs are causally intouch with the world simply in virtue of our physical con-staution as creatures hard-wired to respond in certain waysto incoming sensory stimuli Most often this involves anappeal to the nature (or 'essence) of the objects that scienceinvestigates — subatomic configurations, molecular struc-tures, chemical attributes, DNA protems, etc — along witha kindred division of labour among the different sciencesconcerned Thus the realist's idea that the world comes pre-packaged (so to speak) into natural kinds finds as counter-part belief in the idea of knowledge as orgamsed into vari-ous fields of special expertise corresponding to their variousdistinctive objects of enquiry In other words a harks backto that old Platonic metaphor of knowledge as somehow`cutting nature at the joints', or delving beneath surfaceappearances so as to get at the true, underlying structure ofrealay However, Rorty argues, we can easily dispense withsuch outworn realist notions if we just follow Quine's andDavidson's lead toward a naturalized (physicalist) episte-mology, and accept that there is nothing more to be had inthe way of `correspondence', deep further facts, justificatorygrounds, and so forth We can then start gettmg used to

248 Christopher NOMS

the idea that there is no lima In principie — as opposed toshort-term pragmatic or cultural constraints — on therange of new descriptions which might be applied to this orthat physical datum For if there is one thing that recent(post-Kuhnian) philosophy of science has taught us it is thefact that scientific revolutions come about through justsuch a strong-revisionist break with normalized habits ofdescripttve or dasstficatory thought

&dl the realist might come back with an argument thatappears to concede both main points of Rorty's case — thephysicalism and the strong revisionism — but whichstrengthens the former by giving it a greater degree ofcausal-explanatory force, and thus cuts down the range ofdescriptions that can daim genuine scientific warrant AsRorty preemptively puts it

[w]hen Gahleo saw the moons of Juptter through his tele-scope, it might be said, the Impact on his retina was `hard'in the relevant sense, even though its consequences were,to be sure, different for different commumnes The as-tronomers of Padua took it as merely one more anomalywhich had somehow to be worked into a more or less Aris-totehan cosmology, whereas Gahleo's admirers took it asshattermg the crystalline spheres once and for ali But thedatum aself, rt might be argued, is utterly real quite apartfrom the interpretation it receives 38

Now there is no obvious reason for Rorty to reject this limeof approach, given that it seems to square quite well withhis own (Quine- and Davidson-derived) outlook of base-tine physicalism plus a wide latitude of choice in interpre-tive matters However he does take issue with it in so far asit involves a sharp dichotomy between 'data' and 'inter-pretation', whereas — to Rorty's way of thinking — anydata adduced by Galileo or the Padua astronomers werealready products of their differing worldviews, theories, or

Treachng Water in Neurath's Ship 249

conceptual schemes, and could therefore provide no neu-tral ground for deciding the issue between them What theRorty-style pragmatist should therefore do when con-fronted with such arguments is stick to the basic physicalistline but also make it dear that nothing follows as regardsthe more substantive issue Thus

he agrees that there is such a thmg as brute physical rens-tance — the pressure of hght waves on Gahleo's eyeball, orof the stone on Dr Johnson's boot But he sees no way oftransferring this nonhnguistic brutahty to facts, to thetruth of sentences As Donald Davidson says, causationis not under a description, but explanation is Facts arehybrid entrties, that is, the causes of the assertibility of sen-tences indude both physical stimuli and our antecedentchoice of response to such stimuh To say that we musthave respect for facts is just to say that we must, if we areto play a certain language game, play by the rules To saythat we must have respect for unmediated causal forces ispointless It is like saymg that the blank must have respectfor the Impressed che lhe blank has no choice, nor dowe

I have quoted this passage at length because it shows veryclearly how the Quine-Davidson project of a 'naturalized'epistemology can be taken on board by a strong-descriptivist hke Rortv and then turned around to under-mine the very programme that led to its adoption in thefirst place 'This is partly a result of the inherent ambiguityof phenomenalist terms — such as 'data' — which on oneinterpretation refer to what is given as a matter of `hard'self-evidence, and on another lie open to relativist constru-ais of the sort descnbed above I have wntten elsewhereabout the problems created by the use of such strategicallydouble-edged terms by vanous `post-empincise thinkers,among them Quine and Thomas Kuhn 4° But the main

250 ChriStoPher NOrTIS

point here is Rorty's distinction — with reference to David-son — between matters of real-world (de re) causality andmatters of de dicto causal explanation which necessanly per-tain to some particular 'language-game' (e g, those of parti-de physics or molecular biology) and which therefore in-volve some particular choice among the many such gamesavailable For it is only by decreeing a radical split betweenbare, unaccommodated sense-data and whatever interpreta-non is placed upon them that Rorty can bring off his stan-dard tnck of relativizing truth to what counts as suchamong the members of this or that ('normal' or`revolutionary) scientific community

Hence Rorty's cunous claim (in the above-cited passage)that 'the causes of the assernbility of sentences includeboth physical stimuli and our antecedent choice of re-sponse to such stimuli' It is hard to make sense of thisclaim if one takes rt (pace Nietzsche) that causes by verydefinition precede effects, and hence that any `choice' inthe matter of interpreting — or respondmg to — causalstimuli will necessanly not be `antecedent' in the sense thatRorty apparently requires Where the confusion comes In,as so often, is with the use of a phenomenalist (or sense-datum) terminology which tends to be ambiguous as be-tween (I) the notion of raw sensorv inputs prior to any per-ceptual or cogninve processing, and (2) data that have al-ready been through such processing, and can thus bethought of as `theory-laden' at least at some basic levelThis confusion was rife in the language of the logical posi-tivists and their logical-empincist successors It is what al-lows Quine to maintain Ris hardline physicalist approachin epistemological matters while espousing a doctnne of-ontological relativity with regard to even the most basic'posas' of the physical sciences With Kuhn, it takes theform of a constant equivocating play on the sense of van-

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ous kindred terms (`stimull', 'data', `sensations',`perceptions', `observations', etc ) whose effect is once againto ease the passage from a highly reductive behavionst epis-temology to the notion that scientists on eaher side of amajor paradigm-change quite literally 'live In differentworlds' 41 In Davidson's case, as we have seen, the argu-ment works out rather differently smce he wants to under-mine such relativist talk by showing a to rest on a dubiousappeal to the `third dogma' of logical empincism, i e, thescheme/content distinction In as vanous residual formsBut here again there is a striking failure to expiam how be-hefs acquired in the way that Davidson desenhes —through causal interaction with the world on the part ofsentient creatures — can yield any means of assessing suchbeliefs in terms of their truth, their evidennal warrant, theextent of their agreement (or disagreement) with currentlyprevailing scientific ideas, etc For on this account knowl-edge (or vendical belief) just is the product of that causalinteraction construed in a suaably holistic manner, that isto say, as involving not a one-for-one match between par-ticular `stimulf and particular iteras of behef but rather asan ongoing process of adjustment at vanous points in thetotal fabnc In whtch case, as Rorty is quick to remark, onecan be as `realise as one likes about objects, data, physicalstimuh, and so forth, while still denymg that one's beliefsare fixed — or one's range of creative 'redescnptions' in anyway limited — by the requirement that they should some-how `correspond to realay'

Thus, for Davidson, Ibleliefs are true or false, but theyrepresent nothing It is good to be nd of representations,and with them the correspondence theory of truth, for it isthinking that there are representations that engendersthoughts of relativism' 42 Ali that is needed in order toshrug off the relanvist challenge is a simple recognition that

252 C:, stopher Noms

the problem it raised was a false problem ali along, one thattook nse from the Cartesian idea — the bugbear of episte-mology ever smce — that the only kmd of knowledge se-cure from doubt was the kind arnved at by somehow at-taming accurate mental `representations' of an objective,mind-independent world The best way out of this false di-lemma, so Davidson believes, is to drop that whole theoryof knowledge and truth in favour of a thoroughly natural-ized theory which requires nothing more of vendical beliefsthan that (1) they are assigned some appropnate causalgenesis, and (2) they fit in well enough with the totality ofour likewise physically prompted (but always revisable sinceunderdetermmed) beliefs about the world at any giventime 'This wili in turn have the double advantage ofbringing epistemology more alto lime with the methods ofthe physical sciences and calling a halt to ali those pointless`metaphysical' disputes about truth, knowledge, representa-non, relativism, realism, ann-realism, and the rest Inshort, it will teach us to stop worrying about whether ourown (or other people's) beliefs are reliably 'In touch withthe world' since there is just no way — on the physical-ist/holistic account — that we or they could be so mas-sively in error as to lose touch eaher with the world orwith each other 4-3 This should put an end not only to scep-tical and relativist arguments but also to Kuhnian talk ofparadigm-incommensurability and Quinean talk about theproblems of 'radical translanon' across disparate ontologiesor conceptual schemes What takes their place is the simplepoint — to paraphrase Madonna — that we are ali in theend physical creatures who live in a material world Andthis argument is supposedly an adequate cure for hypenn-duced Cartesian doubts concerning the very possibilay ofknowing whether or not our ideas `correspond' to this orthat item of realay

Treadzng Water zn Neurath's Shzp 253

However, as I have said, there is not much support forany version of commonsense or scientific realism In an ar-gument that takes so reductive a view of our epistemologi-cal condition, or our capacity for acquinng vendical behefsthrough mere exposure to the range of physical stimuli thatbombard us from one moment to the next Indeed, if thereis a candidate for the fourth — and hopefully the last —dogma of empinctsm, a is Davidson's icica that one canavoid ali those old sceptical-relativist problems simply bydumping the third dogma (i e, the scheme/content dual-ism) and adopting a causal theory of behef-acquisitionwhich entalis nothing more than the behever's haba of re-sponding in certain predictable ways to certain kinds ofphysical snmulus This is why Rorty can treat Davidson asa more than half-way convert to his own strong-descriptivist viewpoint, despae Davidson's occasional lapsesinto retrograde talk of truth-as-correspondence, realay asthat which decides the issue between true and false behefs,or other such onose `metaphysicar ideas For if you just puttogether the two main Quinean components in Davidson'sthought — his physicalist account of belief-acquisition andhis holistic theory of truth, meaning and interpretation —then what comes out is a persuasive argument against thatwhole une of epistemological or representation.alistthought

The following passage is a good example of the way thatRorty talks Davidson around to dropping those regressive(= reahst) behefs and adopting a sensible (= pragmatist)view of the vanous issues — or non-issues — concernedDavidson', he wraes,

has no parti przs In favor of physics, and does not thmkthat it, or any natural science, can provide a skyhook —something winch might hft us out of our behefs to astandpomt from which we glimpse the relanons of those

254 Christopher Norns

behefs to reahty Rather, he takes us to be in touch withreahty in ali areas of culture — ethics as well as physics, lit-erary crincism as well as biology — In a sense of `in touchwith' which does not mean `representing reasonably andaccurately' but simply `caused by and causing' 44

This passage can best be read alongside the other lengthyextract (from Rorty's essay `Texts and Lumps') which I atedseveral pages above His main point there was to exploitthe full resonance of Davidson's argument that `causationis not under a description, but explanation is' 45 This hetook to mean — by perrrussible extension — that although'there is such a thing as brute physical resistance' [e g, thelight-waves impinging on Galdeo's eyeball], neverthelessthere is absolutely no way — on Davidson's account — of(transferring this nonlinguistic brutality to fctcts, to tinetruth of sentences' '6 For facts, after ali, are not objects orentales existmg out there in the world, and avadable forinspection in order to ensure that our various statements orbeliefs somehow `correspond' to them Rather, they arethemseives items of belief that may take the form of state-ments, propositions, attitudes, propensmes, assenting ordissenting disposmons, etc They can ali lay ciam to fac-tual warrant but cannot — on pam of manifest circularity— be compared with or held up agamst 'the facts' as ifthese latter somehow belonged to a separate realm of(objective, real-world, mind-independent) truth

Hence Rorty's daim that the realist in.junction `we musthave respect for facts' amounts to no more than the Witt-gen.steiman thesis that `we must, if we are to play a certamlanguage game, play by the rules' Hence also his kindred(Davidson-derived) argument that 'to say that we musthave respect for unmediated causal forces is pointless' Forthe causal forces, no less than the facts, are always alreadyunder a description by the time that they come to figure In

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our vanous language-games, hypotheses, theones, concep-tual schemes, or whatever Moreover, this argument can bepushed right back to the levei of our 'basic' perceptual data,just so long as there remam the yet more basic (Quine-Davidson) appeal to a stage of purely physical stimulto-response where we must be In touch with those 'familiarobjects' whose afines — to repeat — are what 'render oursentences and opirnons true or false'

3. Figleaf Reabsm

Now there is — I submit — something very odd about atheory (Davidson's) which can make such a poli-a ofclaiming to restore 'unmediated touch' between beliefs andworld while also giving warrant for the claim that, sinceeverythmg is under some descnption or other as soon as itenters our ken, therefore we should have no truck wah talkabout `unmediated causal forces' This oddity is ali themore striking in view of Davidson's causal acount ofknowledge and belief-attribution, an account whose chief\Tatue — as he sees a — is to cut out the icica of conceptualschemes or anything else that is thought of as `mechating'between word and world, or beliefs and objects-of-beliefIndeed, Davidson will later go so far as to suggest thatthere is 'no such dung as a language', at least if by'language' is meant the sort of thmg that philosophers of-ten have In mmd when they raise problems about meanmg,representation, or the problem of translating or interpret-a-1g across different cultural-linguistic contexts 48 The causalaccount is supposed to put an end to such wornes by sim-ply pointing out that ali language-users are demzens of thesame physical world, disposed to respond to certam stimuliIn certam (mostly appropnate) ways, and hence not proneto be 'massively in error' concerning that world or con-

256 Chnstopher Norns

cerning each others' world-related meanings and beliefsHowever there is there an obvious difficulty here if we alsorecall Davidson's point that everything is under some de-scnption or interpretation as soon as we encounter it,'causal forces' included For it is this that gives Rorty hishandle for arguing — with due warrant from Davidson —that 'facts are hybnd entales', and hence that 'the causes ofthe assertibility of sentences include both physical stimuliand our antecedent choice of response to such stimuli'But rt is still hard to see how any such `choice' could possi-bly enter the picture, given that the physicalist theory re-quires a direct (`unmediated') causal link between objects orevents in the ambient world and the vanous, more or lesspredictable reactions displayed by sentient creatures withthe right sort of hardwired snmulus-response repertoire

This is why Rorty can claim to be a `realist' In the onlysense that matters, i e, in acknowledging 'the pressure oflight waves on Gahleo's eyeball' or of 'the stone on DrJohnson's boot' But it is also why he can turn that ac-knowledgement around and make rt the merest of tokenconcessions (in order to head off the charge of out-and-outidealism) while none the less maintaining a strong anu-realist line with regard to everything bar the existence of anoumenal `reality' which is under no particular description,and which therefore scarcely affects the issue either wayHere again Rorty's strategy is one that exploits the am-bivalence of sense-data language This language can bebent, according to context, in either of two directions,both of which are needed if the strategy is to look at allplausible, but each of which undermines the other if itsimplications are examined more closely Thus in order forepistemology to be 'naturalized' — or treated (on Quine'sprescription) as fully continuous with the methods of thephysical sciences — one must construe such talk in a strong

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causal-determinist sense which leaves no room for vanant'responses' to the same physical `stimulus' In which case adatum is indeed just that — like the che irresistibly hatingthe blank, in Rorty's apt metaphor — and a can make nosense to think of human knowers as having any leeway forinterpretative (or indeed rational) choice in the matter Onthis account causalrty is preserved, along with a certain(albeit highly reductionist) form of epistemic realism Butmore often, especially In Kuhn's case, what is assumed tobe `given' at the sense-data levei is a mixture of incomingphysical stimuli and dispositions to interpret those stimuliaccording to vanous perceptual frames, ontological com-mttments, preexistent theoretical behefs, etc

So it is that Kuhn — following Quine — can manage tohold this exceptionally tncky balance, on the one hand(when challenged) professing an outlook of sturdy com-monsense realism, while on the other espousing a doctnneof full-fledged epistemic relativism " For that doctnne mustbe construed in such hohstic terms tf we are to take Kuhnand Quine at their word when they push right throughwith the relativist argument to the point where it extendsali the way from the logical 'core' to the empincal`periphery' of behefs held true at any given time But inthat case clearly something has to go either the causal the-ory of belief-acquisition or the relanvist idea that any`stimulf or 'data' encountered in the process of acquinngbeliefs are always subject to prior `choice' as regards theirvendical content or their Impact on the range of currentlyaccredited truth-claims, theones, observational protocols,and so forth In so far as philosophers try to have a bothways they can only be trading — conscously or not — onthe kind of ambiguity that typically attaches to sense-datalanguage For otherwise there is just no way that the physi-calist theory can be joined to the opposite extreme of a

258 Christopher Norris

relativist doctrine that must reach right down to the leveiof casual `stimult' and 'data' if tt is gomg to support suchextravagant claims for the ground-up revisabihty of ali ourmost basic items of belief But the case falis apart undercloser scrutiny since those claims require that the stimulithemselves are alwavs already under some description oropen to various (context-dependent or belief-related) con-struais Thus the Quine-Kuhn argument for ontologicalrelativity completely undermmes the Quine-Kuhn argu-ment for treating our beliefs as reliably produced (andhence as reliably knowledge-conducive) so long as they re-sult from the right kind of causal interaction with theworld

Nor is there much help to be had from Davidson's hope-ful way of avoiding relativism, that is, by rejecting thescheme/content dichtotomy and hence regaming`unmediated' touch with those objects and events whoseImpact on our nerve-ends (and the rest of our cognitive ap-paratus) is sufficient to render our beliefs true or false Forthis idea very easily converts — as we have seen — from arobust-sounding theory of causal realism to a variant onthe old empiricist theme according to which sense-data arethe sole means of access to `external' reality And so theway is reopened for relativists (or Rorty-type pragmatists) toclaim that it makes no difference what we happen to thmkconcerning the realist versus antireahst issue Ali we needdo is take Davidson's lead and give up not only conceptual-scheme talk but that whole `epistemologicar way of think-ing that has plagued philosophy from Descartes downFrom this point of view, 'it is no truer that "atoms are whatthey are because we use 'ator& as we do" than that "we use`atom' as we do because atoms are as they are" Both ofthese daims, the antirepresentationalist says, are entirelyempty Both are pseudo-explanations' 51 In other words we

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can opt right out of the realist/antirealist debate simply byrefusing to play that pancular verbal game Thus it is nomore the case that reality depends on the language we useto desenhe a than that our language depends for itsmeaning or truth-content on the fact of its somehow`corresponding' with a pnstine, as-yet undescribed realityThe pragmatist will wisely avoid both options since the oneleads on to a linguistified version of old-style Berkeleianidealism while the other ends up in the circular predica-ment of ali such correspondence-theones That is to say,leaves us with the problem of finding something factual butnort-linguistic to which our statements may be said to cor-respond, or again, of explaining what could possibly countas an `adequate' or `accurate' match between words andworld Much better Rorty thinks — that we should giveup this hopeless endeavour and adopt the sensible pragma-tist position that nothing depends on our getting thingsright in the representationalist sense

However this position has problems of its own, as be-comes evident in the following passage where Rorty elabo-rates on the non-issue (as he sees it) between realism andanti-realism

The reason why physiasts have come to use the word`atom' as we do is that there really are atoms out therewhich have caused themselves to be represented more orless acccurately — caused us to have words which refer tothem and to engage in the social pracnce called microstruc-tural physical explanation The reason whv such explana-non meets with more success than, say, astrological expia-nation, is just that there are no planetary mfluences outthere, whereas there really are atoms our there 5'

The first thing one notes about this passage is Rorty's cun-ous relapse tnto just the kind of `representationalise

260 - Christopher Norris

thinking that he had earlier — a couple of sentences back— advised us to abjure altogether Thus the causal theoryof belief-acquisition (as concerns the existence of real-worldentales like atoms) is here linked up with a further re-quirement that the objects in question be `representedmore or less accurately' For otherwise — so the argumentseems to imply — our behefs might pass the physicalist testof being tnggered by this or that sensory input, and yetturn out to be largely or wholly mistaken with regard towhat kinds of object we suppose to have tnggered that re-sponse Hence Rorty's distinction between atornic physicsand astrology, smce the fact of observmg some particularplanetary conjunction is presumably enough to ehet a re-sponse (a physically-induced or causally explicable re-sponse) in one who is disposed to credit such things,though we wouldn't want say that this was enough to es-tablish astrology as a reputable scence In the case of at-oms and subatomic particles, conversely, their existencehas been borne out by a whole range of causal stimuli —from observations of Brownian motion or tracks in a cloudchamber to the latest high-resolunon electron microscopes— and also by their playmg a central (indeed an indispen-sable) role in our current best theones of subatomic phys-ics, molecular biology, and so forth 53 So one can have noquarrel with Rorty's ontological-realist clann that there`really are atoms out there', and that this what distm-guishes talk about atoms from talk about planetary influ-ences

However it is questionable whether Rorty is entitled toassert that dali-11, given his belief — so vigorously canvassedelsewhere — that there is just no point to the endless dis-pute between realists and anti-realists, since everthing(atoms presumably induded) is already under some descrip-non or other, and we are thus never in a position to check

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the truth of our vanous observation-statements, scientifictheones, ontological commaments, etc This belief showsthrough in the above-caed passage when Rorty movesacross — within a single sentence — from the idea of atomsas having `caused us to have the words which refer to them'to the idea of atoms as causing us to engage 'In the socialpractice called microstructural physical explanation' Outof context the sentence might be taken to endorse a strongcausal-realist argument of the type promoted on the onehand by logicians and philosophers of language such asKnpke, Donnellan, and the early Putnam", and on theother by philosophers of science including David Arm-strong, Richard Boyd, and Wesley Salmon 55 That is to say,a would treat a term like `atom' as picking out just thatkind of entay which was first referred to (albea in purelyspeculative fashion) by the ancient atomists, and then —much later — made an object of increasingly precise theo-retical and observational knowledge by scientists from Dal-ton to Rutherford and Bohr 56 On this account, moreover,rt is the case not only that atoms 'cause us to have wordswhich refer to them', but also that their existence explainsand justifies the 'the social practice called microstructuralphysical explanation' However, when the passage fromRorty is put back into context then it turns out not to bearanything like such a causal-realist construal For he makesit very clear that this whole line of thought — whether inphilosophy of language (Knpke) or philosophy of science(Boyd) — is in his view just a throwback to old'metaphysical' ideas such those of natural kinds, truth-as-correspondence, or scientific knowledge as that which en-ables us to `cut nature at the joints'

Thus a is very much 'the social practice called microstruc-tural physical explanation' that Rorty wishes to emphasise,rather than any realist notion that such a `practice' is prop-

262 Christopher Norris

erly or uniquely suited to pick out the particular (i e, mi-crostructural) features, properties, or attributes which makeit the right sort of science for that sort of job Rather, as heurges in rrexts and Lumps', there is absolutely no reasonwhy we shouldn't mix disciplines to our hearts' contentand look (say) to literary theory for new descriptions insubatomic physics, or to subatomic physics for a new rangeof metaphors to enliven the discourse of cultural anthro-pology, or to the language of molecular biology as justwhat is needed to revolutionize thinking in other — sup-posedly unrelated — fields of study For those fields aremarked out not so much by their appropriate objects ormethods of enquiry but rather by the currently-prevaihngdivision of intellectual labour Moreover, since conserva-tism tends to rule in such matters, the best hope of movingthings along is to switch descriptions or metaphors as oftenas possible and reject any putative object-language thatmakes some clann to descriptive accuracy or causal-explanatory truth Nothing could more clearly illustrate thefact that one can be a `realise about objects and beliefs inthe sense recommended by Rorty while none the less de-nying that objects are in way characterized — or beliefs inany way constramed — by real-world properties (such asthe microstructural attributes of atoms) that make somedescriptions scientifically valid and others scientificallyfalse

One further passage from Rorty on the same topic mayhelp to bring out both the strams In his argument and theextent to which that argument exploits ambiguities or re-gions of fuzzy definition in the texts of those (chiefly Quineand Davidson) whom he cites in this connection 'The an-tirepresentationahse, he writes,

is quite willing to grant that our language, hke our boches,

Treadmg Water In Neurath's Ship 263

or she insists on this point — the point that our mmds orour language could not (as the representanonalist scepncfears) be `out of touch with reality' any more than ourboches could What he or she dentes is that it is explanato-nly useful to pick and choose among the contents of ourmmds or our language and say that this or that item`corresponds to' or `represents' the environment m a waythat some other item does not On an antrepresentanon-ahst view, it is one thing to say that a prehensile thu.mb, oran abihty to use the word 'atorn' as physicists do, is usefulfor coping with the environment It is another thing to at-tempt to expiam this unhty by reference to representation-alist notions, such as the notion that the reahty referred toby `quark' was 'cleterminate' before the word `quark' carnealong (whereas that referred to by, for example,'foundation grant' only jelled once the relevant social prac-tices emerged)

I have suggested already why the kmd of causal realism(more precisely the kmd of stimulus-response physicalism)laid out in the first two sentences here is In fact no defenceagainst relativist arguments, nor mdeed against the`representationalist sceptic', hung up on some version ofthe correspondence-theory For tt is perfectly possible — asRorty shows — to accept the Quine-Davidson case for anaturaltzed eptstemology, 1 e, one based on a physicalistaccount of behef-acquismon, while holding that any bellefsthus arquired can always be construed In vanous ways ac-cording to the various language-games or 'social practices'that happen to prevail within this or that culture, interest-group, or research-community This is why Rorty can movestraight across from what sounds like a thoroughly realistposition vis-a-vis atoms and suchlike to a position that en-talis ontological parity as between `quarks' and 'foundationgrants', both (so he argues) commg 'rito existence only asand when 'the relevant social practices emerged'

264 CILTIStOPIleT NOTTIS

At this point the typecast representationalist will surelydeliver a typecast response, namely that 'the reality referredto by "quark" was "determmate" before the word "quark"carne along', whereas there could not have been founda-tion-grants before foundations existed with the means andauthonty to award them However this argument is hope-lessly circular, Rorty thmks, since rt depends on our pos-sessing a `determinate' knowledge both of ob jects in theworld (their kinds, properties, causal powers etc ) and ofthe vanous cntena that decide what shall count as a'determinate' (adequate or accurate) descnption of themNo such problems anse, of course, for anyone who takesthe antirepresentationalist view and who thus makes aclean pragmatist break vvith that whole tradition of episte-mological thought which has come down from Descartesand Kant to their present-day analytic progeny Quite sim-ply, Ehey see no way to expiam what "determinate" meansin such a context except by chanting one of a number ofequally baffhng words' 58 In this respect they are followingQuine's lead (from Two Dogmas of Empincism') butpushing that argument one stage further so as to reduceevery version of the representationalist case — his own re-sidual version mduded — to the levei of stuttenng tautol-ogy Thus

just as Quine suggests that we throw out the whole clusterof concepts (e g, `synonymous', 'conceptual') which are in-voked to make us thmk we understand what `analytic'means, so antirepresentationahsts suggest that we throwout the whole cluster of concepts (e g, `fact of the matter',Invalence') which are used to make us thmk we under-stand what 'the determmacy of realitv' means 59

And, according to Rorty, we can get this desirable result atabsolutely no cost to any real-1st convictions that we might

Treading Water zn Neurath's Ship 265

otherwise hold as a matter of workmg (sciennfic or every-day) belief On the pragmattst view such convicttons arecompletely unaffected by any position one takes with regardto the realism versus antirealism issue That is say, theworld will continue to exist (contam the same ob jects, exertthe same causal powers) no matter what descnption webring it under o what theones we develop to expiam itMeanwhile we shall carry on applying those descriptionsand developing those theones even though — as Rortywould have it — there is no possible way of companng orassessing them in point of `correspondence' or `truth'

This is not to say that the objects and the powers existin a realm entirely unrelated to the descriptions and theo-nes On the contrary the former determine the 'atter in sofar as our `minds and our language' (like our boches) arealways responding to physical stimuli and hence fali underthe same range of causal-explanatory descriptions But,again, there is no means of getnng from this basic levei ofstimulus-response physiology to a plausible account of justwhy some descnptions might constrtute a real improvementover others In respect of their precision, accuracy, explana-tory power, empincal warrant, or whatever Representa-nonalists are hopelessly stuck at this stage since (Rortyurges) they offer no way of deciding

whether a certam linguistic item is usefully deployed be-cause it stands in these relations, or whether rts utility isdue to some factors which have notlung to do with them— as the utility of a fulcrum or a thumb has nothmg to dowith its `representing' or 'corresponding' to the weightslifted, or to the objects marupulated, with rts aid 6°

So we can cut out ali that onose talk about `representation'or `correspondence' and sun hang onto the basic (Quine-Davidson) idea that what makes our sentences true or false

266 Chrtstopher Norrts

is the incoming barrage of sensory stimuh plus whateverneeded in the way of adhoc pragmatic adjustment to thewider context of behefs-held-true at this or that time Ob-jects may exert causal powers, and events be caused byother (preceding) events, and behefs In their turn havecausal explanations that render them determinately true orfalse But, as Rorty sees a, there is no legaimate passage —no transitive relation. — between tias kind of purely physi-calist causal account and the kind that looks for reasons (aswell as causes) to expiam how we progress from the stage ofmime sense-certainty to the stage of more adequate scien-tific knowledge Such an argument can only work if there issomething in the nature of physical ob jects (whether ful-crums, atoms, or quarks) that accounts for their actuallybehaving in this or that way, and which justifies the claimthat saence makes progress by offering more adequate de-scriptions or causal-explanatory theories But it is just thisbelief that Rorty rules out as a rehc of old, `metaphysical'habits of thought Thus, according to the antirepresenta-tionalist, to say "we use `atorrf as we do, and atomic phys-ics works, because atoms are as they are" is no more en-lightening than to say "opium puts people to sleep becauseof as dormaive power"' 61

4. Phyncs, Phdosophy an.d the `1Anguistte Turn'

At this stage, I think, we are entaled to call Rorty's bluffand conclude that his version of causal 'realism' as appliedto beliefs and objects-of-behef is in fact the merest of figleafdevices adopted in order to disguise what amounts to a full-fledged antireahst and cultural-relativist posaion The dif-ference between the da= about atoms and the dam aboutoptum's Vormitive power' is precisely the difference be-tween science and pseudo-science That is to say, we can

Treachng Water ni. Neurath's Slup 267

write a history of atomic physics which would trace thevanous stages of advance that led from the purely specula-tive theones of the ancient atomists, via Dalton's calcula-nons of atomic weight as a means of distinguishing thechemical elements, to the vanous (increasingly refined anddetailed) models of atomic structure proposed by physicistslike Rutherford and Bohr

Of course a mav be argued that the sheer vanety ofcandidate descriptions — ali purportedly referring to thesame kind of object — is aself good reason to adopt ananti-reahst or at any rate an instrumentalist approach, onethat witholds ontological commament as regards the ulti-mate `reality' of atoms Ernst Mach famously maintainedthis posaion against the dominant consensus of his time,and a has lately received an eloquent restatement (underthe tale `constructive empincism') in the wraings of Basvan Fraassen 62 The claim, in bnef, is that we should countas 'real' only those entales that can actually be observed,while remaining agnostic with respect to those otherswhose existence is required by our best current theones,but cannot as yet be confirmed or disconfirmed by the bestobservational means to hand This sounds hke sensible ad-vice, especially when a comes to problem areas — such asquantum mechanics — where ontological assues are at pres-ent so far from being resolved that agnosticism might seemthe best, most rational attaude to hold

Now one might construe Rorty's comments about atomsand quarks as meant in the same way, i e, as counselhng amoderate (van-Fraassen-style) reluctance to quantify overindeterminate object-domains However, this construal isruled out by the fact that he draws no distinction in pnn-ciple between quarks, atoms, and middle-sized ob jects (suchas fulcrums) whose existence and effects can be plainly ob-served, and which would therefore possess an indisputable

268 Omstopher Noras

claim to reality by van Fraassen's constructive-empinostcritena Certainly there is no place for such distinctionsone assumes, like Rorty, that everything is under some de-sci-113ton or other as soon as we take cognizance of it, andhence that any une we care to draw between 'real' and'theoretical' entales will always be a product of this or thatlanguage-game or socialized sdentific practice At whichpoint the real-1st wili respond that atoms can indeed be dis-tinquished from quarks since (1) we possess an immenserange of observational as well as theoretical evidence forthe existence of atoms, whereas (2) the term `quark' is atpresent used to pick out an entrty presumed to exist intue of its role within the best (most 'complete') availabletheory of subatomic particle phvsics In other words wehave rational warrant for assignmg a high degree of prob-ability to the existence of quarks while also — with equallygood reason — maintaining a margin of doubt as regardstheir precise ontological status Thus the current situationwith respect to quarks and other, yet more elusive partidesis very like the situation with respect to atoms at a timewhen their existence was strongly borne out on theoreticalgrounds and also indirectly observable by vanous means,but sun subject to doubt if one adopted a ngorously Ma-chian (empincist) approach Moreover, as I have said, thereare arguments from quantum mechanics such as thewell-known paradoxes of measurement and the issue ofwave versus particle interpretations wluch cannot be 'g-nored at these more advanced (microstructural) leveis ofsubatomic research, and which thus strengthen the case foran outlook of prtricipled agnosttasm

Ali the same there is no reason — antirealist prejudiceaside — to suppose that these problems of interpretationthe quantum domam necessanly extend ali the way upthrough electrons and atoms to ob jects and events in the

TreadIng Water In Neurath's Slup

macrophysical world Indeed a was precisely Schrodinger'saim, with his gruesome thought-experiment concernmg thecat in the box, to show that the classical (Copenhagen)theory of quantum mechanics must be in some sense`incomplete' since a failed to establish a cut-off pomt atwhich quantum phenomena (such as wave/particle dualayand the observer-induced `collapse of the wave-packet') dtdnot and could not carry over into matters of macrophysicalreality '''' However that aim has been lost on many com-mentators who continue to extrapolate, more or less wildly,from the one to the other domam There is a parallel herewith Rorty's belief that any difference In point of`ontologicar standing between (say) quarks, atoms, and ful-crums is really just a difference in the role they play as de-scriptive items In the vanous vocabulanes that scientistsadopt from one penod to the next On this view, atomsand molecules are no more 'real' for the fact of Perrin'shaving conducted some ingernous and (as might bethought) conclusive expenments to establish the existenceof atoms, or for Alvogadro's having established a law todetermine the precise number of molecules In a mole of anygiven substance 65 Nor is the case for electrons In any waystrengthened by citing the negative change that exists onevery such partide, by traang thar passage in cathode-raytubes, or by pointmg to the marnfold effects they produce— and the numerous technologies reliant upon them — byway of realist counterargument For at this point Rorty willagain respond that ali the above-mentioned iterns (fromcharges to electrons to cathode-ray tubes and the wholemodern range of electromcally-based technologies) arethemselves inescapably `under a description' — just thekind of description that the realist requires in order tomake his point — and can thus provide nothing more thananother piece of purely circular self-justifying talk

269

270 Chnstopher Norns

What is more, a may be said, the realist has once againfailed to reckon with the problems introduced by quantummechanics since `electrons' exhibit ali the cunous sorts ofbehaviour (such as nonlocality and wave/particle dualism)which make it impossible to grant them admission to therange of well-defmed ob jects possessing a determinatespace-time location 66 But if this is the case with quarks andelectrons then rt is also the case with atoms and moleculesand thence on up — so Rorty would argue — to every van-ety of physical object that figures In our vanous (scentificand everyday) descnptions of the world For the idea thatwe can somehow draw tines on this scale at ontologicallysalient points — as between (say) subatomic, atomic, andmolecular orders of `reality' or micro- and macrophysicalorders of event — is just another version of the old`representationalise idea of truth-as-correspondence, or ofscientific language as that which somehow (impossibly)`cuts nature at the joints' On the contrary, Rorty arguesalthough behefs are susceptible of causal explanation in thephysicalist (Quine/Davidson) mode there is no way of get-ting from that basic levei to the stage where particular con-tents of behef — object-terms, descriptions, theones, hy-potheses, causal explanations, statements of physical law,etc — could be thought of as confirmed or disconfirmed byobjects and events in the physical domam For this wouldrequire something more to the process of arriving at ra-tionally or scientifically warranted behefs That processcannot be simply a matter of having one's sensory re-sponses tnggered by this or that mcommg physical stimu-lus which then leads on — through a kind of diffuse chainreaction — to certain conflict-minimizing changes or ad-justments elsewhere in the fabnc of preexistmg beliefs Orrather, if it is just that, then such `thinking' belongs byvery defmmon to the least advanced, most conservative,

Treadtng Water m Neurath's Ship 271

since wholly uncritical and haba-bound phases of scientificthought

Rorty can see no force to this objection since on his ac-count ali that is I equired to make a break with such rou-tine mterludes in the 'cultural conversation' is a switch oflanguage-games, rnetaphors, or Kuhnian paradigms, onethat comes about for no better reason (but what better rea-son could there be 7) than boredom with the old style oftalk But this will orily stnke his realist opponent as yet fur-ther evidence — if such were required — of Rorty's impos-sibly reductive theory of belief-causation, his failure to offerany adequate account of scientific paradigm-change, andhence his adoption of the strong-descriptivist alea thatthere is nothing 'In the nature' of physical realay or ourvanous descriptions of a that could count decisively for oragainst any candidate item of belief That is to say, a willappear an unfortunal'e result of his adopting so drasticallyrestnctive a view of our 'knowledge of the physical world'that only by swinging ali the way across to a wholesale'hermeneutic' or hnguistic-constructivist view can Rortyallow any scope for change In the history of scientificthought

In this essay I have viewed the linguistic turn (or theturn from de re to Cli dtcto conceptions of necessity andtruth) as one that has charactenzed many, otherwise di-verse or conflicting movements of thought within recentanalync philosophy lvforeover, I have suggested that amarks the retreat from alternative conceptions of episte-mological enquiry that were firmly ruled out by the advo-cates of logical empinasm — as well as by mildly dissidentfollowers such as Quine and Davidson — but which mightyet point a constructive way forward from the vanous en-suing problems and dilemmas This is why Davidson canoffer no viable alternanve to Qumean framework-

272 Christopher Norris

relativism, despae his perceiving very acut ely how Quine'sargument itself falis prey to just the kind scheme/contentdichotomy that he (Quine) rejects as a legacy of old-stylelogical empincism In both cases the upshot of adopting anarrowly physicalist (sense-data-based) epistemology is toundermine those normative standards and values of cnti-cal-reflective enquiry that have marked the emergence ofscientific knowledge from a backgrou nd of taken-for-granted commonsense wisdom In both ( ases, likewise, thistheory goes along with a doctnne of full-fledged meaning-holism which denies that any statement can possess a de-terminate sense or truth-value apart from as role within theoverall structure of presently existing beliefs And fromhere — as I have argued — a is but a short step to Rorty'sidea that one can be as `realise as one hkes about stimuli,sen.se-data, the Impact of photons on Gahleo's retina, etc ,and yet maintain that this exerts absolutely no constraintupon the range of descriptions ot scientific theones'compatible with the evidence'

It seems to me that what is needed is an opening-up ofthis somewhat parochial and self-absorbed debate tosources outside the mainstream analyttc tradttion Theyinclude not only causal-explanatory approaches to episte-mology and philosophy of science but also a range ofhighly developed arguments for critica! realism in vanousfields of the natural an.d social sciences 67 Among these lat-ter must be counted the large body of work inspired byHusserhan phenomenology and — perhaps most relevantfor present purposes — the distinctive strain of critica! or`applied' rationalism developed by thmkers such as GastonBachelard and Georges Cangtulhem 68 I have argued thiscase in a number of recent books which offer a wider per-spective on issues confronting analytic philosophy of lan-guage and science in the wake of logical empincism 69 What

Treading Water In Neurath's Ship 273

I have sought to do here, in diagnostic mode, is trace some,prominent influences — chiefly that of Quine — whose ef-fect has been to divert attention from these promising al-ternanve hnes of enquiry At any rate there seems latleprospect of signiftcant advance while the stnctures of alogical-empincist approach continue to set the main termsfor debate despite reiterated claims to have shucked off asvanous residual dogmas

KeywordsQuine, W V O , Davidson, D

School of English,

, Rorty, R

Christopher NorrisCommunication & PhilosophyUniversity of Wales, Cardzff

United Kingdom

Notes

1 See for mstance W V Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge,Mass M I T Press, 1960), From a Logical Point of View, 2nd ed(Cambridge, Mass Harvard University Press, 1961), OntologicalRelativity and Other Essays (New York Columbia UniversityPress, 1969), Theories and Things (Harvard U P, 1981), also — forsome later rethinking of these issues — Pursutt of Truth, reviseded (Harvard U P, 1990)2 Quine, Ontological Relativity (op cit ), p 1263 Quine, `Two Dogmas of Empiricism', in From a Logical Point ofView (op cit ), pp 20-464 See Quine, Word and Object (op cit ) and Indeterminacy ofTranslation Again', Journal of Philosophy, Vol LXXXIV (1987),pp 5-10, also — for some interesting commentary from variousstandpomts — Robert Kirk, Translatton Determtned (OxfordClarendon Press, 1986), Colm McGinn, 'Radical Interpretation

274 Christopher Nonis

and Epistemology', in Ernest LePore (ed ), Truth and Interpreta-tton perspectives on the philosophy of Donald Davidson (OxfordBlackwell, 1986), 356-68, Talbot J Taylor, Mutual Misunder-standing scepticzsm and the theorizing of language and interpretation(London Routledge, 1992)5 Quine, Word and Object (op cit ), p 2216 Gottlob Frege, review of Edmund Husserl's Philosophie der Ar-ithmetik, translated by E -H W Kluge, Mind, Vol LXXXI(1972), pp 321-377 See especially Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Medi tations an tntro-duction to phenomenology, trans Donon Cairns (The Hague Mar-tinus Nijhoff, 1973), Expertence and Judgement investigations in agenealogy of logic, trans James S Churchill and Karl Arnenks(Evanston, Ill Northwestern U P, 1973), Formal and Transcen-dental Logic, trans Donon Cairns (Nijhoff, 1969), Logical Investi-gations, 2 vols , trans J N Findlay (New York Humanities Press,1970)8 For some representative commentary from the `analytic' side,see Gilbert Ryle, Phenomenology', Review of Martin Farber,The Foundanons of Phenomenology', and Thenomenology ver-sus The Concept of Mind', in Ryle, Collected Papers, Vol 1(London Hutchinson, 1971), pp 167-78, 215-24 & 179-969 Michael Dummett, The Ongins of Analyttc Philosophy (LondonDuckworth, 1993) See also Dagfinn. Follesdal, 'Husserl andFrege a contribution to elucidating the ongins of phenomenol-°geai phdosophy', in Leda Haaparanta (ed ), Mind, Meaning andMathematics essciys on the philosophical views of Husserl and Frege(Dordrecht & Boston Kluwer, 1994), pp 3-47, R Cobb-Stevens,Husserl and Analytic Philosophy (Dordrecht Kluwer, 1990), andJohanna Mana Tito, Logic in the Husserlian Context (Evanston,111 Northwestern University Press, 1990)10 See especially Hilary Kornblith, Inductive Inference and its Natu-ral Ground an essay in naturalistic epistemology (Cambndge, MassM I T Press, 1993) and Kornbhth (ed ), Naturalizing Eptstemology(M I T Press, 1985)11 Quine, Theortes and Things (op cit ), p 112 See Christopher Norns, Resources of Realism prospects for `post

Treadzng W ater in N eurath' s Slup 275

analytic' philosophy (London Macmillan, 1997)13 Quine, Pursuit of Truth (op at ), p 3714 Quine, Methods of Logic (Cambndge, Mass Harvard Umver-sity Press, 1982), p 22415 See for instance Quine, 'Reference and Modahty' and'Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes', m Leonard Linsky(ed ), Reference and Modality (Oxford Oxford University Press,1971), pp 17-34 and 101-1116 Saul Knpke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford Blackwell, 1980),see also David Wiggins, Sameness and Substance (Blackwell, 1989)and Stephen P Schwartz (ed ), Naming, Necessity and NaturalKinds (Ithaca, N Y Cornell University Press, 1977)17 See Note 15, above18 See Quine, Two Dogmas of Empinasm' (op at )19 Ibid, p 4520 Quine, Word and Object (op at ), 16121 Ibid, p 122 Quine, From a Logical Point of View (op at ), p 1623 Quine, The Nature of Natural Knowledge', in Samuel Gut-tenplan (ed ), Mind and Language (Oxford Clarendon Press,1975), p 6874 See Note 8, above, also Jonathan Dancv, An Introduction toContemporary Epistemology (Oxford Blackwell, 1985), Jim andMary Tiles, Epistemology a criticai history (Blackwell, 1993) andAn Introduction to Historical Epistemology (Blackwell, 1993) Onthe 'continental' background more specifically, see Donald Gil-hes, Philosophy of Science in the Twentieth Century four centralthemes (Oxford Blackwell, 1993), Gary Guttmg, Michel Foucctuit'sArchaeology of Scientific Knowledge (Cambndge Cambndge Uni-versity Press, 1989), Chnstopher Norns, Agatnst Relativism pht-losophy of sczence, deconstruction and criticai theory (op ar), MaryTiles, Bachelard sczence and objectivity (Cambndge U P, 1984)25 See Michael Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas (LondonDuckworth, 1978), also Michael Luntley, Language, Logic andExperzence the case for anti-realism (Duckworth, 1988), N Ten-nant, Anti Realism and Logic (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1987),Cnspm Wright, Reahsm, Meanmg and Truth (Oxford Blackwell,

276 Christopher Norris

1987)26 Donald Davidson, 'On the Very Idea of a ConceptualScheme', m Inquzrzes into Truth and Interpretatzon (Oxford OxfordUniversity Press, 1984), pp 183-98, p 19827 Edmund Getner, 'Is Justified True Behef Knowledge', Analysts,Vol XXIII (1963), pp 121-3, also R M Chisholm, Theory ofKnowledge, 2nd ed (Englewood Cliffs, N J Prentice-Hall, 1977)and R Shope, The Anal ysis of Knowing (Princeton, N J Prince-ton University Press, 1983)28 See espeaally Alvm Goldman, Epzstemology and Cognition(Cambndge, Mass Harvard University Press, 1986)29 Davidson, 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme' (opat )" Ibid, p 19831 Richard Rorty, 'Pragmansm, Davidson and Truth', in Objec-tivay, Relativism, cuid Truth (Cambridge Cambndge UniversityPress, 1981), pp 126-5032 Davidson, 'A Coherence Theory of Meamng and Truth', inLePore (ed ), Truth ctnd Interpretation (op at ), pp 307-19, p 317-833 Rorty, 'Pragmansm, Davidson and Truth' (op at ), p 13534 See espeaally Rortv, Inquiry as Recontextualization an ann-dualist account of interpretation', in Objectivity, Relatzvzsm, andTruth (op at ), pp 93-110' See Quine, `Two Dogmas of Empincism' (op at )36 Rorty, 'Is Natural Science a Natural Kind r , in Objectivity,Relatzvzsm, and Truth (op at ), pp 46-62, p 4737 See especiallv Rorty, 'Texts and Lumps', In Objectivity, Relatzv-zsm, and Truth, pp 78-9238 Rorty, 'Texts and Lumps', p 8139 Ibid, p 81" See Thomas S Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,2nd ed (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1970)41 Ibid42 Rorty, Introduction', Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (opat ), p 743 See Davidson, 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme' (op

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at ), also 'The Method of Truth in Metaphysics', 'Reality With-out Reference', and `Communication and Convennon', in Inquines 'rito Truth and Interpretatzon (op at ), pp 199-214, 215-25and 266-8044 Rorty, Introduction', in Objectivity, Relanvism, and Truth(op cit ), p 945 Cited in Rorty, Texts and Lumps', p 81' Ibid, p 81

47 Ibid, p 81" Davidson, 'A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs', in R Grandyand R Warner (eds ), Philosophical Grounds of Rationalzty inten-tions, categortes, ends (Oxford Oxford Umversity Press, 1986), pp157-7449 Rorty, Texts and Lumps', p 815° Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutzons (op cit )

Rorty, Introduction' (op ai), p 552 Ibid, p 553 See for instance J Pernn, Atoms, trans D L Hammick (NewYork Van Nostrand, 1923), Mary Jo Nye, Molecular Reality(London Macdona1d, 1972), Michael Gardner, Realism and In-strumentahsm in Nineteenth-Century Atomism', Philosophy ofScience, Vol XLVI, No 1 (1979), pp 1-3454 Keith S Donnellan, 'Reference and Definite Descnpnons', inSchwartz, Naming, Necessity and Natural Kinds (op ai), pp 42-65, Knpke, Naming and Necessity (op at ), Hilary Putnarn, 'IsSemantics Possibler and `Meaning and Reference', in Schwartz(op at ), pp 102-18 and 119-32, also Gareth Evans, The Varie-ties of Reference, ed John McDowell (Oxford Clarendon Press,1982), Wiggins, Sameness and Substance (op at )55 D M Armstrong, Behef, Truth and Knowledge (CambndgeCambndge University Press, 1973) and Universais and ScientificRealzsm, 2 vols (Cambndge U P, 1978), Richard Boyd, 'TheCurrent Status of Scientific Realism', Frkenntnts, Vol XIX(1983), pp 45-90, Wesley C Salmon, Sctentific Realtsm and theCausal Structure of the World (Pnnceton, N J Princeton Univer-sity Press, 1984) See also John W Carroll, Laws of Nature(Cambndge Cambrtdge University Press, 1994), Michael Devia,

278 Christopher Norris

Realism and Truth, 2nd ed (Oxford Blackwell, 1986), Rom Harreand E H Madden, Causal Powers (Blackwell, 1975), Jarrett Lephn(ed ), Scientific Reahsm (Berkeley Si. Los Angeles University ofCalifornia Press, 1984), M Tooley, Causation a realist approach(Blackwell, 1988), Bnan Skyrms, Causal Necessity (New HavenYale University Press, 1980)r"6 See Note 55, above57 Rorty, Introduction' (op cit ), p 558 Ibid, p 659 Ibicl, p 660 Ibicl, p 661 Ibicl, p 662 See Bas van Fraassen, The Scientific Image (Oxford ClarendonPress, 1980) and Laws and Symmetry (Clarendon Press, 1989), alsomy critique of bis posinon In Norns, `Ann-Realism and Con-structive Empincism is there a (real) difference r and `OntologvAccordmg to Van Fraassen some problems with constructweempiricism', Against Relativism (op cit ), pp 167-195 and 196-21763 See for mstance Peter Gibbins, Pondes and Paradoxes the limas/of quantum logic (Cambndge Cambndge University Press, 1987),Tini Maudlin, Non Locality and Relativity metciphysical intimationsof modern sczence (Oxford Blackwell, 1993), Alastan I M Rae,Quantum Physzcs illusion or reality 7 (Cambndge U P, 1986), Mi-chael Redhead, Incompleteness, Nonlocality and Real zsm a prole-gomenon to the philosophy of quantum mechanzcs (Oxford Claren-don Press, 1987)64 Erwm Schrodmger, Letters on Wave Mechanics (New YorkPhilosophical Library, 1967), also John Gribbin, In Search ofSchrodinger's Cat quantum physics and real ity (New York BantamBooks, 1984)65 See Note 55, above66 See Note 65, above67 See Note 55, above, also Mano Bunge (ed ), The Criticai Appoach to Science and Philosophy (New York Free Press, 1964), RoyBhaskar, Scientific Realzsm and Human Emancipation (LondonVerso, 1986) and Reclaiming Rectlity a criticai introduction to con

Treading W ater in N eurath' s Shzp 279

tem porary philosophy (Verso, 1989), Rom Harre, Vaneties of Realism a rationale for the social sciences (Oxford Blackwell, 1986),Wilham Outhwaite, New Philosoplues of Social Science realism,hermeneutics and criticcd theory (London Macmillan, 1987), SeanSayers, Reality and Reason dialectic and the theory of knowledge(Blackwell, 1985)' See Notes 7, 9 and 24, above, also J N Mohanty, The Possi-bility of Transcendental Philosophy (The Hague Martmus Nijhoff,1985), H Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 2 vols(Nijhoff, 1984), Gaston Bachelard, Le rationalisme applique (ParisPresses Umversitaires de France, 1949), The Phdosophy of No aphilosophy of the new scientific mind (New York Orion Press,1968), The New Scientific Spint (Boston Beacon Press, 1984),Georges Canguilhem, Lct connaissance de la vie (Paris Vrin, 1969),Ideology and Rationality ui the History of the Life Sciences, trans AGoldhammer (Cambridge, Mass M 1 T Press, 1988)69 Norris, Against Relativism and Resources of Realism (op cit ), alsoNew Idols of the Cave on the limits of anu. realism (ManchesterManchester University Press, 1997)