Quine, Dewey, and the Pragmatist Tradition in American Philosophy of Science Don Howard Department of Philosophy Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values University of Notre Dame Introduction The standard historiography of American Pragmatism gives leading roles to Charles Saunders Peirce (1839-1914), William James (1842-1910), and John Dewey (1859-1952). Supporting roles are played by Chauncey Wright (1830-1875), George Herbert Mead (1863-1931), Charles W. Morris (1901-1979), and C. I. Lewis (1883-1964). The “extras” in the cast are too numerous to list. An off-Broadway revival premiered in 1979, with the producer, Richard Rorty (1931-2007) casting himself in the lead (Rorty 1979, 1982), and the road-show version had a surprisingly long run, given the many departures from the original script and the overall lackluster performances. The best that one can say about the Rorty version of “Pragmatism” is that its modest success proved that there is an audience eager for more. Prominent and strange among the new bits in the revival are whole scenes in Act I in which Rorty, playing the role of Dewey, drives out of the castle a pretender for the throne named Willard Van Orman Quine (Rorty 1979, Ch. X). Rorty’s attack on Quine is strange, and not just because Rorty did not understand Quine. It is strange because some of us think that Quine was the legitimate heir and Rorty the pretender. One of the aims of this essay is to explain why and how that is so, which is to say, why and how it is that Quine should be regarded as the pre-eminent representative of pragmatism in the latter twentieth Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 2 century.1 But the essay’s main aim is to convince you that Quine deserves such recognition because, at the heart of Quine’s project, is a philosophy of science with roots firmly planted in the pragmatist tradition and to sketch the principal features of that pragmatist theory of science. Those of us interested in Dewey bemoan the fact that, while science was central to his project, he produced no philosophy of science per se. Perhaps we should take comfort from the fact that Quine did it for him. There are obvious obstacles to a pragmatist reading of Quine. Start with the fact that he is commonly remembered as part of the larger twentieth-century story of analytic philosophy, even though, ironically, his classic “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (Quine 1951) was and remains one of the most devastating attacks on the central legitimating premise of the analytic project, namely, the analytic synthetic distinction. The irony grows as we remember that Quine was also one of the twentieth century’s most vocal defenders of epistemological naturalism, a stance more or less diametrically opposed to analytic philosophy. The attack on analyticity and the naturalism are, of course, central to Quine’s version of pragmatism. Another obstacle to the pragmatist reading of Quine, especially one foregrounding his philosophy of science, is that he is remembered more commonly as a logician and philosopher of language than as a philosopher of science. When we think about modern, analytic philosophy of language or modern, formal logic, we do not think of James and Dewey (though Peirce gets some of our attention). More’s the pity, because logic and philosophy of language were major interests of Dewey’s. But so it is. Quine was a logician and philosopher of language from the beginning, this being the font from which all else flowed. Nonetheless, the way of remembering Quine that Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 3 foregrounds logic and philosophy of language to the exclusion of philosophy of science has much to do with the historical accidents of who chose to be his principal interlocutors. The fact that Donald Davidson, Jerrold Katz, and Saul Kripke were not ever or in the first instance philosophers of science implies nothing, however, about Quine’s understanding of his own project. In fact, Quine wrote extensively about science and about core issues in the philosophy of science, such as conventionalism, induction, ontology, the theory-ladenness of observation, inter-theory relations, and incommensurability. Indeed, the engagement with philosophical issues about science is pervasive. More importantly, the proper way of setting Quine in the context of twentieth-century philosophy, especially his early debts to C. I. Lewis, the younger Rudolf Carnap, and Otto Neurath, highlights Quine’s central place in the century’s major wrangles in the philosophy of science, such as the Vienna Circle’s protocol sentence debate, to which one cannot help but read “Two Dogmas” as almost a direct response, even if Quine omitted those footnotes, just as he managed to forget having been part of an argument about Pierre Duhem’s brand of conventionalism when he first published “Two Dogmas” in the Philosophical Review in 1951.2 Shifting our glance forward in time, Quine’s work from “Two Dogmas” in 1951 to Word & Object in 1960 must been seen in the context of pre-Kuhn (Kuhn 1962) anti-foundationalist challenges to neo-positivist orthodoxy in the philosophy of science. Other such include Nelson Goodman’s “The New Riddle of Induction” (Goodman 1955), Norwood Russell Hanson’s Patterns of Discovery (Hanson 1958), Stephen Toulmin’s The Philosophy of Science: An Introduction (Toulmin 1953) and Foresight and Understanding (1961), and Paul Feyerabend’s “Explanation, Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 4 Reduction, and Empiricism” (Feyerabend 1962). Looking backward from the viewpoint of later twentieth-century discussions of Quine, he might appear mainly as a philosopher of language. Looking forward, however, from the viewpoint of the 1930s through the early 1960s, Quine looks much more like a philosopher of science. That Quine was once seen as a philosopher of science is evidenced by the first collection of critical essays on Quine’s work, Words and Objections (Davidson and Hintikka 1969), the first contribution to which, by J. J. C. Smart, is entitled, simply. “Quine’s Philosophy of Science” (Smart 1969). Anachronism is a vice. A third obstacle to the reading of Quine as a pragmatist, at least in the Dewey tradition, is that he tendered no social philosophy. Dewey was as much an activist as a philosopher.3 Quine’s Nixonian Republican politics were well known, but they left no trace on his philosophy, which is just as well. Quine’s claim to a place in the pragmatist tradition rests all the more crucially, for this reason, on his philosophy of science and its filiations to Deweyan pragmatism. Quine on His Debt to Dewey and Pragmatism That Quine understood himself to stand in the pragmatist tradition is clear from the concluding words of “Two Dogmas”: Carnap, Lewis, and others take a pragmatic stand on the question of choosing between language forms, scientific frameworks; but their pragmatism leaves off at the imagined boundary between the analytic and the synthetic. In repudiating such a boundary I espouse a more thorough pragmatism. Each man is given a scientific heritage plus a continuing barrage of sensory stimulation; and the considerations which guide him in warping his scientific heritage to fit his continuing sensory promptings are, where rational, pragmatic. (Quine 1951, 46) That Quine owed a debt specifically to Dewey is something that Quine, himself, proclaimed when Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 5 he delivered the inaugural John Dewey lecture at Columbia University in 1968, the lecture that we know as “Ontological Relativity.” Permit me to quote at length: I listened to Dewey on Art as Experience when I was a graduate student in the spring of 1931. Dewey was then at Harvard as the first William James Lecturer. I am proud now to be at Columbia as the first John Dewey Lecturer. Philosophically I am bound to Dewey by the naturalism that dominated his last three decades. With Dewey I hold that knowledge, mind, and meaning are part of the same world that they have to do with, and that they are to be studied in the same empirical spirit that animates natural science. There is no place for a prior philosophy. When a naturalistic philosopher addresses himself to the philosophy of mind, he is apt to talk of language. Meanings are, first and foremost, meanings of language. Language is a social art which we all acquire on the evidence solely of other people’s overt behavior under publicly recognizable circumstances. Meanings, therefore, those very models of mental entities, end up as grist for the behaviorist’s mill. Dewey was explicit on the point: “Meaning . . . is not a psychic existence; it is primarily a property of behavior.” Once we appreciate the institution of language in these terms, we see that there cannot be, in any useful sense, a private language. This point was stressed by Dewey in the twenties. “Soliloquy,” he wrote, “is the product and reflex of converse with others” (170). Further along he expanded the point thus: “Language is specifically a mode of interaction of at least two beings, a speaker and a hearer; it presupposes an organized group to which these creatures belong, and from whom they have acquired their habits of speech. It is therefore a relationship” (185). Years later, Wittgenstein likewise rejected a private language. When Dewey was writing in this naturalistic vein, Wittgenstein still held his copy theory of language. (Quine 1968, 185-186). Quine is, himself, here quoting from Dewey’s Experience and Nature (1925). The pragmatism in Quine’s philosophy of science, at least at the time of “Two Dogmas,” was noted by Smart in his above-mentioned contribution to Words and Objections (Smart 1969, xx), coupling it, as once was common and right, with a version of instrumentalism about theories and theoretical terms. Smart thought that he detected a shift toward realism by the time of Word & Object, but Quine, in his reply, chides Smart for confusion on this point, claiming no change in doctrine, only a change in formulation (Quine 1969c, yy). Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 6 Six years later, Ernest Gellner described Quine as “The Last Pragmatist” (Gellner 1975). The immediate context for Gellner is ontology, Quine’s views on which were famously expressed in the formula, “to be is to be the value of a bound variable,” in “On What There Is” (Quine 1948). Gellner brands Quine as a pragmatist for his eschewing ontological absolutes: Quine is indeed a pragmatist philosopher. A number of themes are generally involved in pragmatism, but two are specially relevant: a joyful acceptance of change, trial and error, impermanence (as opposed to the old pursuit of absolute repose), and a vision which considers human activities and cognition in a biological perspective. Each of these themes is conspicuously present in Quine. . . . But over and above exemplifying pragmatism in some measure, Quine has also elaborated an overt epistemological doctrine which actively preaches and justifies this attitude, which repudiates “Cartesianism” in so many words. (Gellner 1975, 848-849) Gellner goes on to describe Quine’s “free-and-easy pragmatism” as emphasizing two continuities: the continuity between man and nature and the continuity between philosophy and other forms of inquiry. It is instructive that those reading Quine at a time when Dewey and his work were still living memories remark upon the link to pragmatism as something not at all surprising, no special argument being needed to secure Quine’s place in the tradition. But opinion in the secondary literature shifted in later years. An essay of Quine’s, “The Pragmatists’ Place in Empiricism” (Quine 1981) is cited as evidence. Several authors quote this passage:4 It is not clear to me what it takes to be a pragmatist. It is not clear in what ways the philosophers who have been called pragmatists are nearer in outlook to one another than to philosophers who are not so called. I suspect that the term “pragmatism” is one we could do without. It draws a pragmatic blank. However, we have the term, and we can make some sense of it by enumeration. Peirce, James, Schiller, Mead, and Dewey have been called pragmatists and have owned the soft impeachment. . . . All of these professing . . . pragmatists (Peirce, James, Schiller, Mead, Dewey) belong, it seems, to the empiricist tradition (Quine 1981, 23). Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 7 They quote, as well, this later remark: In limiting myself to the card-carriers, I have found little in the way of shared and distinctive tenets. The two best guesses seemed to be behavioristic semantics, which I heartily approve, and the doctrine of man as truth-maker, which I share in large measure. (Quine 1981, 37) That Quine is not as good a historian of pragmatism as, say, Louis Menand (2001) is indisputable. Matthew Brown thinks that Quine’s “ham-fisted” history of pragmatism is so bad – mainly for want of a recognition of the pragmatists’ testy relationship to empiricism – as to constitute “good reason to dispense with the myth of ‘Quine, the Last Pragmatist’” (Brown 2006, 340). But Quine never pretended to be a serious historian. I think that the right way of appreciating this and other of Quine’s persuasive histories is as telling us more about Quine’s view of his own place in history than about the thinkers and movements that here receive a creative reading.5 That Quine emphasizes behavioristic semantics, as he did also in his hymn to Dewey in “Ontological Relativity,” is the crucial point. I will argue below that this is, indeed, the starting point of Quine’s pragmatic philosophy of science. Remember that we are discussing Quine the philosopher of science as part of the pragmatist tradition. One might still stumble over the fact that Quine’s own explanation of his debt to Dewey speaks mainly to the philosophy of language, so it would seem, not philosophy of science. We are helped here by recalling some pertinent history. The historiography of twentieth-century philosophy of science and the historiography of analytic philosophy remain curiously disconnected from one another. I say “curioiusly,” because so much of the history of analytic literature, stressing logic and philosophy of language, seems to forget how most of the central questions in this arena grew up originally as part of the philosophy of Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 8 science. Surely this is true for Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Rudolf Carnap, to name only three of the core figures in the tradition. Consider the case of Carnap. His earliest work, from his dissertation (Carnap 1921) through the Aufbau (Carnap 1928), was almost exclusively devoted to philosophy of physics and general philosophy of science (see Howard 1996). It is in the context that his interest in the philosophy of language matures, the questions all being about how the language of science acquires and expresses empirical content, mainly so as to be able to assess the empirical credentials of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. Such remains the focus in the context of the protocol-sentence debate (Carnap 1932a, 1932b), namely, what should be the observation language of science and how that language relates to the world. And when, by the time the Logische Syntax der Sprache (Carnap 1934), the focus turns more directly on the languages of science, with questions about analyticity and conventionalism, the distinction between internal and external questions, and so forth, the context is still that of the languages of science. These were the questions with which Carnap and his Vienna Circle friends were wrangling when Quine visited them in Vienna and Prague during his European Wanderjahr of 1932-33. It was out of the conversations that took place there that early essays like “Truth by Convention” (Quine 1936) were born, again, the context being philosophy of language as it informs philosophy of science. Another fact about the debates of the 1930s is relevant to appreciating Quine’s pragmatism. A common North American response to the philosophy of language emerging from the Vienna Circle, especially the work of Carnap, was that syntax and semantics had to be supplemented by pragmatics. The person who pressed this point with special vigor and made it well known was Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 9 Charles Morris, a student of George Herbert Mead who was a kind of pragmatist emissary to the Vienna Circle during his Wanderjahr of 1934-35. It was Morris who later brokered Carnap’s move to Chicago, and he played a major role in the gestation and editing of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. In a series of papers explaining pragmatism to the Viennese and logical empiricism to an American audience (Morris 1935a, 1935b, 1935c, 1936, 1937a, 1937b), Morris the semiotician argued that Carnap’s philosophy of language devolves into an empty conventionalism if not supplemented with an appreciation of the pragmatic aspects of language in use. When Carnap, himself, later spoke of external questions as “pragmatic” (Carnap 1950), he had learned that way of speaking from Morris. Morris’s championing the addition of pragmatics to syntax and semantics affords the context in which to understand yet another late remark by Quine sometimes cited in more recent secondary literature to question Quine’s self-identification as a pragmatist (see, for example, Isaacson 2004). Recall the above-quoted, closing paragraph from “Two Dogmas,” where Quine mentioned the pragmatism of Carnap and Lewis and described himself as espousing “a more thorough pragmatism.” Years later, in “Two Dogmas in Retrospect,” Quine wrote that this remark had “unforseen consequences,” adding: I suspect it is responsible for my being widely classified as a pragmatist. I don’t object, except that I am not clear on what it takes to qualify as a pragmatist. I was merely taking the word from Carnap and handing it back; in whatever sense the framework for science is pragmatic, so is the rest of science. (Quine 1991, 272) Carnap learns this way of speaking from Morris. Quine knew the pragmatist tradition perfectly well and identified one of its defining themes as involving the continuities between and among science, Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 10 the philosophy of science, philosophy more generally, and the rest of human activity. Here Quine simply and rightly says to Carnap that a genuine pragmatism sees the pragmatic moment as reaching beyond the choice of a linguistic framework for science to the whole of science. Daniel Isaacson prefaces his quotation of, first, the passage from “Two Dogmas” and then, in a footnote, the just-quoted remark from “Two Dogmas in Retrospect” with the following peculiar comment: In “Two Dogmas,” Quine formulates explicitly his rejection of Carnap and the Vienna Circle. They are not sufficiently empiricist. He makes this point in the final paragraph of “Two Dogmas,” though the point is a little obscured by his use of the word “pragmatism” instead of “empiricism.” (Isaacson 2004, 250-51). What kind of strong hermeneutic is it that ignores both the context and the manifest content of Quine’s own words? Quine said that he has been labeled a pragmatist and that he does not object. He does not say in “Two Dogmas in Retrospect” that he meant to write or should have written “empiricism” instead of “pragmatism.” He said, “I don’t object.” His saying that he was a bit unclear on what qualifies one, in general, as a pragmatist does not imply and was not meant to imply that he thought himself something other. No. Quine’s place in the pragmatist tradition and, specifically, his debt and intellectual kinship to Dewey, is clear and was, in the day, recognized by everyone who remembered and appreciated Dewey’s work. Was Quine “the last pragmatist,” as Gellner described him? I hope not, but this only because I choose to think of pragmatism as a still living tradition, not a dead one, with Quine’s variety of pragmatist philosophy of science pointing the way. Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 11 The Principal Features of Quine’s Pragmatist Philosophy of Science I turn now to a sketch of the principal features of Quine’s pragmatist philosophy of science. Space being scant and time being short, what follows is more an outline of main points, not a densely analytic or critical exegesis. The sketch will likewise say little about the historical development Quine’s views, interesting though it is. I aim for synopsis, a kind of rational reconstruction, if you will excuse the term, one organize around a set of core themes. NATURALISM In “Ontological Relativity,” Quine wrote that he shared with Dewey, first and foremost, “the naturalism that dominated his last three decades.” “Naturalism” means different things in different contexts. To Quine, as to Dewey, it meant this: With Dewey I hold that knowledge, mind, and meaning are part of the same world that they have to do with, and that they are to be studied in the same empirical spirit that animates natural science. There is no place for a prior philosophy. (Quine 1968, 185) There is a long, historical context in North American philosophy for this version of naturalism. A more commodious name for the larger tradition is “evolutionary naturalism.” That human cognition is to be understood as a capacity with biological roots reaching deep into the evolutionary history of homo sapiens was a view shared by all of the major figures in the pragmatist movement. But it was a view shared well beyond even by some of the pragmatist movement’s chief antagonists, among them critical realists, like Roy Wood Sellars, and critical rationalists, like Morris Raphael Cohen. Quine’s most famous elaboration of his specific variant of naturalism is “Epistemology Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 12 Naturalized” (Quine 1969a). The argument one finds there is an indirect one. Quine holds up the reductionist phenomenalism that he attributes to the Carnap of the Aufbau period as the last, best attempt to construct a justificationist, empiricist epistemology. The failure of that variety of foundationalist empiricism leave us with little choice but to settle, instead, for an empirical, descriptive epistemology, one that turns to psychology as the framing empirical science, for the purpose of generating a story about how input in the form of sensory stimulations becomes output in the form of verbal behavior. To the objection that such a project is viciously circular because it uses empirical science to ground empirical science Quine replies that, if we have eschewed justification as an aim, settling for description, instead, then a vice becomes a virtue and objectionable circularity becomes commendable theoretical closure. Quine’s argument here is curious in at least three respects, the first being that naturalism is made to appear a kind of second best, a stance to which we retreat only after the failure of foundationalist empiricism. Dewey would have urged naturalism as the preferred alternative from the start, as did Quine, himself, in many other places. Of a piece with Dewey’s famous rejection of Cartesian first philosophy in writings like The Quest for Certainty (Dewey 1929), Quine famously rejected the idea of an Archimedean point from which to leverage a justificatory epistemology. It’s not that we tried the foundationalist project and reverted to naturalism because foundationalism failed. Quine and Dewey both believed that, as a consequence of naturalism, foundationalism was fated to fail. Curious, as well, is Quine’s taking psychology alone or in the main as the framing empirical science for a naturalized epistemology. Dewey, as well as Quine in many other places, stressed the Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 13 ineluctably social nature of language, meaning, and, therefore, the science expressed in language and expressive of such meaning. Above I quoted Quine quoting Dewey: “Language is specifically a mode of interaction of at least two beings, a speaker and a hearer; it presupposes an organized group to which these creatures belong, and from whom they have acquired their habits of speech. It is therefore a relationship.”(Quine 1968, 186; quoting Dewey 1925) Why, then, not accord sociology a comparably fundamental role in a naturalized epistemology? For that matter, biology deserves mention, obviously and too. But Quine’s privileging the psychological perspective in spite of his explicitly social view of language was a consistent feature of his philosophy from early to late. Some commentators see here a vestige of positivism in the form of the unexamined assumption that all of the relevant questions concern the manner in which input becomes output in the behavior of the individual knower. Vestigial positivism might be the explanation for the third curious feature of Quine’s naturalism, which is his making the question one about how input in the form of sensory stimulation becomes verbal output. Why sensory stimulation? The very same behaviorist psychologists whose lead Quine claimed to be following would have said to him that proximal stimuli such as states of affairs on receptor surfaces turn out not to be the relevant controlling variables for most behaviors and certainly not for verbal behavior. B. F. Skinner, in particular, made this a central point in his sadly neglected 1957 classic, Verbal Behavior (Skinner 1957), specifically in developing his behaviorist surrogate for the semantic notion of reference, the verbal operant that he dubs the “tact.”6 There is irony in Quine’s failure to appreciate the point, for the fruits of a Skinnerian operant analysis of verbal behavior would have equipped Quine with additional arguments for Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 14 hallmark theses such as referential inscrutability. There is also an historical point to make in passing. Legend has it that Skinner’s place in the history of the philosophy of science in the twentieth century is as the poster child for what goes wrong when simple-minded positivism or operationalism invades the social sciences. That is an ungenerous story in any case, as a thoughtful scholarship has shown (see, for example, Smith 1986). But it is doubly unfortunate folklore, because it also obscures Skinner’s debt to the functionalist tradition in American psychology, the tradition in which Dewey worked and which was prominently championed by Dewey’s University of Michigan student and, later, University of Chicago colleague, James B. Angell. By obscuring Skinner’s debt to functionalism, the folklore also obscures Skinner’s debt to American pragmatism and his place in that tradition.7 Properly appreciating Skinner’s place in the pragmatist tradition makes only clearer still Quine’s place in that tradition. HOLISM AND UNDERDETERMINATION Naturalism is one premise of Quine’s philosophical project. The other major premises are the two related claims of theory holism and the underdetermination of theory choice by empirical evidence. Quine credited neither to Dewey. Of course, when he premiered these ideas in 1951 in “Two Dogmas,” Quine credited them to no one but himself. Only after the similarity to Duhem was pointed out to him by Philip Wiener and Paul Oppenheim did Quine add the famous footnote about Duhem in the 1953 reprinting of “Two Dogmas” in From a Logical Point of View (Quine, personal communication). Later on, Quine often noted an affinity on this point with Otto Neurath, making frequent use of Neurath’s boat metaphor for theory holism (Neurath 1932; see, e.g., Quine 1960, 3- Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 15 4). Neurath, however, was clear about having learned this way of thinking from Duhem. More relevant to this discussion, however, is that, unlike Duhem, Neurath explicitly situated his argument for holism and underdetermination in a broadly naturalistic epistemological project. For Neurath, holism and underdetermination were not derived from a logic a theory testing. They were, instead, empirical facts about the behavior of individual human cognizers and communities of inquirers. Neurath made this explicit in the early and influential essay in which he premiered his version of holism and underdetermination, “Die Verirrten des Cartesius und das Auxiliarmotiv. Zur Psychologie des Entschlusses” [“The Lost Wanderers of Descartes and the Auxiliary Motive (On the Psychology of Decision)”] (Neurath 1913), where he deliberately chose the psychological language of “motives,” not the logical language of “reasons” to name the factors guiding theory choice within the domain of underdetermination. In this and later writings, Neurath explicitly proposed our making the nature and function of such motives a subject for empirical, scientific inquiry: “It is an empirical question how the auxiliary motive meets the test in practice” (Neurath 1913, 9).8 Turn back to Neurath’s epigone, Quine. It is too easy to misread Quine’s holism as only a logical thesis about the structure and empirical interpretation of theories and to miss the fact that, for Quine, as for Neurath, holism and underdetermination are, themselves, empirical facts about the verbal behavior of individuals and the practices of communities of inquirers. For Quine, it is an empirical fact about verbal behavior that meaning does not attach to terms and sentences in the manner imagined in the Fregean tradition. A behavioral semantics cannot sustain the abstractions of Sinn and Bedeutung. That there is no sharp analytic-synthetic distinction is, therefore, also an Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 16 empirical fact about verbal behavior, and so, too, is the semantic holism and theory holism that follow from that empirical fact. Quine’s employing in Word & Object an amateur anthropological linguistics in the argument for the indeterminacy of radical translation was not just for rhetorical effect. He knew that the details were fanciful, that his was just a though experiment. But he meant us to conclude that the concept of meaning sustaining an analytic-synthetic distinction and the phenomenological reductionism that was its correlate were contradicted by a consequent epistemological naturalism.9 Writing in a different philosophical idiom, Dewey in effect endorsed semantic holism, theory holism, and underdetermination (Dewey’s Hegelian background is relevant here), but none were focal in Dewey’s theory of science nor were they claims prominently associated with American pragmatism in any of its canonical forms. That they are, nonetheless, integral to Dewey’s theory of science, is obvious if we query the possibility of a Deweyan pragmatist’s denying them. The denial would take the form of the assertion that an individual theoretical claim possesses determinate empirical content of such a kind that the truth or falsity of the claim is fixed by the possible experience corresponding to that empirical content. Asserting such implicates several sins from a pragmatist point of view, foremost among them the mortal sin of hypostatization, and this in two forms: hypostatizing “experience” and hypostatizing “meaning.” About the latter, Dewey wrote: The ordered development of meanings in their relations to one another may become an engrossing interest. When this happens, implicit logical conditions are made explicit and then logical theory of some sort is born. It may be imperfect; it will be imperfect from the standpoint of the inquiries and symbol-meanings that later develop. But the first step, the one that costs and counts, was taken when someone began to reflect upon language, upon logos, in its syntactical structure and its wealth of meaning contents. Hypostatization of Logos was the first result, and it held back by centuries the development of inquiries of a kind that are Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 17 competent to deal with the problems of the existent world. (Dewey 1938, 57-58) Of course, Dewey sought a theory of science “competent to deal with the problems of the existent world.” Logical empiricist verificationism, or any theory of science that proffered an algorithmic approach to theory choice, like Karl Popper’s falsificationism, would have failed Dewey’s competence test and would have been derided by Neurath as “pseudorationalism” (Neurath 1913). Experience, likewise, shall not by hypostatized. Dewey famously defended a view according to which experience, or better, experiencing, is an activity, not a static content of some psychic state (Dewey 1925). As such, experience cannot be parsed in units like sense data, elements of sensation, or Carnapian elementary experiences. The kind of empiricism that assumes otherwise was regarded by Dewey as the philosophy of science of nineteenth-century, British shopkeepers and bookkeepers, not a theory of science competent to deal with the challenges of the twentieth century Dewey the functionalist saw humans and their musings as all embedded in a dense world of other musings and makings. Language is a tool like any other, its virtues being all instrumental, hence to be assayed not by a mapping between reified units of discourse and meaning but by its effectiveness in achieving desirable ends. Those ends and the means of their achievement being all interrelated, as are the communities pursuing them, holism is inevitable. Nor would there be reason to think that one set of tools would always prove best. We should there to be multiple means to our ends, and the choice among them should be, well, pragmatic. BEHAVIORAL SEMANTICS AND THE INDETERMINACY OF RADICAL TRANSLATION Naturalism, holism, and underdetermination are ground from which flows the rest of Quine’s Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 18 philosophical project. Let us quickly survey the whole, keeping the focus, as far as possible, on the implications for a philosophy of science. We begin with the behavioral semantics that Quine, himself, regarded as the most important common heritage of pragmatism. Language, for Quine and Skinner, lives in the form of verbal behavioral dispositions. Quine simplifies in Word & Object by imagining a linguist who seeks to translate the discourse of a people with whom there is no history of cultural contact. That lack makes the translation “radical.” Through full participation, the linguist notes loose correlations among vocalizings – such as “Gavagai” – and stimulus conditions like the sight of a rabbit. Assume for the sake of argument that the linguist can form queries in the native tongue, say by rising inflection, and can reliably distinguish assent and dissent to queries. He or she then does that, namely, queries, and notes the patterns of assent and dissent. What happens? Anthropological linguistics is an empirical science. Its hypotheses, in this thought experiment, are guesses about the translation of native discourse. Its evidence comes in the form of native, verbal behavioral dispositions to assent and dissent to queries. As all evidence underdetermines theory choice, so, too, here. A manual of translation, built upon a set of “analytical hypotheses,” is systematically underdetermined by empirical evidence in the form of native dispositions to assent and dissent to queries. The sentence, “Gavagai,” might be translated as “Rabbit,” or it might just as well be translated as “Lo, an undetached rabbit part,” or “Aha, a temporal slice of a rabbit.” A similar indeterminacy attends to the derivative translation of individual words, like “gavagai.” Translation being, thus, systematically indeterminate, the postulate of determinate meanings has no place in such a behavioral semantics. Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 19 The device of “radical” translation is supposed to make the indeterminacy especially clear. Quine holds it to be there in all translation, even between, say, French and German, or between my discourse yesterday and my discourse today, only obscured by the history of cultural or autopsychological contact. For Quine as for Neurath, language is the vehicle of science. Dewey would remind both that language is a form of doing, hence continuous with non-linguistic aspects of scientific and other practice. But there is no disagreement here. The Skinner whose behaviorism inspired Quine (and who, as noted, also belongs to the history of pragmatism), famously defined “verbal behavior” and any behavior in which the reinforcement was socially mediated, thereby emphasizing, like Dewey, the continuities among vocal and non-vocal behaviors.10 Neurath’s whole philosophy of science was based on a repudiation of the Cartesian distinction between practical and theoretical reason, Neurath arguing that rationally ungrounded auxiliary motives are central to both (Neurath 1913). Language being the vehicle of science, and all translation being indeterminate, the Quinean version of a holist and underdeterminationist philosophy of science is more extreme than that of Duhem, certainly, and possibly also that of Neurath. One might hold that evidence in the form of empirically well-credentialed observation sentences underdetermines theory choice. Loosen the link of language to experience after the fashion of a naturalist and pragmatist like Quine, deny even the possibility of determinate, hypostatized, empirical meanings attaching to observational primitives, and the hold of experience over theory becomes more tenuous still. Neurath already argued that the underdetermination goes all the way down to the level of physicalist protocol sentences, but Quine unpacked that point with care and theoretical subtlety. Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 20 Is there anything left of empiricism? Well, yes. There is at least the contingent, empirical fact of provisionally privileged sentences – call them “observation sentences” if one will – that history and sociology show to be less likely to be sacrificed when we minimize disturbances in the web of belief occasioned by newer experiences. This is not an empiricism that fetishizes experience as foundational, but it is an empiricism that respects both the fact that experience usually trumps dogma and the hope that it should and will continue to do so. Is Quine’s holism also more extreme than that of Neurath or Duhem also in countenancing an anything-goes form of relativism? That the underdetermination goes all the way down to the observation sentence surely suggests the question. I think that answer is, “no.” But let’s return to this question only in the conclusion. ONTOLOGY AND ONTOLOGICAL RELATIVITY Closely related to radical indeterminacy is the thesis of ontological relativity premiered in the 1968 Dewey Lecture with that title (Quine 1968), the lecture quoted above that opens with Quine’s most extensive description of his debt to Dewey. Questions of ontology, for Quine, are questions about theories and the languages in which they are expressed. Quine was well known for the claim that “to be is to be the value of a bound variable” (Quine 1948), meaning that questions of ontology were nothing more than questions about the elements of our theories’ models. But what are those elements? How do we identify them? Quine’s answer, by translating a theory into a background language. What are the natural numbers? Translate Peano arithmetic into set theory. There is no other way. Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 21 That being ontology, it is, as Quine said, “doubly relative” (Quine 1968). It is relative, first, to the choice of a background language. I can translate Peano arithmetic into Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory, or I can translate it into von Neumann set theory. Which to choose is a question not of truth but of pragmatic utitity. (There is that word, “pragmatic,” again.) Translation via Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory might better illuminate some problems, translation via von Neumann set theory might better illuminate others. But then, having chosen a backround language, the translation is, itself, indeterminate. Is the number 2 to be interpreted as the set of all two-membered sets, or is it to be interpreted as the set consisting of the null set and the unit set of the null set? There is the second way in which ontology is relative: It is relative, first, to a choice of a background language, and it is relative, second, to a choice of a manual of translation. Again, no truth of the matter, just instrumental or pragmatic utility. Our topic being Quine as a pragmatist philosopher of science, we should pause here to consider a point not often made about Quine’s philosophy of science. Questions about inter-theory and inter-level relations have long loomed large in the philosophy of science. In the 1930s, we argued about the kind physicalism that demanded the reducibility, in principle, of all science to physics.11 Today we argue about emergence, taking that thesis sometimes to mean the denial of a reduction claim. Am I the only one who thinks that current debates about inter-theory and inter-level relations, from the philosophy of physics to the philosophy of mind, would be helped by a dose of Quine? Quine would remind us that all such questions are, at least in part, questions about the translation of an object theory into a background theory. Stop right there for lesson one. Such Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 22 questions are not well posed absent a clearly articulated object theory and a clearly articulated background translation between which is contemplated. Respecting just that requirement would and should shut down much of the debate. Does mind reduce to matter? That is not a well posed question absent clearly articulated theories of mind and matter, neither of which are on offer in the contemporary metaphysics literature. But suppose we do have reasonably clear object and background theories. Lesson two is that there will always be multiple background theories among which to choose. What is my matter theory? The standard model in particle physics? String theory? Some classical, macroscopic approximation to a microphysical theory? Does it make a difference? Surely. OK. Pick one. Lesson three. Translation from the object to the background theory will depend on a choice of a manual of translation. So even if the mind-matter reductionism question were well posed from the point of view of our having reasonably clear theories of mind and matter (which we don’t), there would be no one right answer about how to connect the two. A dose of Quine would have the salubrious effect, I think, of simply putting an end to a lot of philosophical silliness. Alert readers will have noticed a fourth lesson. Not once was it asked whether translation were possible at all. Is mind reducible to mater? The discussion assumed that it was, the only questions being those about the constraints on translation. In the same way, Quine never suggested that his linguistic might find impossible the translation of the native discourse, however alien or odd. The questions were all about the whereby. That should strike one as interesting, for when was the last time a philosopher told you that a problem was easy, not hard? But here there lurks another very deep point to which I want to return in the conclusion. Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 23 TRUTH Questions about ontology, for Quine, are not about truth but about the instrumental or pragmatic utility of this or that way of translating a theory into this or that background language. That claim will be an affront to many philosophical programs. Best to ask, then, about truth, itself, in Quine’s philosophy. Recall that Quine identified as the only common theme in pragmatism, after behavioral semantics, the view of “man” (the gratuitious sexism is Quine’s, not mine) as “truth-maker.” Note that Quine did not borrow the cartoon characterization of pragmatism as the view that “truth” is to be defined as “pragmatic utility” or “success.” He said, instead, that pragmatists view humans as “truth-makers.” What does that mean, and what is Quine’s theory of truth? Truth is a topic that Quine discussed at length and often. But there is no better place to turn than to opening chapter of Word & Object, the chapter over which most of us skip to get right to the weird stuff about the gavagai. Quine explains there that his theory of truth is Tarski’s. Lazy thinkers are puzzled. Tarski defended a correspondence theory of truth, did he not? “‘Snow is white’ is true iff snow is white.” Right? . . . . . .Wrong. Here is your crash course on Tarski on truth. Tarski defines “truth” for a theory, T, in modeltheoretic terms via the relationship of “satisfaction.” A model structure “satisfies” a theory, roughly speaking, if an assignment of entities and relations in the model to appropriate terms in the language of the theory, LT, makes the postulates of the theory true. A condition of adequacy on a Tarski truth definition for a theory, T, is that every sentence in the metatheory of the form “‘X’ is true iff X” is Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 24 a consequence of the truth definition. Right away one sees that one gives a Tarski truth definition only for specific theories, not for all theories in one fell swoop. Thus, “truth in T1" means, in general, something different from “truth in T2,” if only for the trivial reason that T1 is a different theory from T2. But couldn’t one just embed all of these different theories in, say, natural English? Sure. But Tarksi, himself, explained that one cannot give a Tarski truth definition for natural languages, because a necessary condition on the possibility of a Tarski truth definition is a recursive specification of sentencehood in the language, and none such is available for natural languages. Indeed, the lack of a recursive specification for sentencehood is more or less definitive of the difference between natural and artificial languages. Quine simply takes over all of this apparatus. For Quine, the pragmatist, there is no truth with a capital “T.” There is only truth in theory T1, truth in theory T2, and so forth. In what sense, then, is “man” the “truth-maker”? Well, theory choice is underdetermined by logic and experience. When I choose my theory, I also choose what counts as truth, or better, when a community of inquirers chooses a theory it chooses what counts as truth. Quine is a pragmatist about truth – in the sense in which he understood that claim – simply because he believes that theory choice is underdetermined by logic and evidence. REALISM The truth question takes us close to the realism question. No debate dominated the philosophy of science literature of the late-twentieth century more than this. Quine chose not to mix Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 25 in the debate, but he is nonetheless widely regarded as a defender of a view not too far removed from Hilary Putnam’s “internal realism” or Arthur Fine’s “natural ontological attitude.” It is not surprising that the Quine who held that to be is to be the value of a bound variable and added that ontology is doubly relative would be read as dissenting from scientific realism of the kind associated with Richard Boyd, or Karl Popper, or the Hilary Putnam of the pre- or (have you heard?) postinternal realism phase. Underdetermination and ontological relativity certainly do not comport well with a realism like Popper’s that postulates inquiry’s long-term convergence on one final, consistent, complete, and true theory of the world that will fix the real ontology of science.12 It is curious, then, that when asked the question directly, Quine always denied that he was some species of anti-realist, insisting that he understood himself to be “as much of a realist as one can possibly be” (personal communication). What did he mean by that? I always took him to mean that doing science in an ontological mode was crucial, but that he recognized the obvious constraints on ontology: Which theory among the alternatives choice among which is underdetermined by logic and experience? Which background language? Which manual of translation? All of those questions receive pragmatic answers. Can we speak, then, of a pragmatic realism? Conclusion: Antifoundationalism without Relativism Dewey died one year after the publication of “Two Dogmas.” By the time Word & Object appeared in 1960, the Deweyan variant of American pragmatism had more or less disappeared from academic philosophy. It lingered in schools of education, but mainstream philosophers no longer took Dewey seriously. The political pressures of the Cold War and McCarthyism played a Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 26 surprisingly large role in effecting this transformation.13 One wonders how different might have been the reception and impact of Word & Object had John Dewey been Quine’s chief interlocutor instead of Donald Davidson. A dominant narrative tells the story of post-WWII philosophy of science, and philosophy more generally, as one in which neo-positivism and its progeny confront anti-foundationalism in forms ranging from the modest skepticism of Toulmin, Hanson, and Kuhn, the antics of Feyerabend, and the wayward, Edinburgh, Marxism of strong programme sociology of scientific knowledge, to the excesses of post-structuralism and post-modernism. Defenders of science see the threat of radical relativism growing every more ominous. Some try to salvage empiricist foundationalism, perhaps tricked out with a more powerful inductive logic. When that falters, a new transcendentalism appears. Sometimes it is implicit, as when proponents of the “no-miracles” argument hold the success of science to be impossible unless terms refer and theories converge in the long-run to the truth. Sometimes it is explicit, as with Michael Friedman’s revival of the old relativized or contingent a priori program. Surely others sense, as I do, an air of desperation in much of this. Too often lacking during most of my professional life have been philosophical projects that know how to be antifoundationalist without simply opening the door to radical relativism. But precisely that – antifoundationalism without relativism – defines what I have always found most valuable in the pragmatist legacy and in the philosophy of science of Quine. Many will be quick to object that Quine’s project fails precisely because it cannot prevent the slide into radical relativism. After all, wasn’t it Quine, himself, who glossed his holism and Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 27 underdeterminationism as showing that one can save any cherished belief as long as one is willing to make sufficiently drastic changes elsewhere in the web of belief? Yes, he did. And isn’t that tantamount to an anything-goes relativism? No, it isn’t. Let me explain. Emphasize the first half of Quine’s claim – “one can save any cherished belief” – and his view seems the epitome of radical relativism. But don’t stop there. Read on to the end: “as long as one is willing to make sufficiently drastic changes elsewhere in the web of belief.” Well, how easy is that, namely, to make sufficiently drastic changes elsewhere in the web of belief? What Quine the non-relativist would have us appreciate is that making those adjustments elsewhere is often a highly non-trivial task, and the more radical the nonsense we choose to cherish and preserve, the greater price to be paid for the needed surgery elsewhere in the web. Sure, I can defend a geo-centric and geo-stationary model of the planetary system, but I would be a fool to try. I can cling to a belief in cold fusion, but I would have to make adjustments elsewhere in the web of belief so drastic that I should not expect an offer from Berkeley anytime soon. Schlick tried this maneuver against Neurath back at the time of the protocol sentence debate. He charged Neurath with defending a coherence theory of truth and argued that a coherence theory of truth devolves into relativism. An old canard. But Neurath, like Quine, understood that the demand for coherence across the web of belief or within the total body of theory was, in fact, a very powerful one, and this precisely because of the highly interconnected or – if I may borrow a physics metaphor – highly entangled nature of that web. It is precisely because individual statements or beliefs do not stand alone, contrary to the phenomenalist reductionism that Quine dubbed one of the “Two Dogmas,” that the Duhem-Neurath-Quine version of antifoundationalist empiricism works Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 28 so well. The quip above about not expecting an offer from Berkeley if one defends cold fusion points to another important feature of Quine’s pragmatist naturalism. It is that, while there is no archimedean point, no royal road to truth, no self-evident first principles, and no theory-choice algorithm, there are many contingent facts of history, sociology, psychology, and biology that make likely an agreement among a community of inquirers about how to respond to new discoveries. Spin it one way and it looks like the indoctrination or socialization that Kuhn said was necessary for the smooth functioning of normal science. Spin it another way and it looks like what Duhem called “bon sens,” the collective, good, common sense evinced in the practice of a well-functioning community of well-trained scientists, a community of reasonable people reasoning together. John Dewey would have appreciated this aspect of Quine’s philosophy of science. The naturalism that they shared would have led them to expect no revelation and no toehold in certainty. All is contingent, all is in flux, everything is up for grabs, more or less. But that same naturalism would have led them to expect a common nature and history that affords basis enough for getting on with the common task of making a better world. What, then, about the indeterminacy of translation? How can we act in concert to make a better world if we cannot even understand one another? Is a gavagai a rabbit, a rabbit slice, or a rabbit part? If we can’t sort that out, how can we hope to settle argument over superluminal neutrinos or the Greek debt crisis? Doesn’t the indeterminacy of radical translation prove Quine to be a radical relativist? Isn’t this proof of incommensurability far more extreme than ever imagined by Kuhn? Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 29 Well, no. Many of Quine’s readers who remembered debates in linguistics from the 1930s through the 1950s used to say that Quine had just formulated a version of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, according to which different language groups had buried deep within their semantics and even their syntax different fundamental metaphysics, so different as to be incommunicable to speakers of other languages. Their best-known example was supposed to be Hopi, which was said to assume a process metaphysics so alien to the substance-accident metaphysics of Indo-European languages as to make the two untranslatable. When asked the question, as he often was, “Aren’t you just asserting a version of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis?”, Quine would chuckle, and with a twinkle in his eye, and in a voice that sounded just like Hugh Downs, he would say, “Don’t you find it curious that Whorf and Sapir tell us that Hopi has a deep metaphysics so different from ours as to be inexpressible in English, and then prove their point by telling us, in English, what that alien metaphysics is?” It usually took a few seconds for the light to dawn. But Quine’s point was really a very simple one. It was that the thesis of the indeterminacy of radical translation doesn’t make translation harder; it makes it easier. The very fact that there will always be a multiplicity of manuals of translation that make equally good sense out of native dispositions to assent and dissent means that we should be optimistic about always being able to find a translation that works. How much so? Quine went so far as to dispute on these grounds the once widely discussed thesis of the existence of so-called “pre-logical” cultures, not because he could prove that such peoples were truly logical, but because one could always find a manual of translation that made it seem so while respecting the verbal behavioral evidence. Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 30 I choose to end now on this optimistic note, because optimism about solving our problems should have been the third common commitment that Quine identified as uniting all of the thinkers in the pragmatist tradition. There is no denying that science is hard, let alone negotiating an end to the conflict in Syria, or fixing a broken global climate. But American pragmatism voices the spirit of optimism that once characterized American culture, scientific and otherwise. Quine was like that. He was a science geek. He had a child’s naive enthusiasm for science (some would also say, perhaps with warrant, a child’s understanding of science), and he expected science to be, on balance, a force for good. Enthusiasm must be tempered with an appreciation of the risks of applying science and deploying technology in ways that are blind to context. A pragmatist like Dewey would, however, be among the first to make that very point about understanding the context and tailoring the science to fit. Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 31 NOTES 1. Roger Gibson does not go quite this far in his article on Quine in the Blackwell Companion to Pragmatism (Gibson 2009), but Quine’s inclusion in the volume is encouraging. 2. The story, in brief, is that the 1951 Philosophical Review version of “Two Dogmas” lacks the well-known footnote about the similarity to Duhem that was added for the 1953 reprinting in From a Logical Point of View. Quine reported that he had been unaware of the similarity to Duhem until that was pointed out to him by Philip Wiener and Paul Oppenheim (Quine, personal communication), at which point he cast about for English-language sources on Duhem to mention in a footnote. It would appear that Wiener’s 1954 translation of Duhem’s Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (Duhem 1906) was a direct consequence of this interaction. Speaking for myself, I always found incredible Quine’s claim not to have known of or to have remembered Duhem’s work in 1951. Debates about Duhem’s holism and underdeterminationist conventionalism were so prominent a part of the landscape, especially during Quine’s year in Vienna and Prague in the early 1930s, and especially among the people with whom Quine was working then and there – Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath, Moritz Schlick – that it is impossible for Duhem’s work to have escaped Quine’s notice. 3. Cite the Ryan biography, perhaps. 4. See, for example, Brown 2006 and Gibson 2009. 5. A similar point is to be made about Quine’s shaky grasp on the history of phenomenalism. In “Two Dogmas” (Quine 1951), “Epistemology Naturalized” (Quine 1969a), and other essays, Quine seemed to forget that Carnap’s official doctrine in the Aufbau (Carnap 1928) was one of neutrality on the choice between a physicalist or phenomenalist protocol language. I think that Quine rightly discerned phenomenalist leanings in Carnap in 1928, but here too it is Quine’s place in history, not Carnap’s, that is relevant. Quine emphasized Carnap’s phenomenalist side because that’s what he, Quine, wanted to dispute. 6. See Howard 2012 for a more thorough discussion of the Skinnerian approach to reference. 7. For Angell’s version of functionalism, see Angell 1906. See Hothersall 2004, 139-174, 361-392 for an overview of functionalism. Explaining how it is that Skinner is to be understood as a functionalist would take us beyond the bounds of this paper. Suffice it to note for now that Dewey, like Skinner, was a forceful critic of the older stimulus-response form of early behaviorism (see Dewey 1896), and that Skinner’s fundamental unit of analysis, the operant, is defined as a three-term functional relationship among stimulus conditions, probability of response, and history of contingencies of reinforcement. Skinner also shared with Dewey an aversion to mentalism, but, as with Dewey, this was not a consequence of a stringent verificationism. For Skinner it was mainly a worry about the danger of too quickly adverting to contingently available analogues for modeling Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 32 possible intervening variables in the analysis of behavior. One final bit of folklore that has long obscured the real history is that pragmatism and logical positivism were closely allied philosophical movements. How and why this is false is discussed at some length in Howard 2003. 8. See also, for example, Neurath 1936, where Neurath contrasts what can be achieved by a restricted logic of science with the fuller understanding of how theory choice proceeds that we attain through the history of science and the “behavioristics of scholars.” “Social behaviorism” was Neurath’s preferred name for the kind of sociology that constituted the framing science of his version of epistemological naturalism; see Neurath 1931. 9. De Rosa and Lepore 2004 make a similar point about the roots of Quine’s holism in his naturalism. 10. Skinner 1957. This point is discussed in Howard 2012. 11. Note that this was not Neurath’s physicalism. For Neurath, physicalism was the thesis that the protocol or observation language for a unified science should be a physicalist one, meaning one in which the primitive terms putatively referred to medium-sized physical objects. Neurath condemned as “metaphysics” the reductionist version of physicalism. [Citations needed.] 12. Popper credited this view, rightly, to the pragmatist Peirce! But remember that Quine did not include either realism or antirealism in his short list of commitments common to all pragmatists. 13. See McCumber 2001, Howard, 2003, and Reisch 2005. Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 33 REFERENCES Angell, James R. (1904). Psychology: An Introductory Study of the Structure and Function of Human Consciousness. New York: Henry Holt. Brown, Matthew (2006). “On What Quine Is.” Review of Gibson 2004. Mind, Culture, and Activity 13, 339-343. Carnap, Rudolf (1921). Der Raum. Ein Beitrag zur Wissenschaftslehre. Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde der hohen philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Jena. Göttingen: Dieterich’schen Univ.-Buchdruckerei, W. Fr. Kaestner. Reprinted as “KantStudien” Ergänzungshefte, no. 56. Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1922. ——— (1928). Der logische Aufbau der Welt. Berlin-Schlachtensee: Weltkreis-Verlag. 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Chicago: Open Court. ——— (1929). The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action, New York: Minton, Balch. ——— (1938). Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Howard, “Dewey, Quine, and the Pragmatist Tradition Draft June 15, 2013 Page 34 Duhem, Pierre (1906). La Théorie physique. Son objet et sa structure. Paris: Chevalier & Rivière.. [Originally published in the Revue de Philosophie 4 (1904), 387-402, 542-556, 643-671; 5 (1904), 121-160, 241-263, 536-569, 635-662, 712-737; 6 (1905), 25-43, 267-292, 377-399, 519-559, 619-641.] English translation of the 2nd. ed. (1914): The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory. Philip. P. Wiener, trans. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954, rpt. New York: Athaneum, 1962. Feyerabend, Paul (1962). “Explanation, Reduction, and Empiricism.” In Scientific Explanation, Space, and Time. Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell, eds. Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science, vol. 3. 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