Abstract

Several of the better essays in On Quine are critical of Quine’s views. In “Against Naturalized Epistemology,” Bas Van Fraassen challenges empiricists to provide a self-consistent statement of their view; if empiricism is the view that “experience is our one and only source of information,” then that piece of information must itself have experience only as its source. Van Fraassen argues that Quine’s naturalized epistemology cannot meet this challenge and thus “is itself a metaphysics of the sort which empiricists disdain”. Barry Stroud argues in “Quine on Exile and Acquiescence” that there is a tension between Quine’s thesis of “immanence”—that we can work only from within our language and/or conceptual scheme—and Quine’s doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation. And in “Quine’s Experiment with Intensional Objects and His Existentialist Quantified Modal Logic,” Hector-Neri Castañeda explores how “pseudo-Quine,” the Quine who experimented with modal logic in his 1947, might respond to the attack on quantified modal logic presented in his 1961.