Publications

Word and Object is Quine’s boldest effort at showing how the organization of experience could be described in entirely naturalistic terms. Its most distinctive theses, from the indeterminacy of translation to the ontogenesis of reference, are all framed within his naturalistic framework, a framework that actively invites conceptual and empirical challenges as opportunities for refinement. This volume takes up that invitation, as philosophers, linguists, and developmental psychologists examine Quine’s naturalism sixty-five years later to assess its resilience. It contains chapters thoroughly analysing its arguments, chapters that discuss its theses in light of recent psychological and linguistic findings, as well as historical discussions situating it in its context, including recent archival discoveries. All aspects of the book—its epistemology, its ontology, its theory of language acquisition, its critique of the intensional idioms—are covered, making it an indispensable reference for future Quine scholarship.

In this chapter, I examine Quine’s persistent struggle with sense data and sensory qualities in the drafts of Word and Object. I argue that the pressure toward such entities arose from a difficulty at the heart of his attempt to naturalize sensory evidence: while physicalism encouraged him to identify evidence with sensory stimulations, an account of learning required a mediating state capable of organizing varying stimulations into similarity classes while tracking features of the external world. Quality spaces thus generated a recurrent temptation to reify the psychological organization of stimulation as sensory qualities or sense data. The successive drafts of Word and Object reveal Quine repeatedly attempting to accommodate this temptation within his physicalistic framework, ultimately demoting sensory qualities to a heuristic role. I then trace the eventual replacement of this apparatus by Quine’s theory of perceptual mechanisms. I argue, however, that this solution leaves a residual difficulty concerning the objective identification of what a subject perceives, reflecting a constitutive tension between subjective perception and intersubjective judgment.

Quine is generally taken to be a paradigmatic defender of the idea that language is a shared public resource, learned by internalizing shared standards. I argue that this misreads him. The correct Quinean picture is what I call the Projection Thesis: our linguistic practices result from the projection of individual organization and the harmony among individual neurophysiological mechanisms, not from the internalization of anything shared. Establishing this requires distinguishing Quine’s heuristic vocabulary—behavioral dispositions, which delimit phenomena to be explained—from his explanatory vocabulary—neurophysiology, which actually explains them. Conflating these levels generates what I call the Philosophical Illusion: the seamlessness of practice is taken at face value, leading us to posit shared entities to explain it. I trace the Projection Thesis through two domains. In grammar, I show that the child’s acquisition of grammatical structure is a projection from her own resources, not an extraction from the data—a point connected to Quine’s indeterminacy of translation through the parallel with the radical translator’s analytical hypotheses. In the domain of perceptual similarity standards, I show how the preestablished harmony among innate standards sustains communication without shared resources while generating the illusion of shared language. The philosophical payoff of dissolving this illusion is substantial: negotiation emerges as the real social art, and the absence of shared standards reveals that the only available measure of communicative success is the response of the other—a result that, as I argue in the conclusion, points toward a Cavellian picture of mutual responsibility as the ground of linguistic community.

This paper argues for a shift in the debate surrounding McDowell’s conceptualism: from contents to capacities. This shift is important because the conceptual nature of a capacity is revealed in the way the capacity figures in the life of the animal, in particular in how the animal acquires and sustains the capacity. More specifically, I argue that a capacity is conceptual insofar as the subject can improve it by systematically exploiting interconnections among the features involved in its exercise. I first develop this notion through an analysis of skillful action, showing how a skilled agent perceives the interlocking demands of a situation and uses this perception to refine her performance. I then extend the model to perception itself, arguing that perceptual learning exhibits the same structure: theoretical knowledge can reshape perceptual organization, bringing it under conceptual control. This yields what I call a systematically rational capacity, which, I argue, comes in degrees and is not specific to humans. I next examine McDowell’s account of virtue, where practical wisdom is shown to consist in an intimate harmony between intellect and sensibility rather than a computation between independent components. I argue that this harmony, far from being restricted to the ethical domain, characterizes the relation between reason and sensibility in general: our intelligence just is the properly molded state of our perceptual capacities, reflectively adjusted. Finally, I turn to the role of language, which enables a degree of systematic integration unavailable to non-linguistic animals, and argue that language’s deepest contribution is not merely representational but ethical, and that here we can find what is special about us: language initiates us into a shared form of life in which we matter to one another and have a say in shaping what matters.

In this article, I examine Davidson’s surprising argument, in his John Locke Lectures, that speaking the truth is what he calls an essentially disengaged act. I show he defends in these lectures a type of semantic conventionalism, and how he took this conventionalism to entail the essentially disengaged character of speaking the truth. I then show how his characterization of the Principle of Charity, in those lectures themselves, suggests a powerful argument against the essentially disengaged character of speaking the truth, and, thus, against semantic conventionalism. Finally, I examine how he could have failed to notice this in the lectures by examining his changing picture of communication and the role the Principle of Charity plays in such exchanges.

In this article, I will offer some remarks about Tarski’s nominalism. First, I will show that, even though it was mainly developed in private conversation and lectures, Tarski did try to develop a rigorous nominalistic theory, which shows that the issue was of some importance to him. In particular, I show how Tarski’s formulation is based on the idea of a humanly understandable language and show how he tried to develop this idea throughout his career. Unfortunately, even though his formulation is interesting, it seems to face an insurmountable obstacle, which I examine in detail in the article. Finally, I offer some remarks about what went wrong with Tarski’s nominalist program.

This paper presents an approach to mathematical terms similar to the approach developed by Kripke in order to deal with natural kind terms; in fact, I argue that mathematical terms are natural kind terms in the sense of Kripke. Thus, I suggest that, from a semantic perspective, such terms should be seen as primarily referring terms, and, from a metaphysical perspective, that good definitions of such terms should embody structural information about the exemplars from the kind in question.