May 31, 1988
Dear
Mr. Hookway,
Many thanks for sending me your book, and for
writing it. I was much pleased and surprised to see it, but I
have only now been free to settle down to it.
I read Part I with delight and admiration; I
delight in your grasp and appreciation of my views, and admiration of your
lucid exposition.
Early in Part II (page
62, line 11) a misconception of my attitude toward prediction seems to emerge.
I have never viewed prediction as the main purpose of science, although it was
probably the survival value of the primitive precursor of science in
prehistoric times. The main purposes of
science are understanding (of past as well as future), technology, and control
of the environment. So I have written, in one place or another.. My point about prediction is that it is the
checkpoint.
Soon I begin to trace a
related and more persistent misunderstanding, traceable perhaps to an ambiguity
of 'physical'. There is a hint of the trouble on p. 63, lines 3-5; more so on p. 64, line 17-20; p. 69, last
paragraph; p. 203, line -6; p. 213, line -4; p . 214, middle. All these
passages ascribe a far narrower conception of science to me than I hold. I even
accept history. On page 72, lines -15 through -13, you do have me right; also
p. 77, lines 10-14. My physicalism is the "disappointing" brand, and was not meant as novel or
interesting. It differs none from Davidson's, surely.
My basic position early
and late is empiricism, and hence prediction as touchstone. Physics enters my
picture only because, in my naturalism, I take the current world picture as the
last word to date. If evidence mounts for telepathy or ghosts, welcome.
Physicists would go back to their drawing boards. Whether to call the resulting
theory physics still, on determinationist grounds, is a verbal question.
What transcends all this is just prediction as
checkpoint. This remains as long as we
are engaged in the language game of empirical science rather than some other
language game. So I agree with your p. 73,
last seven lines.
Like Rorty, and
excusably in view of some phrasing in WO, you have me distinguishing between
constitutive and regulative conditions of translation (pp. 182, 220). Actually
I am Putnam's Quine2 not Quine1. [Quine is referring to
my “The Refutation of Conventionalism”—HP] It would indeed be insane to translate
'gavagai' as 'rabbit part' rather than 'rabbit'.
We translate on the
assumption that the native talks as we do, barring evidence to the contrary.
Hence the principle of charity; but the broader and better principle is simply
empathy and folk psychology. Otherwise it would be hopeless to try to think up
analytical hypotheses. The point of indeterminacy of translation is just that
all the checkpoints are in observable verbal behavior in observable
circumstances. Contrary to your p. 170 (foot), Davidson and I see eye to eye
here. And I am not as far from Evans as you and he supposed. So I quite agree
with your p. 163, line 16f, and 171, top.
Also I appreciate the utility, even
indispensability, of mentalistic language.
As you rightly say somewhere, I merely ban it from the austere
scientific descriptions and explanations. Thus
the "double standard" in WO. I share Davidson's anomalous
monism.
My focus on stimulations reflects a divergence
in purpose from Davidson. (Your p. 163,
foot and 217, foot.) The philosophical focus of his concern with translation is
other minds. My concern is partly that, or meaning, but I am concerned to
integrate these matters with "naturalized epistemology" in general,
that is, the theory of evidence for science. Hence my starting point is the
sensory receptors.
Incidentally I have no strong feelings about
the old term "epistemology"; I have acknowledged some differences.
But my pursuit of it, under whatever name, is decidedly more central to my
thinking than translation. It is little noticed in your book. Observation
categoricals, critical semantic mass, empirical content, and the logical
role of reification in linking theory to
observation.
On page 151, end of section, and at other
points the crucial difference between (1) indeterminacy of translation in the
full sense (sentence by sentence, holophrastically) and (2) inscrutabiliy of
reference is underplayed. The rabbit-part bit comes under the latter head, and
so do some actual and disputable cases, notably that of the Japanese
classifiers (OT). The other is the stronger and more debatable thesis. But a
plausible artificial case based on geometry is in Edwin Levy's essay in the
Boston Studies in Philosophy of Science, vol.8 (1971), pp. 590-605.
Apropos your p. 211 (foot), I recognize that I
am hard to classify on realism and relativism.
see my "Relativism and Absolutism”, in the Monist, 1984. My realism
lurks in my naturalism: science tells me what there is.
As for your quandary about "intensional
content" midway in the same p. 211, I just blame it on the notion of
"intensional content", which was the target of my indeterminacy
thesis to begin with,
P. 207, lines 13f, prompt me to state my
present view on truth of empirically equivalent theories. I accept both as true
(as you say on p.200, line 6),couched in an inclusive language. Truth is
defined over the whole language, à la Tarski, not over each theory separately. If
the theories are incompatible, we reconcile them by Davidson’s trick of
respelling.
Page 199, foot, it is not clear to me that you
can always find such a manual; not for sentence-by-sentence translation. You
have it right on the next page.
It is too bad the volume
on me in The Library of Living Philosophers did not reach you in time. It did appear seven months before the date on
you p. 98, line -10, so it was a near miss.
Not but that there are pages in your Parts
II-IV that I applaud as heartily as Part I.
Pages 119, 123-124, 180, 198, and 211 gratified me especially.
Sincerely yours,
W.V. Quine
