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TWO CONCEPTIONS of PHILOSOPHY I. Lntroduction Roger F. GIBSON Washington University, St. Louis in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism

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TWO CONCEPTIONS of PHILOSOPHY I. Lntroduction Roger F. GIBSON Washington University, St. Louis in TWO CONCEPTIONS OF PHILOSOPHY Roger F. GIBSON Washington University, St. Louis I. lntroduction In "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", W.Y. Quine advanced consider­ ations designed to show that the analytic/synthetic distinction and reductionism (e.g., the principle ofverifiability applied to individual sentences) were untenable dogmas of the two dominant, mid-cen­ tury strands of Anglo-American philosophy, viz., logical empiricism and linguistic analysis. Subsequently, many other philosophers have come to reject the dogmas. Deprived of these dogmas, logical empiricism and linguistic analysis cannot be sustained: Without the dogma of reductionism, logical empiricists cannot demarcate the meaningful and the meaningless and, thus, cannot claim to have demarcated (meaningful) science and (meaningless) metaphysics. Without the dogma of the analytic/synthetic distinction, neither logical empiricists nor linguistic analysts can demarcate the semantical and the Jactual and, thus, cannot claim to have demarcated (semantical) philosophy and (factual) science. Consequently, they also cannot claim that the chief task of philosophers is to analyze analytic (or conceptual) truths, while the chief task of scientists is to think-up and test synthetic hypotheses. Moreover, the collapse of logical empiricism and linguistic analysis signals the demise of the linguistic turn; it has been superseded by the naturalistic turn, or so it seems. 11. The Naturalistic Turn At least since Descartes' time, philosophers have often turned to the science of their day to inform their speculations in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and so on. But the naturalistic turn 26 is not this, or not merely this; rather, it is the more recent recognition "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."1 Thus, the naturalistic turn marks a radical departure from the rationalist and empiricist traditions, both modem and contemporary. The naturalistic philosophical method promises no apriori insights (analytic or synthetic) into knowledge, mind, or meaning. Quine, the contemporary philosopher who is most responsible for bringing about the naturalistic turn is also the philosopher who has most thoroughly taken it. He takes his naturalism very seriously, indeed, and one cannot gain a proper understanding of Quine's philosophy unless one appreciates this point.2 In fact, once one appreciates how committed a naturalist Quine really is, one begins to see how radically his philosophy departs from that of his Anglo­ American predecessors. But, if philosophy isn 't conceptual analysis, then what is it? III. Quine's Conception of Philosophy Quine's doctrine of naturalism has both a negative side and an affirmative side. Its negative side is the rejection of first philosophy, rationalistic and empiricistic, modem and contemporary. Its affirm­ ative side is the acceptance of science as offering the last word on what there is and on what there it does. The sources of Quine's naturalism are both negative: holism and an attitude of unregenerate realism. Holism is the view that sentences of a theory (apart from observation sentences) are not separately vulnerable to adverse observations, because it is only jointly as a theory (or a significant part thereof) that such sentences imply their observable consequen­ ces. Holism undercuts the philosophical methods of logical empir- 1. W.V. Quine, "Ontological Relativity", in Ontological Relativity anti Other Essays, p. 26. 2. See Roger F. Gibson, "The Key to Interpreting Quine", in The Southern Journal 0/ Philosophy (forthcoming) for a discussion of this point. .
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