The Destruction and Reconstitution of Experience: On Sellars' Account of Ur-Conceptuality and Sensibility

THE DESTRUCTION AND RECONSTITUTION OF EXPERIENCE:
On Sellars, Sensibility and Correlationism
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    I have been re-considering Sellars' account of "ur-conceptuality" from the Lever of Archimedes in the Carus Lectures, after evaluating my contention, presented during the Bonn summer school about a month ago, that these are not to be understood in terms of 'pre-linguistic' cognitive capacities, but are rather more like 'rudimentary concepts', already linguistically mediated, if not fully functional in the logical space of reasons.  In what follows I intend to present this issue which, I believe, ties up some essential knots on the questions about the relationship between Sellars' nominalism and his realist metaphysics.


1. Ur-Concepts and Primitive Representation

           In a discussion with Roderick Firth, Sellars sets out to separate the primitive conceptual capacity of pre-adult humans to discern secondary qualities as component-parts of physical objects. He thereby seeks to pin down precisely how it is that appearances already enjoy a primitive ontological status, the better to eventually offer successor concepts in order to supersede not only the base conceptual attributions that children make, but also our available 'adult' concepts for secondary qualities.  The ur-concepts that Sellars attributes to the infant Jones Junior are as follows[1]:

1.       Junior has an ur-concept of volumes and expanses of red stuff.

2.       Junior has an ur-concept of seeing a volume of red stuff.

3.       Junior has an' ur-concept of a physical object as an individuated volume of color stuff which is endowed with certain causal properties.

4.       Junior has an ur-concept of seeing a volume or expanse of red stuff not only as a volume or expanse of red, but as a constituent of a physical object.

5.       Junior has an ur-concept of what it is to see of a physical object a volume or expanse of red which is one of its constituents. If the constituent is the surface of an opaque object, e.g., an apple, it is the very redness of the apple.

6.       Junior has an ur-concept of what it is to see the very redness of an object.

      The problem at hand is what precise status these ur-concepts have; are they linguistic capacities or representations? Or are they another species, perhaps psychological, of intentional representation? What is behind Junior's capacity to do all of these things?


   At Bonn, Ray Brassier flirted with the idea that these might be understood best as pre-linguistic capacities, while I contended the opposite. Essentially, I think my original contention was fundamentally correct, but I think I can see why Sellars' own formulation of the problem might nevertheless tempt us to identify ur-concepts with pre-linguistic capacities, especially judging from what he says in other writings. Moreover, in his influential study, James O'Shea identifies ur-concepts with pre-linguistic capacities, which would seem to settle the case once and for all. I think the issue is more complicated, and ultimately important.


   The two crucial texts that I think help us figure out what's going on, however tentatively, are Some Reflections on Language Games and the Mental Events paper. These will also shed a lot of light into why many consider Sellars' venture into process metaphysics to constitute a relapse into a form of the Myth of the Given, or finally a form of adherence into naturalist prejudices that strictly speaking are 'pre-Sellarsian'. The separation between left and right wing forms of Sellarsianism can be mapped to some of the neighboring issues as well. But anyhow, I think these texts allow us to see why the thesis that ur-concepts are pre-linguistic is infelicitous.

   In Some Reflections on Language Games, Sellars considers the original empiricist or naive realist appeal to pre-linguistic ur-concepts as facilitating the capacity to associate undefined descriptive predicates ('red) with items in the world. The basic idea that these thinkers shared is that the meaning of our observation statements derives from our primitive cognitive capacity to apprehend the categorical structure of the world, and specifically the content concerning perceptible qualities. The subsequent idea was that the predicates involved in observation statements (as paradigmatic ways in which causal stimuli trigger linguistic responses or "language-entry transitions") acquire meaning  as we learn to obey "semantical rules" which in involve recognizing colored things. Say, our concept of 'red things' acquires meaning as we learn to explicitly obey the rule red objects are to be called 'red', and so on. This is not to say, of course, that we need to have a concept of the rule in order to obey it; but that our behavior exhibits conformity to the rule in a sense in which we count as having internalized it, as exhibited by regularities of behavior, and specifically in learning to recognize objects of the right sort. But what grounds the surreptitious pre-linguistic capacity for recognition that subjects make explicit as they learn to deploy observation talk? Sellars critically considers two such candidate accounts for these ur-concepts that allow pre-linguistic categorical apprehension:

1) A symbolic structure or language -  Under this hypothesis, there is a fundamental language or symbolic system that is not itself acquired by obeying rules, but that rather conditions that possibility of identifying different terms in different languages as being about the same thing, beyond their functional role. For if learning to use a concept requires identifying by way of its use an appropriate kind of object/properties or class of objects/properties, then we need to explain how we come to identify such objects or properties of being of that kind.

         If in order to learn the meaning of 'rot' we obey the rule 'red objects are to be called rot' then, in pains of regress, we need to say that the symbolic language by virtue of which we identify 'red objects' is unique, and not itself learned by virtue of obeying a further rule, for this would obviously unchain an infinite regress. This must hold necessarily since obviously the ur-concept of 'red object' would have to be different than the concept we learn by virtue of obeying the semantic rule in which the ur-concept is formulated, in order not to fall to the inconsistent hypothesis that we acquire concepts on condition that we already have them. Thus, some basic language is primitive in the sense that it is not acquired by obeying rules and in that it conditions all further learning by relating the functional role of a term in another language to the objects/properties that we identify primitively in the base language.

 

      It is precisely on the basis of such an ur-conceptual economy we can then learn the functional role that specific linguistic tokens bare to empirical reality, i.e. the contents of descriptive predicates (redness, red items...etc). I think this preemptively anticipates the nativist hypothesis championed by Fodor and Lepore, among others, according to which innate conceptual structures precede and condition that capacity for learning, and thus full-blown linguistic rationality.

2) The capacity to apprehend items as belonging to kinds or resembling classes of particulars  - Sellars castigates this position as a variant of the 'mental eye' view which ascribes to the mind the capacity to immediately apprehend the categorical structure of the physical world, sense qualities, or whatever else, by fixating itself inwardly and outwardly at once. But it seems clear that were Sellars to endorse this, he would be delivered right back into both the matrimonial account of meaning and the epistemological Myth of Given. For it would require postulating both that we have immediate awareness of abstract entities which furnish the categorical structure of reality ('redness'), and that it is by virtue of such awareness that words acquire meaning. But this is to reactivate knowledge by acquaintance.

       At this juncture it becomes clear that the the first, proto-Fodorian hypothesis must also postulate a pre-rational cognitive symbolic economy that simply staples mind into world. But this is another version of the Myth of the Given since, it seems that whatever this system is, it works to grant a sort of luminosity into at least the undefined color qualities of objects.

    It is important to note that in SRLG, Sellars rejects both accounts of pre-linguistic ur-concepts as facilitating the rule obeying usage of observational language. The solution seems to be clear: we have to account for language acquisition not as the explicitation of a semantic protocol for recognizing 'red things' via some dubious 'semantic intuition'. We don't learn to say red because we learn to obey the rule that we should utter 'red' when we see a red thing. For then the ur-conceptual protocol as a foundational discourse is introduced simply to halt the inevitable regress that follows from the thesis that we need a meta-language to learn a language. The obvious alternative thesis is to say that an observation-language is, if not learned as rule-obeying,  a conditioned responsive behavior. We can relax our account to claim that although one does not obey rules to apply observational discourse, one must nevertheless be conditioned to respond to the right sorts of entities in the world. Thus, to say that "...the fact that the word 'red' means the quality red may be identified with the fact that 'red' is a conditioned response to red things" (Sc. 38). But while Sellars accepts that indeed the proper application of the word involves being capable of reliably responding to the occurrent stimuli, he warns against the dubious claim that this entails that words acquire meaning by being associated with things. Reiterating the distinction between acting in accordance to rules and acting in accordance with conceptions of rules, Sellars' suggestion is that in acting in accordance to rules we are simply conditioned to respond to red things in the right circumstances, rather than assigning a term to an object we have already recognized in advance by some prior intentional mechanism. This is obviously a corollary of Sellars idea that there is no form of intentionality that precedes the linguistic; neither psychological nor practical.

       What is going on, then, when Sellars speaks of ur-concepts in Junior's talk?

     Now, it seems tempting to claim that when formulating his account of ur-conceptuality to open the space for the analysis of sensibilia or sensa, Sellars reverts into something like the second variant of the empiricist/ naive-realist account outlined above, in virtue of which we have some kind of immediate awareness of the categorical contents of reality. This might be reinforced by considering that Sellars also wants to account for something like pre-linguistic, "animal representations" or proto-cognitions roughly around the same time as the Carus Lectures, in Mental Events (1981). And yet it seems just implausible that Sellars would have suddenly relapsed into a mind's-eye view, of all people! How are we, then, to account for the ur-conceptual status of Junior's experiencing of sensible qualities as constituents of physical objects?

   I think Sellars' remarks in S. 38 of SRLG point towards the right solution. Although it is true that our we cannot have a concept of red without being capable of reliably responding to instances of red, it does not follow that we must equate the meaning of the word with a relation to an item in the world. We can simultaneously accept that our capacity to use undefined predicate-quality words as conditioned by capacity to differentially respond to environmental stimuli in a way that precedes rational rule-obeying, while maintaining that the meaning of the word is nothing but its role in a conceptual economy. Sensibility itself plays no epistemic role, even if it is necessary to acquire knowledge. Sellars must preserve his nominalist account: meaning is functionally specified within a conceptual economy.

     But this means that Junior's ur-concept of red is not 'pre-linguistic' in the sense that it involves the operations of a nativist ur-language (hypothesis 1), nor the fixation of the mind's eye upon the categorical structure of the given via intellectual intuition or some other pre-linguistic intentional mechanism (hypothesis 2). Junior clearly is conditioned to respond with the verbal output 'red' when he sees red things, and can do so somewhat reliably. He uses language already in a self-conscious manner, even if lacking full fledged capacities to enter into deliberative reason-giving behavior.

          Furthermore, his ur-concept is not one of something looking red, but of something being red, since he lacks the contrastive concepts of 'looks/is' introduced upon further conditioning. Junior attributes the redness he sees to the objects he interacts with rather than to private experiences, fields of sense, or whatnot. This is not to say that Junior has a fully-developed concept of 'physical object, extended in space' at that stage, or something so sophisticated. It's clear Junior is not yet capable to playing the game of giving and asking for reasons, or of using the contrastive concepts of 'looks/is' to enact withdrawal of endorsement, or to characterize episodes as merely ontensible seeings. He reports redness as pertaining to objects, and is flummoxed when some evil grown-up tampers with lighting conditions so that what he takes to be a red object suddenly appears blue.  He must then simply retort to thinking that a blue object is before him, and needs eventual introduction into the contrastive concepts to distinguish between mere seemings/lookings and actual features of objects, by modifying his entitlement towards the content of the claim. Thus, Sellars' 'ur-concepts' are utterly linguistic capacities; they cannot be understood as primitive capacities at the level of mere sentient registration and causal responsiveness. Junior's repertoire is surely already more sophisticated than that.

     So what does then, this ur-concept of redness, encompass? Sellars list is amply clarifying.

  It clearly already involves the capacity to see a red thing as red, or that it is red, since Junior attributes redness to that which he sees. Although Sellars characterizes this as-content as being 'of a physical object' this should be taken in tandem with his qualification in section 32, where he makes it clear that Junior has the notion of an object as a 'determinate thing-stuff'; but not the full-grown concept of physical we attribute to adults and which evidently Junior could not have. This is of a piece with his reductive semantics of sensa that he provisionally already proposed in Some Reflections on Perceptual Consciousness (1975).

 

   Junior also has the capacity to see of the thing the redness which is a extended surface of the object, i.e. Junior is not shocked if when splitting an apple in half the inside of the apple is not red too. Junior sees of the object the facing side, which is non-conceptually given to him through his senses. But having an ur-concept of what it is to see of an object, Junior thus both is capable of attributing redness to the object, and at the same time realizing that this redness pertains to something like the extended surfaces of opaque objects, rather than being a thorough characteristic of objects through and through. This is crucial, since it is the first step towards untethering expanses of sense-qualities from objects; a move that Sellars subsequently exploits for metaphysical speculation. This is what is fundamentally added by conditions (5) and (6).

      Junior's ur-concept of red is thus conditionally acquired and not rule-obeying, linguistic insofar as it involves predicative attributions and the capacity to see things as such-and-such, yet too rudimentary to count as an 'adult concept' since it lacks the contrastive concepts that allows one to formulate one's endorsement or lack thereof, on the basis of warrant tethered to a notion of standard conditions, and so on.  And precisely because Junior's ur-concept of red is simply a 'rudimentary' rather than 'foundational' concept that Sellars can resist the myth of the categorial given: it's not that Junior, before learning language, already accesses the categorical structure of the physical world. Junior is conditioned to respond in ways through which he becomes capable of characterizing the contents of his experience, but this already involves linguistic mediation/acculturation.  Junior has no determinate category of colored physical objects extended in space, he has an determinate concept of something-being-colored as a colored-expanse more generally. This is the only way to reconcile the psychological nominalism with the holistic account of linguistic rationality, I think.

       On this account, it becomes a lot clearer just where the Carus Lectures depart from the account of the Myth of Jones, and the looks-talk analysis. Sellars' eventual supplement to the Myth of Jones is to say that before the contrastive concept of looks, which can be applied to color-qualities as easily as dispositional ones, we have a proto-concept of color-qualities or 'the proper sensibles' characterizing them as constituent parts of physical objects, if not identical with them. There is a positivity of appearance that precedes the epistemic regulation of looks talk, which does require fully grown linguistic rationality or integration in the game of giving and asking for reasons. Understanding this also allows us to understand why looks-talk, when applied to color-concepts or sensible-predicates operates withdrawal of endorsement in the form of ostensible seeings, i.e. to merely see red is not just to refrain from claiming that something is red, but to report on the autonomy of the colored expanse from the properties of the object.  The occurrent properties of sense can thereby be examined positively in a metaphysical account.


2. Against Correlationism 

         On a different but related note, this allows us to see how Sellars is precisely not a correlationist. Correlationism requires three conditions:

1) the sense dependence of objects on concepts,

2) the reference dependence of concepts on sensibility, and

3) the ontological identification of sensibility with subjective appearances. Sellars' trick is to accept the first claim, qualify the second, and reject the third.

       Yes, knowledge of anything requires concepts. This is true, but somewhat trivial. Even people like Tyler Burge think knowledge requires justification of the sort only sapient creatures enjoy. Yes, the empiricist is right in insisting that our concepts and so our knowledge of the world begins in sensible experience. But, against the sense-datum theorist or phenomenalist, this is not to say that there is a reference dependence of concepts on sensibility, but only another form of epistemic dependence. That our knowledge is anchored in the world through sensibility is not to say that all knowledge is of the sensible. This is not to refuse that there is such a thing as sensibility, or to say it cannot be metaphysically investigated. Rather, it is simply to say that sensibility can condition our knowledge of that which is not sensible. We can  investigate the non-apparent structure of appearances as belonging to the domain of physical nature, just like we can investigate the micro-physical constitution of the manifestly described world of middle-sized objects and properties apart from their phenomenological conceptual envelopment. Thus, against (3), it is simply false to equate the content of sensibility with 'subjective appearances', where the latter are understood as self-presenting episodes.

         The properties of sense-qualities, although relative to sentient organisms, are irreducible to the phenomenological categories that furnish our commonsense description of the world. Granted, phenomenology reveals that there is a dimension of appearing that must be accounted for. But this is not to say we are forced into construing appearances as subjective correlates. They can be accounted  at the genetic neurocomputational level in terms of how environmental inputs relate to our cognitive faculties by triggering appropriate neuronal onsets.

          Now, Sellars thinks on top of this you can actually characterize the apparent particularity of sensa as ultimately non-object bound physical phenomena, which have irreducible qualitative properties. Sensa turn out to be features that are objectively constituted only in relation to sentient organisms, but they are no less objective for that. In other words, that sensa are dependent on sentience does not render them subjective in any interesting sense. Again, no basic categorical stratum of the sort phenomenologists fetishize over can hope to undergird the objectivity of the physical within which even appearances are constituted.

     Whether that much is tenable remains an open metaphysical question. But the point is that once we have  defused the ontological equation between sensibility and subjective appearances, both forms of epistemic dependence won't do to motivate correlationism. The link between knowledge and conceptuality, and that between conceptuality and sensibility requires that we investigate precisely how observation statements, qua language entry transitions, are articulated with complex causal mechanisms that relate environment to organism. Even if it turns out that the presentational content of experience is fundamentally tethered to sense-data, this is not to assert that sensibility has an autonomous categorical status apart from the physical, nor that the content of our judgments is reducible to sense data just because we require sense data to make them: we can examine the link between appearance and reality by examining the reality of appearing, refusing the phenomenological hypostasis of the categorical status of subjectivity as foundational, by reintegrating sensibility to physical theory, acknowledging it as our anchor to the world, rather than our solipsistic prison.

Two Routes to Idealism? Sellars, Inferentialism and Mathematical Ontology

TWO ROUTES TO IDEALISM?

- Sellars, Inferentialism and Mathematical Ontology -

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I have been exchanging ideas for quite some time with Peter Wolfendale, on a relatively regular basis, and it has been nothing but a pleasure. I find his command of the analytic tradition, and in particular post-Quinean ‘inferentialism’ to be of inestimable worth, in particular in sight of the project of rehabilitating representation within Continental thought begun by Ray Brassier recently. Perhaps I should say that it is not so much a rehabilitation of representation which is at stake, but rather a necessary re-consideration of the problems set forth by it. At its most general, the question concerns the putative displacement of epistemology in favor of ontology that has somewhat ubiquitously dominated post-Heideggerian Continental thought.  Of course, this displacement occurs in various ways, and part of Ray’s polemics with the Continental tradition examines this junction. But also with the analytic deflationary accounts inspired by behaviorism and which solidified in a formal semantics that castigated the valence of the notion of reference, flattening knowledge to semantics. From phenomenology, to vitalism, to deconstruction, to a certain pragmatism complicit with instrumentalism, to inferentialism, to mathematical ontology, Brassier’s work finds in the dissolution of representation understood as how conceptual thought relates to its non-conceptual exteriority a useful lever to motivate what is precisely the impediment for any realist or materialist philosophy in both analytic and continental circles, i.e. the elimination of epistemology inspired by the critique of metaphysics, and the elimination of ontology inspired by the post-Quinean inferentialist deflationary standards for existence, truth and reference. The former option takes representation to constitute one more iteration of the kind of ontotheological posits that require suspension (Husserl), destruktion (Heidegger), deconstruction (Derrida), destratificaiton (Deleuze), or dissolution (Lyotard). For these thinkers the result is either a post-critical restitution of the ontological problematic, or else a progressive de-legitimization of the propriety of the philosophical task tout court, which casts even ontology under questions. The critique of critique ends up in exacerbated forms targetting not just the Heideggerean ban against metaphysics of presence, but eventually all metaphysics, and with it philosophical ‘phallogocentrism’ (Derrida). For the vitalist post-Bergsonian inspired metaphysics, representation becomes the pivotal structure of thought which demands destitution, particularly in the work of Deleuze (inspired by Foucault) against the fourfold axis of conception: identity in the concept, contrariness in the predicate, resemblance in perception, and analogy in judgment. The 'return to Kant' which insists on the propriety of conceptual representation thus resists the displacement of the latter and of the primacy of conceptual knowing all being complicit in some form or other with a pre-Critical metaphysical reification, or an allegedly post-philosophical idealism or correlationism camouflaged under the banners of 'textuality', 'practice', 'thinking', or some other human-relative determinant.

On any account, the radicalization of the critique of metaphysics devolves into an ever aggravating critique of critique which restores metaphysical primacy or else tries to shut philosophy down for good. One of Brassier’s most relevant contentions is to insist, with Badiou, that even in their presumed ‘anti-philosophical’ radicality these thinkers finally display a philosophical complicity to idealism or correlationism. There where philosophy is said to stop, usually an anti-philosophy begins, which is philosophy after all.  However, Brassier thinks that what is necessary is not just a ‘forgetting of the forgetting of the forgetting’ of the restoration of the question on being is favor of a subtractive ontology, like Badiou claims against Heidegger. Rather, we also need a ‘critique of the critique of critique’ against the post-Kantian idealist conflation between thought and reality, the elimination of conceptual representation as relating mind and world, as well as the correlationist-idealist dissolution of the primacy of knowing. And of course this entails that we must ask again the Kantian question about possibility of preserving a relative autonomy between mind and world, without reifying this difference into a metaphysical dualism that falls short of the critical injunction to make their congruence contingent. But he must reconcile the realist requirement of plausible separation between thought and reality, while insisting in that this can be done without invoking metaphysics surreptitiously, obviating the need to explain not just what there is, but the critical question about how we know what there is. In this regard, he resists the Badiouan Parmenidean identification of being and thought, and allots the latter to the ubiquitous disavowal of representation of post-Kantian Continental thought. Representation turns out not to have only been illegitimately obviated, but that this obviation explains the correlationist and idealist incapacity to motivate a realist ontology, at a loss for an epistemological footing. For the question about the difference between concepts and objects, thought and reality, turns out to require the preservation of the scope of rational agency which ascribes normative valence to rational subjects. In this regard, the transcendental delimitation of thought retains methodological autonomy vis a vis the ontological, without inflating thought with a metaphysical status.  Having moved away from the ‘postural realism’ of Laruelle’s exacerbation of abstraction, Brassier’s current position motivates a Sellarsian revisionary naturalism. In it the necessary rationalist articulation of epistemology and metaphysics becomes necessary to dispel intuition (against all forms of self-legitimizing appeals to experience), but also to avoid the folding of being into thought in the inferentialist deflation of metaphysics, or thought into being  in the ontological ‘flattening’ of ideality which devolves from the dissolution of epistemology.             

  There is of course substantial overlap between Peter’s Brandomian vision and Brassier’s Sellarsian position, and so the connection between a (non-metaphysical) Hegel-inspired inferentialism, and a revisionary Kantian naturalism. While Peter agrees with the inferentialist extirpation of the metaphysical core from the deontological account of thought, he aligns himself with Sellars and Brassier in rejecting the wholesale disavowal of the metaphysical task, by insisting that a naturalistic ontology is both possible and necessary. Of course, it is Sellars who has emphasized this by insisting in the relative autonomy of the ontological and the normative, metaphysics and epistemology. A non-metaphysical deontology describing the transcendental structure of thought is methodologically propadeutic to a naturalist metaphysics, set to describe the univocal structure of being, including the ontological conditioning for the instantiation of thought. This last part is precisely what strict inferentialism proscribes.

     One of the interesting things is that Peter seems to accept this Sellarsian corrective to the Brandomian position, advocating a kind of Spinozist and Deleuzian-inspired metaphysics. There is much to be said about Peter’s startlingly brilliant readings of Spinoza and Deleuze, but that is best reserved for another occasion. I would just remark that although I remain skeptical about the plausibility of Deleuzian metaphysics as appropriate for naturalist metaphysics continuous with today’s science[1], I think that there is a more primary issue at stake, which follows from the methodological priority of epistemology, for both Sellars and Brandom.  Before we discern between the specific differences in the metaphysical alternatives themselves, or evaluate their internal conceptual coherency, we must explain the nature of objective knowledge in relation to deontological normative strictures which define the transcendental conditions for intelligibility, or thought as such. Much of Pete’s brilliant deontological project delineates a broadly Brandomian account of the use of conceptual norms, and his Essay on Transcendental Realism goes a long way in explaining how this works.

      For my part, the difficulty in coordinating the deflationary realism of strict Brandomian inferentialism with the Sellarsian alternative reveals interesting issues. To ask about whether inferentialism could support the rehabilitation of metaphysics cannot but provoke the further question about whether Sellars’ position could be described as endorsing a kind of inferentialism like Brandom thinks, and as McDowell, DeVries-Tripplet, among others, reject. Of course, one could say that inferentialism generally holds as a suitable account of thought, while insisting on the autonomy of metaphysics. And I think that this autonomy is surely of the capital features of Sellars’ philosophy. However, exactly how we should coordinate the separation between the metaphysics and the epistemology in Sellars’ case is quite controversial.

      In particular, much polemic has been generated concerning the precise evaluation of the role of perception. For example,  John McDowell (2005) seems to take issue with Brandom’s reading of Sellars, insisting that the deflation of experience to judgment is excessively one-sided, and eliminates a crucial empiricist component in Sellars’ naturalism. But even if we don’t agree with McDowell’s alternative reading, I think we can rescue some of his objections to Brandom’s reading of Sellars as advocating strict deflationary standards for perception. Now, I think that Pete and Ray are prepared to agree in that Sellars’ own account of perception and his account of picturing are not obviously reconcilable with the minimalist account that Brandom provides. A discussion of these two positions merits a full scoped investigation which I intend to carry out in coming work. My impression is that the restriction of perceptual experience to judgments, with no intermediary states of the sort McDowell’s polemical reading argues for to play any part, creates problems for any claims to realism. Specifically, the flattening of perceptual judgments to the general capacity to have the appropriate RDRDs deflates sensible experience in the way that vitiates the way perception serves to anchor us in a causally autonomous world. For one of Sellars’ most important insights is that while perception is conceptual, the ontological constitution of sensation, while remaining epistemically mute, permits us to rehabilitate a notion of correspondence and a theory of picturing in which concepts and so perceptual judgments are causally knit to  physical objects, thus exceeding a purely semantic account of truth. I quote Brassier in this regard:

     “It’s often assumed that Sellars’ critique of relational (or “matrimonial”) theories of meaning dispenses with the word/world relation altogether since conceptual role supplants reference.  But this is not so: he supplements his semantic account of truth as ideal conceptual coherence with a correspondence relation between utterances as “natural linguistic objects” and physical events: one must be appropriately connected to one’s environment in order to be entitled to issue certain utterances. It gets more complicated of course, but the key is that while correspondence is never transparent—it’s too opaque to be called “reference”--- it is still there, although not as a semantic relation.  This is the insight that Brandom expresses in his claim that sense dependence is not reference dependence: the conditions for the former ought not to be conflated with those for the latter. But unlike Brandom, Sellars has a positive alternative to reference as a semantic relation, which he calls “picturing”. 

     Now, it might seem premature to claim inferentialism conflates mind and world, but the primary issue becomes more evident upon considering some of the consequences, using Brandom’s own examples against McDowell. The one that comes to mind is the characterization of the scientist who learns to reliably report the presence and movement of ‘mu mesons’ by progressive refinement in his conceptual ability following the observation of a cloud chamber. For Brandom, the capacity to reliably report the fact that mu mesons are there, even at a loss for knowledge about what criteria one is using in the reliable use of the capacity, counts as a case of ‘seeing mu mesons’ just in case one knows that one is reliable in doing so.  I quote Brandom in this regard:

                  “Thus a properly trained physicist, who can respond systematically differently to differently shaped tracks in a cloud chamber will, if she responds by non-inferentially reporting the presence of mu mesons, count as genuinely observing those subatomic particles. She may start out by reporting the presence of hooked vapor trails and inferring the presence of mu mesons, but if she then learns to eliminate the intermediate response and respond directly to the trails by reporting mesons, she will be observing them. “Standard conditions” for observing mu mesons will include the presence of the cloud chamber, just as standard conditions for observing the colors of things includes the presence of adequate light of the right kind. And the community for whom ‘mu meson’ is an observation predicate will be much smaller and more highly specialized than the community for whom ‘red’ is one. But these are differences of degree, rather than kind.”

       I find this account largely consonant with a strict Sellarsian position in most respects, and particularly in insisting on the possibility of non-inferential knowledge which is not for this reason unmediated or unlearned, since all knowing requires participation within a complexly articulated linguistic community. But the account of observation predicates raises questions which are precisely of the kind that lead McDowell to read Sellars as one step, yet perhaps a decisive one, short of endorsing a full-blown inferentialism ala Brandom.

       To see why, we must just apply the same strictures set in the example of the physicist to a different situation, of the sort proposed by McDowell: a man learns to reliably report that their neighbor is home when he sees that his car is parked in the driveway. For Brandom, assuming the man knows that he is reliable, this counts as observational knowledge and he sees that the neighbor is home. However, the difference between the direct knowledge that is involved in seeing that the neighbor is home by having the neighbor before his eyes, and the knowledge that would be obtained in seeing the same fact when seeing the car, is obscured thereby. Both instances would count as cases of direct observational knowledge, having the same underlying fact as their reported, propositional content, i.e. both report that 'the neighbor is home'. And since they are both non-inferential states, one cannot appeal to the fact that the man ‘arrives’ at such knowledge by a prior consideration of the knowledge that the car is there, since then one must explain how this latter fact motivates the former in situ, which starts sounding a whole lot like inference again. Even if both cases could be construed as examples of non-inferential knowledge, it seems as if what Brassier describes above attests to a complicity between perception and sensible experience, i.e. natural linguistic objects are connected to physical events by the externalist requirement to be properly caused in relation to environmental conditions. Picturing describes a non-semantic relation between perceptual states and the world which, while enveloped conceptually, retains autonomy. And I believe that Sellars’ more acute observation consists not just in severing experience at large, but more precisely in refusing to construe it as the gulf for unacquired knowledge; that is, as cases of independent knowledge. And although he certainly endorses the inferentialist demand for the conceptual envelopment of perceptual experience and the form of judgment, this does not entail that the experience is reducible to the conceptual judgments or to semantic relation. For this is precisely the role that sensation plays, which allows one to level the ontological priority of experience, while preserving the relative autonomy of the sapient, conceptual envelopment of knowledge. Thus while Sellars is perfectly comfortable in accepting that non-inferential knowledge is possible, he denies that independent knowledge is possible, and furthermore insists that sensibility remains crucial for metaphysical reasons, and which illuminate how we ‘picture’ the world rather than simply merely relate to it in accordance to pragmatic norms. Thus the also emphatic interest in Sellarsian naturalism, and in particular in the neurophysiological ontological account of thought advanced by Metzinger and the Churchlands, while refusing tacit pragmatism through the inflation of ‘super-empirical virtues’ that are gratuitously prescribed rather than explained. Rather, while we must deem experience as being conceptually specific in nature, this does not mean that the ontological nature of experience is conceptual nor that understanding concepts means understanding the use of words; one cannot restrict experience to simply signify the capacity to reliably report a fact without completely obviating the naturalist side of Sellarsian philosophy. This is what has made other philosophers insist in the valence of empiricism in Sellars, which one might think is ultimately difficult to reconcile with inferentialism. Thus, for instance, McDowell thinks that perceptual experiences constitute a kind of belief states that are acquired non-inferentially once the subject comes to endorse the content of a perceptual experience. Yet the content of the experience is not by itself judgment, although it has propositional content. It is solely a ‘candidate’ for endorsement.  This is still not sufficient to explain how one comes to acquire such content as mere ‘candidates’, propositionally specific and yet not simple behaviorally fixed dispositions or RDRDs, anchored causally in an environing world. But this is just to say that it is highly controversial whether McDowell does any greater justice to Sellars on this particular point than Brandom does. DeVries and Tripplet seem to side against Brandom, while O’Shea reiterates that the role perception plays in Sellars must be closely understood in relation to his naturalism. I reserve judgment in these matters.

     The discussion around perception becomes a useful key to understanding how conceptual structures that fix our knowing of being are objective with regards to a world, while subject to rational norms for revision. The non-reviseable logic of rational obligation articulates the necessary rationalist rejoinder to all instrumentalist prescriptions of scientism, as necessary to explain how we acquire knowledge, given the primitive methodological priority of the normative space of reasons. And Sellars’ supplementary account of picturing is not clearly reflected in Brandom, particularly since it is not clear that he would allow for the ontological role sensation plays within our understanding of perception. And it is certainly not clear to me that McDowell’s own alternative fares any better. For even if McDowell is right in that reducing perception to judgment to deflate experience into a semantic relation once again conflates empirical content with conceptual form, one might insist that to introduce intermediary states between judgments and candidates for endorsement falls to the trap of thinking that what occasions judgment is a ‘act of will’ which supplements categorical synthesis. And this is precisely what Brandom finds unpersuasive about McDowell’s alleged commitment to empiricism.

    My own position on this matter is that Brandom’s strict inferentialism seems to reproduce the pragmatic conflation of thinking and being which already plagued Quine, and which ends up undermining materialism, not unlike Badiou, in lacking the sufficient resources to disambiguate between form and content. Content dissolves into propositional content, and what Pete calls a ‘thick’ sense of reality falls out the window. I think with Pete that a thick notion of reality is necessary, and that such a notion needs to be advanced without reintroducing the metaphysical dualism of thought and matter. Thus the key moment for Brassier remains the Kantian juncture between the non-metaphysical normative space of reasons and the ontological-natural-causal domain of natural scientific research, while for Pete’s more Brandomian, and by extension Hegelian, position (although I agree with Zizek in that Pittsburg Hegelianism is a misreading of Hegel) the primary task is to eviscerate the myth of phenomenological content in favor of the primacy of logical relation in a deflationary account of thought.

       I would suggest that inferentialism can be seen as a precedent of the problem that plagues structuralist-inspired contemporary French materialisms, like Badiou’s and Meillassoux’s, departing from Althusser and Lacan. And by this I would also mention thinkers like Gabriel Catren, or even the post-Landian neo-Deleuzians, like Reza Negarestani.  While the last two have taken over the Continental liquidation of epistemological primacy and followed the formalist tendency in tethering ontology to mathematics, the inferentialist camp meanwhile insists on the autonomy of the normative while tethering the latter to logic and semantic analysis. Indeed, while the former have folded into deciding the appropriate mathematical paradigm for metaphysics and resolving the relation between the branches of mathematics (differential calculus, set theory, category theory, logic, topos theory…) as part of ontology itself, the latter have insisted on reducing representational content to propositional content, understood as the inferential structure of thought. For them this reduces semantic content to the pragmatic examination of the relations into which normatively charged propositional attitudes enter with respect to each other within a community of rational agents.  It fulfills the promise of a transcendental philosophy that describes the structure of thought without relapsing into the metaphysical dualism of mind and world.

      What I find most striking is that both extreme poles, mathematical ontology and inferentialist epistemology, render their respective counterparts impossible, vitiating the possibility of distinguishing mind and world that realism requires, and that Sellars pursues. For Badiou, it becomes impossible to distinguish ontological from non-ontological situations without the surreptitious mediation of philosophical discourse, while for strict inferentialism of the Brandomian type, metaphysics falls out the window completely. The latter option basically eviscerates the metaphysical core of Hegelianism, while the former similarly extirpates the epistemological core of rational agency which annuls the possibility of thinking of a non-immediate congruence between thought and reality, having no choice but to endorse the Parmenidean identification of thinking and being. In both cases we get something like a cunning of reason against realism-materialism: the epistemological confine to the rational community which instrumentalizes the natural (like Habermas, but also possibly Brandom) into the social space of a rationalist pragmatics (which I take Badiou has sufficiently shown to be in complicit with a kind of idealism), and the ontological confine to a formal ideography with no account of the relation it holds to its denied exteriority. The critique of intuitional or experiential givenness is exacerbated to a deflation of all non semantic, empiricist notion of ‘content’ or reference, which has no option but to conflate being and thought.  In this regard, the violent anti-phenomenological vocation that drives both mathematical ontology and inferentialism, in annulling  experience, end up preemptively throwing the metaphysical baby with the epistemological bathwater (inferentialist dismissal of the necessity of metaphysics), or else throwing the epistemological baby with the metaphysical bathwater (post-Heideggerean strawmans against epistemology).

       What is also intriguing is that both alternatives remain surprisingly cogent with each other in that their respective formalisms entail a noocentric enclosure, which keeps philosophy from taking the empirical sciences sufficiently seriously, despite their protestations to the contrary. Thus neither Brandom nor Badiou seem to have much to say about what those sciences which describe human-independent phenomena are doing; where does physics fall for Badiou? Is it regional ontology, like Catren seems to be implying in his (brilliant) topology of the tasks for thought, the great ‘Outland Empire’? Perhaps it is no surprise that people like Rorty can simultaneously find appealing both anti-metaphysical inferentialism, and anti-epistemological ontology. To sum up, we can say that the strong anti-empiricism of rationalist ontology of the mathematical ends up resembling inferentialism in their mutual Hegelian trivialization of experiential content, which becomes ultimately complicit with the idealist indistinction of thought and being.

      Badiou in fact motivates this conflation from the start in castigating the unquestioned ‘third dogma’ of empiricism, in the dualism between empirical content and form, which has motivated the idea that formal axiomatic systems model reality. The restriction of ontological discursivity to the dialectics between mathematical forms and for which domains of interpretation model axiomatic systems, however, is given a crude quasi-Althusserian analysis of the intrication of philosophy, science and ideology, in the tripartite negotiation of concepts, functions, and notions. And the meta-ontological gloss of the later Badiou cannot but appear as yet another surreptitious normative injunction in favor of a subtractive ontology of the multiple, ultimately motivated by the need to introduce subjectivity in a gratuitous supplementation of the ontological by the evental, of the objective by the subjective, of the stasis of knowledge by truth, etc. But if this is not, like Zizek claims apropos the Pittsburg Hegelians, an ideological validation of liberalist capitalism, it is certainly an equally ideological political suture by Badiou’s own standards, assigning the subject the peculiar role to be the agent of all structural dynamism, of all change and for all truths. This is idealism with a vengeance, hybridizing the decisionistic fetishism of subjective freedom, while dislodging the requirement to argue for the distinction between ontology and non-ontology, the discursive intelligibility of being and the world, through the philosophical umbrella of ‘presentation’ mediating between the two. The emphasis on subjective creation, and of truth as production, also makes the dimension of discovery proper to science in particular difficult to understand.  Other options, like Catren and Negarestani, seem to run into similar problems to Nick Land. Having destratified the empirical transcendental-distinction, and having underdetermined representation by the unconscious thanatropism of intensive matter, it is not clear that anything like a subject remains. So it is not clear that a plausible account can be given to discern how conceptual structure relates to this primary material process. This seems to fold once again on a surreptitious prescription for a given metaphysics, which is itself strictly incompatible with the strictures under which subjective agency, decision, or ‘theorization’ could take place. It’s not clear one could even ‘accelerate’ under this scheme, since in refusing to re-anthropomorphize philosophy with a supplementary ethics of ‘subjective intervention’ along the immanent ubiquity of ontologically primary matter, post-Landians cannot discern between the world and discourse about the world, i.e. they cannot distinguish concepts and objects in their metaphysics as such. Calling it non-metaphysical practicism is simply to obviate the issue that now is resolutely another version of the idealist serpent of absolute knowledge, swallowing itself; only this time cashed out in terms of primary production and a logic of ‘expression’. Shorn of its vitalist residue, this materialism ends up making it extremely difficult to understand the peculiar ‘stratification’ that is theory in relation to the primary process it allegedly it has ceased to described, since no longer experience mediates in it.

     The inferentialist option on its part seems to reproduce the instrumentalization which follows from the extirpation of reference from verificationist standards. Here either metaphysics is in principle proscribed, or else ontology becomes a quite foreign matter, subjected to ideological prescriptions and legitimated extraneously through ad hoc appeals to super-empirical virtues of varied assortments. These finally end up, like Ladyman and Ross, but also Quine, being incapable of reconciling the deflation of reality to existential quantification with a robust realism or physicalism. And here the Sellarsian option stands as a necessary interruption, I think, of this line, through a more intricate idea of how perception mediates the knowing of the real. It insists on the importance of perceptual judgment in epistemology and of giving an account of sensibility within ontology, insofar as we must understand the composite intrication of the conceptual and the objectual. And I agree with Brassier in that ultimately the moniker realism becomes suspect at this stage, since at no point concepts ‘reach out’ onto things. But their difference and relation must be one that is possibly clarified without being metaphysically reified, and this is what I am not convinced strict inferentialism is prepared to accomplish. I think Pete would probably agree at bottom, and thus accept that a necessary corrective to Brandom would require recuperating a thick notion of reality, albeit I don’t think that this has been satisfactorily reconciled with a preservation of inferentialism which deflates perception.

    Here recent questions about aesthetics raised by Peter and Brassier become peculiarly interesting, since I think they can allow us to see how perception continues to play a role in the story in a way that illuminates the peculiarity of Sellars’ position. As I take it, Brassier endorses the modern severance of the beautiful from the sensible, thereby advocating the former’s allotment to the conceptual. Here I agree with Pete in that the intrication between the Beautiful, the Good, and Value brings Plato to the context of a rationalist epistemology with an inferentialist bent. The basic idea is that we can distinguish Beauty as a species of Value, with varying scales of Universality. Thus Pete distinguishes a broad sense of Beauty akin to that of Value-in-itself, or its pure form, which is independent of all rational interests, and a narrower sense in which different aesthetic values are pitted against each other within the conceptual norms of the sensus communis and which make possible the negotiation of aesthetic judgments.

      Here the account of artistic beauty in particular becomes interesting, insofar as it is related to production and intentionality. The idea is that in art, as opposed to nature, we seek to produce affect, and while presupposing communication, art must also resist being communicable, lacking determinate semantic content. This is relevant because this lack of semantic determinacy is meant to capture the Sellarsian rejection of the epistemic valence of sensible transparency as a variant of the Myth of the Given, but can also become a way to address the kernel of truth in the abused cliché about how art is in a way not about ‘mere communication or reproduction’, but about disruption and creation. The point is how to account for this experimental and creative dimension in art without falling into a mindless celebration of the affirmative will, which Brandom castigates rightfully, or a reification of sublimity by interrupting the rational order of causes through a pure experience, or some ‘aura’ which ordains aesthetics to the mystical quality in the work (from Benjamin to Heidegger, to Laruelle perhaps). Here the absorption of the beautiful to the conceptual can allow us to be continuous to the ideal of non-communication in both senses, rejecting givenness while accepting art’s disruptive character, thus embracing a dialectical historicity of artistic production intricate in the conceptual. And this would be the role of the ‘narrow’ sense of beauty of ‘lower order’ universality, in which the production of art would be dialectically imbued within the conceptual seal in aesthetic judgment. This unites one of Badiou’s salient virtues with a proper Sellarsian embedding of productivity within the normative: the semantic indeterminacy of art is to be understood in the sense in which artistic production makes possible new judgments and relations which are strictly irreducible to previous ones, by causing semantic interference with the state of the situation as it is.

    One might think that such a ‘conceptualization’ of the aesthetic deprives it of its link to experience; but here is where I think a Sellarsian rejoinder is necessary. We can salvage the link between the conceptual and the perceptual, accepting that the latter is anchored in the sensible, while insisting that beauty concerns only the conceptual. This is a striking reversal of common sense, since now it is the natural which remains refractory from the conceptual, and which concerns the sensible proper. Ihis reversal can be done by amplifying the account of ‘looks talk’ in Sellars, in a way in which I Pete has again made some headway; although I don’t know how it would fit with Brandom. The basic idea is to disambiguate a sense of looks-talk which is not merely emphasizing the epistemic withdrawal of endorsement before a proposition about the world, i.e. in which the function of ‘x looks y to S’ is not reducible to ‘x withdraws endorsement from x is y’. This can be exemplified by using predicates such as ‘looking fuzzy’, where it is clear that the role of ‘looking’ therein is to make a report about a fact concerning the functioning of our perceptual mechanisms, and not the epistemic withdrawal of endorsement. This means that we can accept that there is a role to be played for experientially specific judgments about perception which provide the anchoring on sensibilia without rehabilitating the valence of sense datum transparency, and which would thus be continuous with the conceptual envelopment of the aesthetic. The idea would then be that the semantic indeterminacy introduced in artistic creation would be the (dialectical) interplay in the production of new perceptual judgments and relations, and which include (albeit not exclusively) statements about how things produce affect as states relative to the functioning of our sensory organs, i.e. perceiver-relative facts.  These would constitute the specifiable content which relativizes aesthetic judgment to perceptual judgments, though not wholly, without losing grip on participation in the generation and negotiation of value. The trick here is to coordinate properly aesthetic judgments in art with perceptual judgments (whose content is determinate) to explain how the indeterminacy of artistic works themselves is to be understood relative to the articulation of conceptual norms within the sensus communis. The obvious question is whether this requires that we make aesthetic judgments in nature subject to the same sort of dialectics, and how the intentional stance ultimately weighs in. Again, this is a subject matter for a different occasion.

     As a provisory note, I would remark that the notion that value is ‘independent’ becomes quite difficult to cash out. On the one hand, I think that the distinction between the projection of value (which is our prerogative), and its construction (which we don’t make) is opaque for the moment. It also doesn’t seem clear to me what natural value consists in, beyond the trivial assertion that nature is not made by or for us. If by projection we simply mean that we need to deploy concepts to make aesthetic judgments, then it is not clear how these judgments are proper to art because of its intentional inflection. Clearly, some sort of projection in that sense would be necessary for natural judgment. This is ultimately a tangential matter.

       The main point is that the insurrectional component in art resists the fetishizing of formless sublimity, and imbues the perceptual within a dialectical understanding, in the narrow sense, wherein experience becomes configured and modified productively in relation to the subjective universality of the sensus communis. For art, there needs to be some non-reproductive element to realize the production of affect, by necessity, and it must not be in the trivial sense in which minimal difference at the level of perceptual content entails the production of wholly autonomous aesthetic value. The task lies in pinpointing the singularity of artistic works without relapsing into the theological frame of revelation still wed to givenness. It is not that the disruptive function of art is semantically indeterminate by being non-conceptual, but rather that it must be understood in relation to how it positions itself with respect to the community of rational agents. Art in this regard is what exorcises the Holy: it relativizes its local value to the rational negotiation of norms, underwritten only by the formal imperative of remaining true to value in-itself as its limit case and higher-order universality, and of rational purposefulness. Either one introduces beauty into the normative frame of reasons, or one pragmatically blocks the historical specificity and epistemic valence of art. We can't simply rejoice in claiming art is all about breaking the rules, and using the primacy of ‘pure’ intuition as the obverse of the affirmative will, against rationality. The conceptual negotiation of the manifest image in which aesthetic judgments are made exemplifies the possibility to think of a logic of change, local and structural, which can explain experimental novelty and semantic interference, without surrendering to irrationalism. The idea is how to coordinate a notion of perception as conceptual and epistemically apt, without deflating the sensible-ontological core of experience. But this is all very rudimentary, since it is not clear how to coordinate the predicates that describe the working of our sensory organs ('fuzzy') with a Sellarsian account of picturing, or something of the sort. But anyhow once perception has been understood as a mediated process the dialectics of historicity proper to it replace the quasi-mystical purchase of 'givenness' in experience championed by phenomenological and vitalist alternatives.

   In any case, here we can be Badioueans without the revolutionary rhetorical excess. Although the idea that truth diagonally subtracts itself from the situation in the construction of a generic subset does well to formalize a dialectics of change, rather than making it ex nihilo, we must insist with Sellars in that this cannot work within a realist register if one annihilates the autonomy of rational agency which guarantees the normative Universality as limit of value-in-itself. If one does, one inevitably ends up tacitly overruling the neutrality of subtractive ontology by regulating it with a higher order, undeclared, ad hoc normative meta-ontological discourse to explain the articulation between being and thought as that of revolutionary disruption in the creation of truth.  Of course, the latter is what Badiou really is after: to motivate the political revolutionary agenda which rejoices in the ‘great chaos under the sky’. As a result, set theoretical frameworks that operate without the axiom of foundation and admit of self-belonging are conveniently obviated rather than rationally discarded, in order to preserve the dialectics of illegality and of the event. Thus while Badiou moves a long way towards eviscerating the phenomenological myths of presencing, he grants too much to the structuralist deflation of the empirical, and the psychoanalytic allotment of the rational individual to the 'imaginary', along with its ontology fantasy.  If anything, I think it is necessary to show that this patronizingly dismissed 'imaginary' is not some secondary spook neatly absorbed as a linguistifying or logicist confusion, but a fundamental condition for any rationalism of the sort Badiou or Brandom pursue.

       On any account, this line of thought goes to show that, contra the predominant Continental doxa, representation need not be aligned to metaphysical skyhooks. All the variants of the critique of metaphysics in the 20^th Century simplify fatally in their dismissal of knowledge and representation, in the castigation of the understanding, and the apportioning of philosophy to ontology. Sellars’ putative force, beyond inferentialism and formalism, is to think the nature of experience without the slothful betrayal toward immediacy and first-person familiarity, all too conveniently aligned to armchair reflection. Of course this is why Deleuze in particular keeps obsessing Brassier, since in a way he has been the more articulate critic of the logic of representation, and in favor of the metaphysical priority.

       Two great limitations of continental thought are concentrated here: one, to think that thought ‘as such’ is rationally inaccessible because one must deflate transcendental metaphysical frames, and second that there is no suitably restricted notion of an object because the latter remains invariably secondary with respect to some linguistic/subjective/cultural constitution. So the object invariably gets destroyed, deconstructed, or destratified for being a testament to metaphysics of presence, of pure Vorhandenheit, derived extensity, secondary process, etc. And thought itself gets shafted for being the stillborn cunning of the same metaphysical reification of substance which lingers in the form of transcendental agency.

        By the same token, the inferentialist thinks that metaphysics as such is impossible since it must hypostasize ‘reference’ in a way that betrays post-Quinean deflationary standards for truth and existence, while insisting in that there is no suitably adequate vindication of experience beyond the pragmatic constriction to RDRDs. Thought on its part gets shrunk to its inferentialist core, while objectivity becomes a function of knowing.  But the point is that the object is not a function of thought, and that thought is itself objectifiable. Objectivity is precisely what allows us to understand the ontological priority of what is not thought, while the latter remains the condition for ascribing the rational responsibility to understand reality, to revise our beliefs in ways which are not merely prescriptive, or super-empirical whims by ideological-institutional agents, but rationally validated.

        The idea is finally to defend a sense of objectivity as part of metaphysics, without for this reason endorsing a neo-Scholastic metaphysics of objects, and a suitable notion of objective knowledge and so an epistemology, without for this reason endorsing a metaphysical divide between transcendence and transcendent.  And all of this while describing the nature of experience as involving a conceptually circumscribed role for perception as that which anchors our relation to the external world.

     Here the question of representation and hylomorphism that Deleuze criticizes apropos representation, which is supposed to hold since Aristotle, becomes an important challenge and focal point. The alternative realist account which rehabilitates perceptual judgment must do two difficult things on this terrain. First, it must resist the idea of a hylomorphic stapling of universal form on singular matter, since it must insist in that the specificity of objective matter is not external to itself, and certainly not a projection of our thought. Form is intrinsic to matter, while not being a function of conception, even if the latter remains necessary to know of it and yet external to itself. At the same time, we must accept that the conceptual traction on being must always ‘leave something out’, or that that, as Deleuze puts it, concepts are too baggy (since concepts are not things, and can never ‘touch’ reality), while rejecting that this constitutes an insufficiency before which we can supplant epistemology and the valence of the normative with a metaphysical account of individuating difference, and through a logic of expressive being, like in Spinozist-Deleuzian alternatives.

     Finally, in distinguishing between concepts and objects, thought and world, one must specificity the latter’ within a natural-causal order of explanation, in order to render it resolutely non-conceptual. This marks the ontological ubiquity of the scientific image, and its proper methodological autonomy. The way in which natural-causal description relates to its exteriority as developed in the account of picturing, however, remains obscure to me at present.

  

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[1] We could broadly understand the contemporeneity of science along Catren’s broad lines, by defining that philosophy would need to be simultaneously Galilean, Heisenbergean, Einsteinean, Newtonian, Freudian and Darwinean: “First, modern science is essentially Galilean, which means, in Husserl’s terminology, that mathematics is a formal ontology, i.e. a theory of the generic categories of being qua being, like for instance the categories of multiplicity (set theory), relation (category theory), quantity (number theory), localization (geometry), operativeness (algebra), symmetry (group theory), predication (logic), stability (dynamical systems theory), and so on6. In other words, modern science is essentially determined by the physical entanglement of mathematical logos and natural existence, an entanglement which implies both the Galilean mathematization of nature and the Husserlian (and Badiousian) ontologization of mathematics. Second, modern science is essentially Copernican, Darwinian, and Freudian, which means that the narcissistically wounded subject of science can no longer be considered a (self)-centred fundamental first or last instance. Third, modern science is essentially Newtonian, which means that nature is one, i.e. that the pre-modern (transcendental) bifurcation between the (unmoving) earth and the (noumenal) sky has been definitively removed. Fourth, modern science is essentially Einsteinian, which means that nature suspends itself in its (cor)relational immanence by absorbing (or physicalizing) any sort of transcendental or metaphysical (back)ground. And finally, modern science is essentially Heisenbergian, which means that the phenomenological objective consistency of nature depends upon a certain number of quantum categories, which define the general conditions of logical predicability, (in)deterministic predictability, physical individuation, temporal reidentification, experimental observability, and intersubjective objectivity.” 

Blackbox Realism: On Quine and the Indeterminacy of Translation

- BLACKBOX REALISM -

On Quine and the Indeterminacy of Translation

________________________________________________________

Introduction

      In this paper I seek to develop some considerations surrounding Quine's thesis for the indeterminacy of translation. As presented in his canonical Word and Object (1964), the thesis states that, for any pair of languages, different incompatible theories of translation, all adequate to the relevant available empirical facts, may be proposed. Thus, Quine seeks to undermine the idea that translation between two languages implies achieving congruence of meaning between them, if the latter is understood as entailing synonymy qua sameness of reference. In doing so, he casts doubts upon the co-dependent traditional notions of meaning, reference, and synonymy. This is supported through what Quine calls the underdetermination of translation by data, which states that the set of empirical facts rendered available for a translator can accept of many possible, incompatible meanings, all of them being adequate to the observable data. There are many ways in which words or expressions fit the facts in spite of being ontologically or referentially ambiguous. Therefore, for a given theory of translation, that theory's conditions for success do not depend on mapping synonymous expressions between the two languages. The translator cannot infer synonymy from the congruence observed in identical behavioral responses to stimuli, when contrasting expressions between languages. Rather, the job of the translator is to preserve the standard relations between given linguistic expressions and behavioral conditions for assent or dissent, relative to observation instances. Quine frames these views in his theory of 'radical translation', supported in the underdetermination of translation by data.

     I shall follow Scott Soames' reconstruction of Quine's argument for the indeterminacy of translation (IOT) by clarifying the relationship between three central concepts: stimulus meaning, observation sentences, and occasion sentences[1]. In the first section, I follow and expand on Soames' presentation of Quine in seeking a formal explanation of the abovementioned three interrelated concepts. I shall then propose that Quine's arguments for indeterminacy fail to account for non-observational criteria relevant for translation, which cannot be captured by the restriction of empirical data to stimulus meaning and observation sentences. In particular, I shall argue that it is possible to propose additional criteria for any two hypothetical alternative compatible theories of translation, which are supposed to share their stimulus meaning and so be equally adequate translations by Quine’s criteria. Although these considerations do not belie the argument for indeterminacy, they do set constraints to the scope of what the latter solicits us to conclude about what can be of empirical relevance for the task of translation. More specifically, it will allow us to consider the possibility that non-truth-functional linguistic expressions can be relevant for translation. I conclude that while Quine's theory of radical translation should be read as an argument for indeterminacy, it should not be read as a comprehensive theory of translation applicable outside of strict cases where the only relevant empirical data is limited to linguistic expressions that function as perceptual reports.

      I then briefly show some problems that arise for the thesis of indeterminacy, by considering it in conjunction with Quine's pragmatic endorsement of behaviorism and physicalism. I focus on the behaviorist disavowal of representational contents, the physicalist pragmatic endorsement of the truth of physics, and the thesis on ontological relativity according to which to be is to be the value of a variable. I suggest that the conjunction of these three theses create problems for Quine’s deflationary scientific realism, and also for the thesis of the indeterminacy of translation. In particular, I argue that his behaviorism can be read in two senses: an epistemological and an ontological one. In conjunction with his other two positions, both options leave the plausibility of the inscrutability of reference in demand of further justification for its claims.

I - The Indeterminacy of Translation

      Quine's focus on theories of translation is contingent upon his intention to advance a general point about language. His two main philosophical targets comprise at least two prevalent orientations in philosophy of mind and language from his time:

1) The logical atomist theory of meaning - which preserves Frege's idea that meaning is primarily a matter of a series of relations between sentential expressions and the items of reference correlative to those expressions. The main idea that the logical atomists adapted from the Fregean view was that, through propositional analysis, an eventual theory of language would yield an understanding of meaning that would allow the logician to neatly separate meaningful sentences from meaningless ones, by isolating those expressions that are apt for empirical verification from those which aren’t. In turn, discerning which sentences are verifiable and thus meaningful would rely on knowing which expressions succeeded at denoting an item of reference in the world. This is an empiricist and verificationist thesis.

2) The sense-datum theories of mind - according to which sense-data, in some form, determines the basic content for all further propositional attitudes, i.e. experience and so knowledge originates in our registration of sensorial stimuli. This (roughly neo-Aristotelian) position entails that a fundamental layer of mental content underlies all propositional attitudes, and so that sensibilia anchors linguistic acts on an analytically available referential frame.

       In relation to the logical atomists and philosophy of language, Quine preserves the verificationist constraint according to which the meaning of a sentence is determined by its conditions for verification or refutation. He also advocates the thesis that sentences are the basic constituents of meaningful expressions: “I follow Frege in deeming sentences the primary vehicles of meaning.”[2]At the same time, he rejects that an analysis of language can clarify meaning by explaining the congruity between expressions and referents, because it turns out that conditions for verification render items of reference ambiguous.  Rather than to seek an elucidation of meaning in terms of word-world representational mappings, Quine proposes instead that language is mostly a matter of social convention, i.e. of dispositions to react to linguistic stimuli by responding in accordance to behaviorally conditioned responses within given socio-cultural contexts, or as cases of what Brandom (1998) calls reliable differential responsive dispositions. The opening line from Word and Object thus reads: "Language is a social act... in acquiring it we have to depend entirely on intersubjectively available cues as to what to say and when." Quine's argument constraining the available empirical data for translation theories to stimulus responses turns out to be the fundamental feature of his views on translation, and the inscrutability of reference that the latter evinces.

     In relation to the sense-datum theorists and the philosophy of mind, Quine endorses the idea that linguistic acts begin in experience, and that the meaning we assign to words is contingent on our capacities for perceptual discrimination. That is, again, part of what is at stake in Quine’s epistemic restriction of translation to observation sentences. However, he rejects the idea of a ubiquitous layer of sense-content which could serve to render linguistic reference unambiguous, i.e. sensibilia has no determinate content which unequivocally and transparently fixes an item of reference across a community of speakers[3]. Alex Orenstein explains in that regard that “the conjecture of indeterminacy is that there is no reason to think, given the empiricism/behaviorism involved in translation and its ontological underpinnings, that translation is determinate [about reference].” (Orenstein, 2002, pp. 144) Rather, communication proceeds while leaving the item(s) of reference inscrutable through the available evidence. In this regard, Soames condenses the two central claims that Quine seeks to advance by using theories of translation: "i) that the class of all possible data for such a theory radically underdetermines the claims about meaning that it makes, and ii) that this indeterminacy could not be resolved even if we had access to all physical facts."[4] (Soames, 2003: Pg. 226) The former follows given the ontological and referential indeterminacy left undecided after observing linguistic behavior. The latter follows from the fact that adequacy to the (natural) facts that constitute the world admit of semantically incompatible expressions, i.e. expressions with divergent meanings can be adequate to the facts. Quine thinks the inscrutability of reference sets epistemological constrains about which ontological commitments other linguistic subjects target in their use of language, since ambiguity of reference persists. However, this does not entail that every possible theory or set of statements are on equal footing before reality: Quine also endorses the physicalist thesis according to which physics describes the totality of facts that structures the world. I shall try to show why Quine’s physicalism becomes difficult to reconcile with behaviorism below. It is important to understand, however, that Quine’s argument for the underdetermination of translation by data in fact depends on the realist thesis that a) there exists an ontological structure composed of true facts which is the world, b) that those facts are specifically those advanced by current bona fide physics. Let us explain how exactly Quine argues for the underdetermination thesis in this context.

      Given the verificationist constraint, all scientific theories, including theories of translation, must be tested against plausible observational data. Quine's argument will consist in trying to delineate what the relevant data amounts to for theories of translation specifically. It will turn out that the set of data available for the translator underdetermines the choice for translation theory, i.e. more than one theory may fit the data equally as well. From this, it follows that a theory of translation must include in its conditions for success a severe and fundamental epistemic constraint. That is, the underdetermination of translation by data entails the indeterminacy of translation. Following Soames (2005), let us propose a definition of these two central ideas[5]:

1) (The Underdetermination of Translation by Data) (UTD)

      Let L1 and L2 be arbitrary languages, and let D be the set of all observational truths (known and unknown) relevant to translation from one to the other. For any theory of translation T for L1 and L1, compatible with D, there is a theory T', incompatible with T, that is compatible with, and equally well supported by, D.

2) (The Indeterminacy of Translation) (IOT)

     Translation is not determined by the set N of all empirical truths, known or unknown. For any pair of languages and a given theory of translation T for those languages, there are alternative theories of translation, incompatible with T, that accord equally well with N and so that are just as adequate to the facts. There is no objective matter of fact on which they disagree, and no objective sense in which one is true and the other is not.

        The plausibility of the inference from IOT to UTD supervenes on whether Quine's argument for what constitutes relevant data is reasonable to uphold. We may provisionally anticipate that it is at least not intuitively obvious what a) observational truths amount to precisely in Quine's account, and b) why we should restrain ourselves to a consideration of such facts. The latter is motivated by the empiricist and verificationist constraint that theories should be tested against the backdrop of evidentially salient data. For translation theories, the task is to correlate expressions between different languages or dialects. The set of correlations that map expressions in one language to another is what constitutes a translation manual or translation theory. The basic constituents of such a theory will then yield statements of the form:

“Word or sentence s1 in L1 means the same as word or sentence s2 in L2.”

    However, as we have anticipated, attempts to anchor translation on reference-synonymy are undermined by the data. To see why this is the case we must ask what ‘behavioral data’ amounts to in the production of a translation manual. The hypothesis advanced by Quine is that this data involves the observation of occasions where the foreigner uses specific expressions in his native language, where the translator compares them to situations where we use expressions in our language. As we surmised above apropos the endorsement of the Fregean thesis, Quine advocates the restriction of meaning to sentential expressions, but we should remark that the latter may include one-word interrogative utterances, and holophrastically construed sentences such as ‘Here-is-a-rabbit!’ or ‘This-is-red!’ The anchoring of such linguistic behavior in non-verbal, observational stimuli provides the observational data that Quine deems essential for translation, i.e. for what he calls stimulus meaning. Coming to know the relation between conditions for assent or dissent relative to expressions in given occasions constitutes the basis for a translation manual. As Orenstein puts it: “Quine’s linguist offers a hypothesis equating two such sentences (one the native’s and another the linguist’s) and checks it against a native speaker’s assenting or dissenting to the native sentence in the presence of some non-verbal stimuli.” (Orenstein 2002, pp. 134) Without further ado, let us introduce the three essential definitions at work in Quine’s account, following and expanding on Soames presentation (Soames, 2005, pp 254-255):

(Stimulus Meaning - SM)
     The stimulus meaning of a sentence S (for a speaker at a given time t) is a pair of classes- the class of situations which would prompt the speaker to assent to S if queried (the affirmative stimulus meaning of S), and the class of situations which would prompt the speaker to dissent from S if queried (the negative stimulus meaning of S).

(­Occasion Sentences - OCS)
     S is an occasion sentence for a speaker if and only if the speaker's assent to, or dissent from, S depends in part on what the speaker is observing.

(Observation Sentences - OBS)
     S is an observation sentence in a language L if and only if i) S is an occasion sentence for speakers of L, and ii) the stimulus meaning of S varies trivially from one speaker of L to another.

      The third criterion tries to render the interference of background assumptions ineffectual, to make variability in stimulus response minimal, i.e. it excludes judgments in which collateral-information affects stimulus responses. Quine’s central idea is then that the empirical constraint to observation sentences, as defined by stable stimulus meaning across occasion sentences, yield data that does not sufficiently support reference-synonymy. The latter is therefore not part of the experimental material or the goal of translation manuals. The translator can at best achieve stimulus-synonymy, while reference-synonymy would require that one may unambiguously assert sameness of meaning, which entails sameness of reference. This impossibility is precisely what Quine’s argument is designed to prove:  “The recovery of a man’s current language from his currently observed responses is the task of the linguist [or translator] who, unaided by an interpreter, is out to penetrate and translate a language hitherto unknown.  All the objective data he has to go on are the forces that he sees impinging on the natives’ surfaces and the observable behavior, vocal and otherwise, of the native. Such data evinces “meanings” only of the most objectively empirical or stimulus-linked variety.”  (Quine, WO: pp. 28-9)

    As a result of the constraint to stimulus-synonymy, the empirical prediction for theories of translation will hold generally that:

(Empirical Prediction of Translation Theories)
    Translation of observation sentences must preserve stimulus meaning. If a translation theory states that an observation sentence S1 in L1 means the same as S2 in L2, then the theory predicts that S1 and S2 have the same stimulus meanings in their respective linguistic communities.

     With this in mind we might stipulate a revision of our earlier general formulation, for the theorematic statements advanced by translation theories, as follows:

“Word or sentence s1 is in L1 is stimulus-synonymous to word or sentence s2 in L2.”

   At this juncture, we should reiterate that the relevant data described in Quine’s argument is of two kinds: the observational data gathered in stimulus responses, and the totality of physical facts which constitute the world, and relative to which the underdetermination by observational data occurs. Whereas the former is available, relevant and tractable for the translator, the latter constitutes the factual background that can be equally adequate to different and incompatible translation manuals, and so to different sets of stimulus responses. The idea is then that a) observational data is referentially ambiguous and so that different translations are equally supported by such data, and b) the facts of physics do not help resolve this ambiguity.

     Quine’s proposed thought-experiment for radical translation asks us to imagine the task of translating a hypothetical native language called Jungle, and which bears little in common to English. Having already stipulated that the translator is capable of discerning the appropriate gestures/expressions in Jungle for assent or dissent, to determine occasions for negative and positive stimulus meaning in the native’s language, Quine considers a specific example in a translator’s attempt to translate the native expression Gavagai! He stipulates that we could find out that the natives will assent and dissent to the one-word interrogative Gavagai? in the same situations that we are disposed to assent and dissent to the one-word interrogative sentence Rabbit? On this basis, the translator might be tempted to conclude that both Gavagai and Rabbit are referent-synonymous. Such a hypothetical translator argues as follows:

1)      For any pair of expressions S1 in L1, and S2 in L2, it is possible to empirically determine that both expressions are synonymous.

2)      If two expressions are synonymous, then they have the same meaning.

3)      If two expressions have the same meaning, then they must have the same referents.

4)      Therefore, if two expressions are synonymous, then they have the same referents.

5)      Therefore, it is possible to empirically determine for any pair of expressions in distinct languages, that they have the same referent.

     As we have suggested above, Quine’s contention against this argument is to disambiguate between stimulus-synonymy and reference-synonymy. Although Quine agrees in that the traditional notion of meaning advanced by the tradition is construed in terms of reference-synonymy and implies it, his point is that translation can at best warrant establishing stimulus-synonymy, and from the latter reference-synonymy doesn’t follow.  It follows that premise (1) fails if not qualified to read ‘stimulus-synonymous’, given the empirical constraint set by stimulus meaning. Furthermore, premise (2) is also only sensible to uphold if one qualifies it to mean ‘referent-synonymy’, and so the inference to (3) requires such a qualification.

       At this point, it might seem as if Quine is oscillating between two possible ideas: is he trying to dispense of the notion of meaning altogether by showing that synonymy simpliter is evidentially undermined? Or is he trying to redefine meaning so that the coinage of stimulus-synonymy can be said to achieve a behavioral account of meaning? This question lies outside the scope of this paper, but it should just be remarked that in any case synonymy and meaning, as construed by the tradition’s focus on referential relations, remain the target of Quine’s argument.

    The second qualification that we must note at this point is that, given the constriction to stimulus meaning and observation sentences, the set of expressions that can be sorted out using the abovementioned procedure is limited. Since the sentential expressions which yield stimulus responses depend by definition on observation instances, they do not comprise sentences whose determination is intractable by such means. For example, expressions like Rabbits share genetic material with Hares or Columbus discovered America will not work under such circumstances (Soames 2005, pp. 229). This raises a question for Quine, as well as for translation tout court. First, in excluding such sentences, haven’t we obviated what is an obvious and crucial part of the task undertaken by real translators everywhere? Quine himself does not address why such sentences are not subject to semantic analysis at a loss for evidential support, which renders the hypothetical nature of radical translation seem less realistic in scope. However, Quine might insist that sentences in a language must be, in the last instance, tethered to plausible direct or indirect knowledge of stimulus responses relative to observation, or at the very least, perceptual instances. One cannot do without being able to correlate expressions to some sort of perceptual stimulus, since it is through the latter that all communication functions to anchor language on the world. That such information might occur indirectly (through third-party testimony, recordings of some sort, or otherwise) does little to change this fundamental constraint.

        To consider why such an argument is persuasive for Quine consider the following radical example: suppose that one finds what appears to be an Alien tabula with indecipherable inscriptions presumably coming from a community of Alien speakers, equipped with similar perceptual capacities to ours. We have no diagrammatic representation of these symbols anywhere, and we lack any contact or knowledge about how any of these expressions might relate to the situations that we might register through perception in specific occasions. It seems reasonable to suggest that it would then prove to be utterly impossible to translate or understand anything about this manual; the bare minimum required to understand a language is to know how certain experientially available situations trigger stimulus responses in the right instances, i.e. to understand how they relate to the world. Without any idea of which situations correspond to which expressions in the native language we couldn’t even be capable of proposing candidates from our language to serve for stimulus synonymy, let alone reference-synonymy. Thus, the paucity of criteria offered in radical translation is meant precisely to illustrate a minimal set of conditions for a translation theory, and not an exhaustive delineation of all possible cases. This response, however, still begs the question about what it is precisely about non-observational sentences that renders them evidentially trivial or empty; are there other forms of evidence besides those rendered in SM or OBS? If so, why are these secondary or trivial for translation? Could these serve to overcome the underdetermination of translation by data as restricted to stimulus responses?[6] We shall return to this issue below, but for now let us return to reference.

     So far we haven’t addressed how the underdetermination of data rests on the inscrutability of reference. Although Quine himself reminds us to keep these two theses separate, it is clear that the former is meant to be supported by the truth of the latter[7]. The question finally amounts to asking why stimulus-synonymy fails to entail reference-synonymy.  Assume a pair of sentences in two different languages with identical SM: s1 in L1 and s2 in L2. Suppose that the two expressions in question are the English Lo, a Rabbit! and the Junglese Gavagai! If both expressions are stimulus-synonymous it follows, by definition of SM, that those circumstances on which a speaker of English would assent/dissent to the one-word interrogative Rabbit? are the same as those in which a speaker of Junglese would assent-dissent to the one-word interrogative Gavagai? From this it might be tempting for the translator to conclude that Gavagai refers to rabbits, and so that Gavagai and Rabbit are not just stimulus-synonymous, but referent-synonymous, i.e. that they have the same meaning where the latter entails sameness of reference.

        However, is this really established by the data? Quine remarks that the native Gavagai could just as easily refer to an undetached-rabbit-part, a temporal rabbit-stage, the form of Rabbithood, and who knows what else. Each of those possibilities remains adequate to the stimulus at hand. Thus, Quine argues that “Given that that a native sentence says that a so-and-so is present, and given that the sentence is true when and only when a rabbit is present, it by means follows that the so-and-so are rabbits.”[8] In other words, while it might be perfectly true that Gavagai? is assented to by the native speakers in the exact same situations that Rabbit? is assented to by English speakers, the former’s reference remains indeterminate. Since the referents of both expressions could be dissimilar, it follows that sameness of meaning is not deducible from the evidence. This thesis is also called the thesis for relative neutrality, i.e. the data is not partial to one possibility rather than the other. All of these states correspond to the physical world, in which rabbit, rabbit-stage, and rabbit-part stimulations all yield the same stimulus response in the same real situation. Thus, commitment to one hypothesis rather than another requires supplementary commitments called ‘analytical hypotheses’. For example, in order to ask ‘Is this rabbit the same as that?’ the translator must decide on how to translate articles, pronouns, identity predicates, among other things. Translating into Jungle requires us to reach beyond what SM renders available (Orenstein, 2005, pp. 135). The selection of a translation manual involves the choice of such divergent sets of possible translations, all of which are equally supported by the data. This allows us to understand how the notion of incompatibility between theories is cashed out in terms of the failure of reference-synonymy. The following reconstruction offers the basic position[9]:

(Incompatibility Between Translation Theories)
      Let T1 be a translation theory containing statement (i), and let T2 be a translation theory containing statement (ii). The union of T1, T2, and a set which includes following premises is inconsistent:
a) Rabbits are not undetached spatial rabbit parts, undetached spatial rabbit parts are not stages or rabbits, and rabbits are not temporal stages of rabbits.

b) 'Rabbit' (as we use it now) refers to an object if and only if it is a rabbit, the same with every respective expression.

c) If two words refer to different things then they don't mean the same thing.

d) If a word of a phrase w means the same as a word of phrase x, and w means the same as a word or phrase y, then x means the same as y. (transitivity)

      This reconstruction obviously rests upon the reading, suggested above, that Quine would be first and foremost be looking to displace the notion of meaning altogether, rather than redefine it.  An alternative reading, which sees Quine as relaxing the notion of meaning, could simply qualify premises (c) and (d) to read ‘reference-meaning’ or ‘reference-synonymy’, thereby leaving it open that two expressions with different referents could nevertheless be said to enjoy sameness of meaning in the sense of ‘stimulus-meaning’. In any case, the point outlined above is that given a translation theory T1 that contains a statement (i), and an alternative theory T2 containing a statement (ii), the union of T1, T2 and the set containing (a-d) is logically inconsistent.  With this in place, we might offer a formal reconstruction of the argument for IOT, as follows:

(A Possible Reconstruction of the Argument)
1) For any instance of radical translation one must base oneself on observation sentences, and the stimulus meaning for the expressions proper to that community.

2) The meaning of a sentence or word is only intelligible in relation to the entirety of the sentences-words which compose a language.

3) For every theory of translation T1 which maps statements of the form s1 <> L1 = s2 <> L2 on the basis of observation sentences, there is a possible alternative theory T2 which has s3 <> L1 = s2 <> L2, and in which s1 and s3 refer to different objects.

4) If two terms refer to different things they have different meanings; synonymy implies sameness of reference.

5) Therefore, s1 and s3 are not synonymous.

6) Therefore, T1 and T2 are semantically incompatible, even though they both correspond equally as well to the observation statements and so to the data available by stimulus meaning.

7) Therefore, in theory, more than one possible translation, all equally adequate to the data rendered available by stimulus-meaning and to the totality of physical facts, and yet incompatible with regards to their reference-meaning, are possible.

8) Therefore, the data gathered by stimulus-meaning underdetermines any claims to semantic synonymy, insofar as the latter entails sameness of reference, i.e. UDT entails relative neutrality.

         At this point, one might wonder whether the thesis for the inscrutability of reference is over-hastily drawn. One could argue that what Quine takes to be an irremediable ambiguity resulting from the relative neutrality obtaining from surveying observation sentences might be nevertheless resolved upon further questioning. Specifically, if one could learn to ask the native more specific questions about the identity and determinate content of what he/she is speaking about, it is not clear why the ambiguity should persist. Quine in fact considers such a possibility, but thinks that nevertheless the inscrutability of reference persists:

     "It will perhaps be countered that there is no essential difficulty in spotting judgments of identity on the part of the jungle native, or even of a speechless animal. This is true enough for qualitative identity, better called resemblance. In an organism's susceptibility to the conditioning of responses we have plentiful criteria for his standards of resemblance of stimulations. But what is relevant to the preceding reflections is numerical identity. Two pointings may be pointings to a numerically identical rabbit, to numerically distinct rabbit parts, and to numerically distinct rabbit stages, the inscrutability lies not in resemblance, but in the anatomy of sentences. We could equate a native expression with any of the disparate English terms 'rabbit', 'rabbit stage', 'undetached rabbit part', etc, and still by compensatorily juggling the translation of numerical identity and associated particles preserve the conformity to stimulus meanings of occasion sentences."
(Quine, Word and Object, pp. 52-54)

         What Quine attempts to argue for in this rather cryptic passage is the following: the question about whether the native refers to the same object(s) as us depends on what, if anything, the native understands that is equivalent to our understanding of identity notions such as: is the very same thing as, or is identical with. But behavioral evidence does not decide this question. Imagine that the word squiggle is hypothesized as a candidate for expressing the notion of identity. One could utter Gavagai squiggle Gavagai? with the belief that if the native assents to my utterance he must be referring to a Rabbit as opposed to an undetached spatial part of a rabbit, or a temporal rabbit stage, etc. This would seem to follow because whereas the rabbit is one thing that remains identical from a time t1 to t2, a rabbit stage isn't. The same might hold for spatial parts, unless the rabbit was immobile. Of course, other candidates for reference might still persist, but the point would be that nevertheless there are ways to narrow down the ambiguity, and so that inscrutability may be resolved with sufficient effort.

            And yet, as far as the evidence goes, squiggle could mean identical with, is an undetached spatial part of the same extended whole as, is a temporal stage of the same enduring complex as, and various other iterations. Thus, for all we know, while the native could be assenting to the underlying belief in unified Rabbithood, he could still be referring to stages or parts, and a variety of iterations like the ones above. With this in place one might begin to wonder about the empirical constraint to stimulus meaning, which Quine thinks sets minimal conditions for translation, as we surmised above.

      The question would be whether the scope of data captured by the Quinean examples of radical translation truly captures the breadth of data relevant and available to the translator. This amounts to asking about whether stimulus meaning exhausts the relevant data for translation. In order to see why this is problematic for Quine, imagine the following scenario. It is at least not a priori ruled out that two expressions in a given language might be stimulus-synonymous. For the argument’s sake let us hypothesize that the interrogatives in Spanish Sombrilla? and Paraguas? are taken to be stimulus-synonymous. Furthermore, assume that a native Spanish speaker, looking to find the appropriate translation for these cases, soon discovers that the stimulus meaning for the English Umbrella? is stimulus-synonymous to both Sombrilla and Paraguas. According to Quine’s criteria, Umbrella could be translated accordingly by both terms, and there are no further grounds to decide upon this issue. Yet it is plainly obvious that such concerns by far delimit the scope of Quine’s thought experiment in a way that obviates empirical considerations taken by translators everywhere. For example, consider that the translator is deliberating on the abovementioned example in the process of translating a piece of poetry. Although determination of stimulus-meaning is part of the labor at stake, the translator must also, in deciding whether to use Sombrilla or Paraguas, pay attention to other salient factors, i.e. for example, the phonetic structure of the poem. It might be that translating Sombrilla for Umbrella allows the translator to preserve the rhyme-structure of the work, which would be destroyed otherwise, or preserve in it a case of alliteration in conjunction with other choices, in the process of conveying a particular idea, etc. Analogous examples could be given to show that stylistic decisions, while based on salient data available for the translator, are irreducible to stimulus-meaning. Although these considerations are not arguments against Quine’s thesis of UTD or IOR, they do provide a reminder of the restricted scope of his experiments.

    However, it turns out that the issue of competing expressions with stimulus-synonymy has more substantial consequences. To see why, it suffices to consider non-referent-synonymous expressions in two distinct languages, which would be assented / dissented to in all possible circumstances. These kinds of expressions are labeled by Soames stimulus-analytic sentences (Soames 2005, pp 234). For example, consider the English expression There have been dogs. It seems plausible enough to suggest that this is a sentence whose assent to or dissent from would bear little to no variance between speakers of the language, and further that assent to it would be ubiquitous across all instances, i.e. it is stimulus-analytic. The problem then emerges when we consider what we would take to be an obvious falsehood in the native language that is also stimulus-analytic. For example, ubiquitous assent to the interrogative Katamerai? in Jungle might actually mean This is the work of the omnipresent Sun-God! The problem is that, restricting ourselves to stimulus-meaning, we could fail to distinguish universally believed English truths from universally believed native falsehoods, and vice versa.

“This raises the possibility that two sentences might differ in meaning, even though utterances of them would generally convey the same information (and hence prompt the same assents or dissents) owing to the fact that utterances of one of the sentences generally would implicate a proposition that was part of the meaning of the other. In such cases, the difference in meaning between the two sentences would be all but invisible to Quine’s radical translator, and Quine’s constraints on the empirical adequacy of translation would allow the sentences to be assimilated to one another.” (Ibid, pp. 235)

     At this juncture, the weight of Quine’s thought experiment turns on the constriction to stimulus-meaning and observation sentences. The problems raised by considering stimulus-analytic sentences show not only that such a restriction might miss some relevant data for the task of translation, but that it can often lead to indistinguishing between semantically incompatible notions. Now, one could argue that this, far from being a limitation in Quine’s account, is actually a result of it: that he is precisely revealing the impossibility of inferring semantic determinacy from available data. However, this again turns on the assumption that we agree in that the constriction of data to stimulus-meaning does not obviate other relevant forms of evidence. As we have suggested above, stylistic decisions in translation include such considerations. The question of stimulus-analytic sentences which prompt expressions that are semantically incompatible, but functionally equivalent, suggests that assent or dissent is motivated by factors which exceed the strict truth-functional conditions of the sentential contents. In particular, conventional and conversational implicatures, and other Gricean categories come to mind. These are precisely the kind of background factors Quine looks to set aside in his notion of observation sentences, but how much it leaves out raises questions. As Soames puts it: “At some point, one must recognize the severe limitations he has imposed on himself, as well as the tentative and approximate character of his adequacy conditions on translation.” (Ibid. pp. 235) Additional evidential factors that he takes could amplify the scope of observational evidence include: situational features like the introduction of a word into a language (verbal definitions vs. ostensive illustrations), situations where individuals acquire competency in the use of the word (explanations vs. examples), spontaneous use of words without prompt (English speakers find it natural to use rabbit rather than rabbit-stage). There are all plausible criteria which could affect the translator’s job, and which amplify the scope of evidence relevantly. Nevertheless, it is not obvious that such considerations would alter the basic conclusion about indeterminacy.

     II – Behaviorism, Physicalism, Ontological Relativity

   At this stage, we might decide to call into question the reliance on observational evidence entailed in Quine’s endorsement of behaviorism. The latter allows him to proscribe from the relevant evidence considerations about beliefs, intentions, and all cognitive states; the contents of wishes and desires, and motivational states of the speakers; the contents of perceptual experiences and the relation of the latter to their environment, etc. All of these factors are not tractable through the salient behavioral evidence yielded by stimulus responses. 

     Yet as several commentators have noted, behaviorism is problematic. It is clear that in other domains non-observational facts come into play for supporting our theories and hypotheses, and Quine’s restriction to observationally salient data in stimulus responses leaves such factors out of the picture. Among others, Burge (2010) and Soames (2005) have pointed out that, in order for the indeterminacy argument to be compelling, Quine would need to provide an independent argument for behaviorism, which he does not do. Yet it is not clear how departure from behaviorism would help overcome the indeterminacy argued for by Quine, say, by a hypothetical inclusion of any of the abovementioned items into the set of relevant data. Some commentators, like Soames (2005), argue that aggregating facts about the neurophysiology of individuals does not intuitively help refute the indeterminacy thesis. Specifically, he doubts that the IOR may be resolved through facts about the anatomy of the subject, or information about the content of mental states. Let us pause on this issue for a moment.

      Soames calls to question the exclusion of these factors, insofar as the restriction to stimulus responses and observational evidence is supported by an endorsement of behaviorism that is itself not argued for. I just add to Soames that without a proper explication and justification for his behaviorism, precisely what kind of conclusions we should draw about the abovementioned items of data is up in the air. One possible reading is that Quine endorses an ontological behaviorism, that seeks to destroy the notion of representational content altogether, and so to claim not only that reference is ambiguous because of an epistemic limitation in observers, but that there is no determinate relation between words, mental states, and things that could clarify the concept of reference in terms of representational content[10]. Sometimes Soames seems to read Quine in this direction, for example, when he claims that, for Quine, “[T]he ordinary notions of meaning and reference are rejected as illegitimate pre-scientific concepts that have no place in a scientifically respectable description of the world... The problem in Quine’s view is not that we are in danger of forever remaining ignorant of the facts about meaning and reference. The problem is that there are no genuine facts to be ignorant off” (Soames 2005, pp 226) How are we to position this thesis alongside Quine’s conjoint commitment to metaphysical physicalism and semantic holism?

     Recall that Quine (1969) endorses ontological relativity, understood as the position according to which existence is to be the value of a variable, i.e. an argument for an existentially quantified true statement[11]. This is part of Quine’s inferentialist commitment which follows from the claim that empirical content undeterdetermines the choice of theory. An ontological disavowal of representational contents under this reading would entail that there are no true facts about reference to fulfill this role, i.e. one doesn’t quantify over ‘referents’, if by the latter we mean something that is supposed to inhere outside our ‘referring’ expressions. 

      Another way to make the same point is to say that reference is nonsensical except by taking it relatively to a background theory, never ‘absolutely’ or with regard to anything ‘external’, i.e. Quine’s position is that of a deflationary realism in which the objectivity of the world is thinly construed in terms of the holistic network of inferential relations that hold between expressions in a given language, bereft of all transcendent skyhooks. In that regard, Quine seeks to exemplify through the indeterminacy of translation and the inscrutability of reference the extent into which ontology is relative to background theoretical assumptions which are socially convened upon and so holistic in nature. As FØllesdal (1995) claims, “Quine, more than any other philosopher, has made us see the far reaching implications of the public nature of language.”[12]

     This reading creates a problem when attempting to reconcile behaviorism with Quine’s simultaneous endorsement of physicalism. If the notions of representational content and of reference have no value; why and how are scientific statements any different than any other, if at all? What grants scientific description, and our understanding of it, a genuine prerogative in adequately describing the determinate structure of the world, without ambiguity? That is, how is it that physics and only physics yields ‘true facts’ about what it existential quantifies? McDowell (1996), similarly to Quine, has claimed that deflationary standards for truth and ontology show that there is nothing more to the reality of beings or properties besides there being true statements about them. However, he thinks that there are many statements which we take to be true, and which are not intuitively part of natural-scientific discourse. Notably for McDowell, value-statements can be also said to be true or false, and do not transparently follow from truths about physics, i.e. they are not logical consequences of physics. It is even less obvious that mundane truths formulated in common language can be shown to be entailed by physics. In this regard, Soames (2005) reasonably claims that to believe that statements such as A car exists, or I own a blue car could be shown to be logical consequences of physical truths is, for the moment, an utterly speculative thesis which exceeds any evidential support made available by current physics. He proposes thus to read the determination of all truths by physics as one of mere (metaphysical) supervenience, as opposed to strict logical consequences. Whereas to construe a given fact q as a logical consequence of a physical fact p requires that q be deducible from p, supervenience only implies the weaker claim that a given entity q could not exist without p. Yet even with a weakened sense of supervenience, it is not clear where from the authority of physics derives, nor the specific relation it bears to other (presumed) truth-functional sentences. These controversies show that even in denying the valence of the concept of reference, problems remain with respect to the endorsement of physicalism. If Quine wants to deny that the notion of reference plays any part in current bona fide physics, and so that the latter need not remain tethered to it, he still needs to explain how it is that scientific discourse describes a mind independent world. Such an explanation would need to be epistemologically explanatory in showing how one can disambiguate between our possible descriptions of the world and the world itself. But a deflationary account which constraints realism to existential quantification seems difficult to reconcile with such a demand since, like McDowell suggests, all kinds of statements appear to be truth-apt which do not seem to be about physics, and which are not construed as consequences of the latter. And it is not clear that in the weakened sense of metaphysical/material supervenience, statements existentially affirming the valence of cars and other middle sized items can be taken to be true on virtue of lower level facts about non-observables, 'real patterns' (Dennett; Ladyman and Ross), or anything else. An account of the relationship between the semantic content of conventional statements and those of physics would be in order, even if some have argued that a physicalism construed around supervenience is empirically supported by current science[13]. On any account, ontological relativity coupled to ontological behaviorism would then run into problems when explaining the relationship between mind and world, beyond the constraints of language and social convention, in order to assert the determinability of a mind-independent world required by any realist account.  It is important to see that ontological behaviorism becomes of a piece with the inferentialist core, in entailing that there is nothing more to representational contents than propositional contents, while insisting that grasping the latter has nothing to do with finding out how concepts match some item in extra-experiential reality, and so nothing to do with reference. The representational ‘content’ of a proposition is taken to be nothing but the inferential relations into which it enters.

      As we saw above, standards for truth and falsity are socially convened upon, rather than anchored on a non-conceptual world by necessity[14]. At the same time, philosophy endows science the prerogative before the real. Thus the ‘totality of true facts’ which make up the world and which physics describes are simultaneously taken to be a matter of a rational pragmatics subordinated to social convention, and a matter of grasping correctly a determinately structured mind-independent reality. These two aspirations in Quine’s realism are not so easy to reconcile. On the one hand, behaviorism entails that there is nothing more to grasping a concept than to grasp its conditions for use, and the latter is simply to understand the inferential relations the concept can enter into, including which counterfactuals it can support in specified contexts. But this severely restricts Quine’s capacity to explain how physics in particular can relate to a mind independent world, since the truths of physical statements are, like those proper to any other discursive register, subjected to pragmatic convention. As Quine himself claims, the distinction between physical objects and other objects ends up being one of degree rather than kind: “As an empiricist, I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience [. . .] The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manage-able structure into the flux of experience.”As Brassier (2008) argues, this ultimately subordinates Quine’s realism to the pragmatic wager between assorted ideological operations and interests, in principle incapable of drawing a relation between competing discourses in terms of how they correctly relate to objects and facts in the world, independent of pragmatic strictures. At a loss for a delineation of the relation between concepts and objects, instrumentalism lurks to usurp Quine’s alleged commitment to scientific realism. Worse still, it might be argued that the failure to distinguish how thought describes being conflates the two, resulting in a kind of idealism. This is precisely what Badiou (2007) proposes, claiming that without explaining the distinction between fact and form, and so leaving the relation between the actual world and formal propositions obscure, one folds the two together. As a result, representation is conceived as a feedback loop, and epistemology becomes incapable of discerning its discursive register from what it purportedly describes. Brassier (2008) writes: “Thus in a surprising empiricist mimesis of the serpent of absolute knowledge swallowing its own tail, naturalized epistemology seeks to construct a virtuous circle wherein congruence between fact and form is explained through the loop whereby representation is grounded in fact and fact is accounted for by representation.[15]” Given that representational is itself accounted in terms of semantic content, the problem becomes clearer. Weakening representational contents to propositional inferential relations whose truths are convened upon socially finally amounts to disintegrating the link to the empirical world that the naturalist claims science is capable of describing. This is to deny that representational contents may bear any ontological status, and to accept that our scientific realism be reduced to the pragmatic prescription of physicalism.

     Furthermore, Quine would owe us an explanation of what the endeavors of those special sciences that make use of the notion of representational content in terms of referential relations are talking about, as part of those sciences in which the ‘intentional stance’ remains.  Burge (2010) for example describes how perceptual psychology examines mechanisms for pre-linguistic objective individuation carried out by our sensory organs, so that representation is causally anchored in relation to environmental stimuli. Are we to simply render such talk derivative, unscientific in tenor, or its postulates epiphenomenal and thus with no proper ontological valence?  We shall say more about Burge below, but we should underline that it is clear that Quine would need of an additional argument to disavow representational content simpliter. Since it is the eviction of the latter which confines objective individuation to linguistic behavior, it follows that without such an argument, the annihilation of the referential relation between words and things is not transparently supported by the demands of a realist physicalism.

      In response to this, Quine could claim that physicalism can be rendered compatible with the wholesale destitution of representational content, along the lines suggested above: for example, if one endorses a form of physicalist eliminativism, in which relations between mind and world may be reduced to phenomena proper to fundamental physics. Quine (1953) advocated this position, as conceived through the distinction between the scientific descriptions of basic physical structure (illata), and posterior theoretical re-descriptions of the former (abstracta). The basic idea then was that the former substructure supports the supervenience of higher-order structure back into basic physical relations between elementary particles. As Ladyman and Ross (2009) point out, however, this view rests on the ‘Democritean faith’, refuted by contemporary science, that eventually it will be possible to decompose everything into elementary particles and relations among them, through fundamental physics. They argue that current physics is ambivalent with regard to the ontological status of unobservables, and so that reductionism is not motivated by present science. In addition, this ‘faith’ wouldn’t be easily palliated even if science did motivate such a reduction, since, given Quine’s endorsement of ontological relativity, the endowment granted to physics is in principle a pragmatic matter, and so a position that is prescribed rather than explained.  Thus, even if reductionism within science were sound, it would still be controversial whether only physical phenomena should be granted ontological status.

        On any account, it is not clear how physicalism and behaviorism are rendered compatible if Quine endorses an ontological behaviorism. A complete disavowal of representational contents and reference seems to entail the liquidation of the epistemological relation between mind and world, and so of knowledge understood (at least partly) as the objective representation of reality. Here it is not only translation and so knowledge of what others mean when they speak that leaves us in a blackbox with respect to other languages and cultures. More generally, the relationship between thought, language, and the world is rendered obscure. Without a clarification of how representation admits purchase on being, it is not even clear how any theoretical posits are capable of gaining traction on phenomena. We might conclude, therefore, that without an epistemological account of how thought represents the world it is difficult to find motivation for Quine’s endorsement of scientism.

        Alternatively, one may suggest that Quine advocates a form of epistemological behaviorism. Under such a reading, there may be facts about reference that, for contingent limitations, we are just incapable of knowing. Thus, even if there are genuine representational relations between mind and world, and if words and things stand in referential relations too, the problem is that salient evidence undermines our capacity to know of them. Representational contents would be said to exist, insofar as mental states and perceptual occasions are not merely linguistically individuated posits or conventionally accepted ‘true statements’, but determinate items in relation to the external world. The problem here would be fundamentally epistemological, inasmuch as we must accept ignorance on ontological commitments, mental states, and the representational contents that the latter bear, when confronted by the limitations of observational evidence. This is a more moderate reading of Quine’s position, but does it fare any better? Even on this reading, it remains unclear why enquiry into the representational contents of our mental states should prove fruitless, i.e. incapable of resolving the IOR. Soames (2005) seems amenable to Quine’s skepticism, and on this regard he comes closer to reading Quine as an epistemological behaviorist: “We can no more read off the contents of a person’s words from physiological claims about neurons than we can read off the contents of his words from statements about the noises he makes in certain environments.” (Ibid, pp, 246) But why should this follow? Why should we accept that an enquiry into the internal constitution of mental states and their contents should be incapable of informing us about the ontological commitments of others, and the items to which their expressions refer, seeing that at least some of them do refer, after all?  On this account, Burge (2010) in particular has raised a fundamental point of contention against Quine’s behaviorist externalism by proposing an epistemological externalism of his own, where objective representational content begins in fundamental instances of perceptual individuation causally relating environmental stimuli to our sensory organs. Advocating study into the science of perceptual psychology, such a position could entail, Burge suggests, that primitive conditions for spatial individuation constrain higher-order linguistic reference. As a result, we would be capable of successfully resolving the IOR through the amplification of our admissible data, since the former now appears artificially restrictive by excluding precisely the kind of empirical insight that would allow the relevant disambiguation for the translator. Burge agues as follows:

    “[Quine] is right in that it does not follow from utterances that occur when and only when rabbits or rabbit facsimiles occur that the utterer mentions rabbits. But he just assumes that the only relevant evidential consideration is the history of black-box utterances in the presence of rabbits. He thinks that if this evidence does not warrant unique attribution of a referent or a meaning, such attribution is gratuitous… Quine does not confront the natural view that the semantics of language is initially determined by perception. He does not consider how perceptual representational content- hence perceptual singular reference and perceptual attribution- are established.” (Burge, 2010, pp. 214-215)

    On this account, which we might deem ‘neo-Aristotelian’ in spirit, the relationship between words and things would be antedated by a more primitive relation between mental states and the world. Since the latter is rendered unambiguously determinate, relative to our perceptual faculties in relation to environmental stimuli, and tractable through scientific investigation, Burge thinks that Quine would have to admit that the supplementation of data by such information could restrict IOR, if not eliminate it. Although I am inclined to agree with Quine in that it is not clear that such an investigation could resolve the IOR, at least, he cannot dismiss the import of representational content by endorsing behaviorism without further argument.

    A second possibility once again brings us back to eliminativism, but this time one which would preserve the notion of knowledge of the external world while dispensing of representational contents. For example, an epistemological account tethered to neurophysiology could explain how the interaction between the environment and the brain does not make appeal to anything like representational contents, even if it describes a robust interaction between a sapient being and its exteriority. If Quine wants to take the eliminativist route in this regard, and claim that knowledge of the world is to be cashed out in terms other than representational contents, other questions are left pending[16]. As we saw above, Soames (2005) convincingly argues that physicalism in Quine must be understood in terms of metaphysical supervenience[17]. Yet Kim (2010) for instance argues that functionally individuated psychological properties which retain intentional content must be ‘functionalized’ redescriptions of those physical properties with which they are metaphysically identical, or else the local supervenience of the psychological on the physical fails. This failure entails dualism, epiphenomenalism about mental properties, or the view that a singular event can have two causes, a mental and a physical one[18]. Without reinforcing how precisely psychological-kinds which are said to have representational content supervene on non-representational physical terms, it becomes unclear how the former can be brushed off from having any epistemological import in favor of behaviorism. On any account, denying that representational content may disambiguate about ontological commitments, and so overcome the epistemic limitations yielded by observational data, leaves in the dark the relation between physics and the ‘special sciences’, and specifically perceptual psychology. Moreover, it would still not be clear how construing the epistemic relation between mind and world in non-representational interactions between organism and environment couldn't help resolve the indeterminacy thesis. Nevertheless, we should always remember that Quine transfers the burden of proof by challenging his opponents to find a supplementary fact about the world which would render the inscrutability of reference ineffectual. Burge’s contention is that in particular the science of perceptual psychology can rise to this challenge. Other philosophers of mind advocate alternative candidates to fulfill this promise. Whether they do or don’t exceeds the scope of this paper.

      In addition, some of the problems that appeared by reading Quine as an ontological behaviorist, reemerge in reading him as an epistemological behaviorist. With regards to the endorsement of physicalism, it is unclear how scientific discourse qua communicational practice, subject to the behaviorist constraint to observational data, relates to other forms of communication and discourse. Is there no inscrutability with regards to the facts of physics, like when, for example, I think to understand what a scientist tells me when he describes the behavior of an electron or some other non-observable cause? Are theoretical posits intractable to behavioral evidence equally susceptible to the inscrutability of reference? The latter is a question which brings to mind Quine’s endorsement of the real ontological status of abstract objects, and so the obscure relation between the latter and observable, concrete physical particulars[19]. If the inscrutability of reference holds even at the sub-observational level, so that even the statements advanced by physics leave reference indeterminate, then Quine’s endorsement of physicalism would render the consensus in scientific community potentially indifferent to the true facts of the matter. But this seems problematic, since it is said that physics describes the world as it is, and given semantic incompatibility between theories, extending indeterminacy to physics would beg the question about whose physics adequately describes the world, and how do we know this? Postulating an ‘ideal physics’ doesn’t quite help, since the question repeats itself in having to clarify the relation between our actual physics, and the ideal physics in exception to the pitfalls of the former. If the UTD applies to physics, then subjecting the epistemic purchase of actual physics to stimulus meaning would seem make Quine’s behaviorism conducive to a kind of radical agnosticism about reference for all intersubjective communication, and not just cases of ‘radical translation’. However, then it becomes difficult to see how such a view could amount to a proper scientific realism, since all of a sudden ontological ambiguity affects even intra-linguistic or intra-theoretical communication. Quine on this reading seems one short step from endorsing full-blown ontological relativism about the world, and not just ontological relativity about discourse, as a result of the behaviorist restriction to stimulus meaning, and the epistemic gulf opened by the inscrutability of reference. 

    If, on the other hand, IOR doesn’t hold at the sub-perceptual level, then it is not clear why the inscrutability yielded through communication in non-scientific description couldn´t be clarified through determinate, fundamental physical facts.  Soames (2005), for example, seems to think that physicalism would entail the disambiguation of inscrutability if we understand by the former the thesis that everything that is true must supervene on physical truths.

         “Whatever any of us means by rabbit, it is natural to suppose that our meaning what we do depends ultimately on physical facts. For example, we may ask whether a physically identical twin- someone (in a physically identical possible world-state) whose utterances, behavior, brain states, causal and historical relations to the environment, and interactions with other speakers…completely and exactly match mine- could mean by ‘rabbit’ what I actually mean by, say ‘undetached rabbit part’. It seems to me that the answer to this question must be ‘No’, for the very same reasons that physicalism itself seems acceptable on this interpretation.” (Soames, 2005, pp. 251)

      Although Soames separates Quine’s behaviorism from his physicalism and focuses on the latter, I think that, on the contrary, consideration of the former yields reasons to doubt the plausibility of endorsing the latter. This follows even if Soames is right in saying that it is not clear why the IOR persists under such a physicalism. If one additionally casts doubts upon the notion of representational contents, it seems on the other hand difficult to understand how physics stands in relation to the IOR. Since it is physics that provides knowledge of the facts underlying the possibility of there being equally adequate but incompatible theories of translation and so incompatible ontological commitments, Quine cannot obviate the task of describing how physics yields determinate knowledge of a mind-independent world, relative to which sentential utterances are rendered ontologically ambiguous or at the very least epistemologically foreclosed.

         Finally, if Quine does not completely eliminate the epistemic purchase of representational contents in tethering the latter to physics, he either needs to explain how such contents don’t resolve the inscrutability of reference, or else claim how they constitute an exception. That is, if physics relates to the world beyond the constraints of convention, and it yields knowledge of such a world, how does it escape the inscrutability of reference, if at all? The former option leads into the kinds of problems we suggested above, making it problematic to discern whose physics is to be championed. The latter option of claiming physics is in exception, renders scientific description and communication metaphysically determined and unambiguous, while leaving other descriptive registers irremediably affected by the IOR, and so subject to the UTD. Thus, Quine could claim that physicalism supports IOT and the UTD insofar as all non-physical linguistic utterances remain referentially ambiguous. At the same time, he can claim that physics, and only physics, gives communicable knowledge about the real, and is not subject to IOR. Finally, the ontological ambiguity presented by IOR would be said to be supported by the plurality of possible incompatible theories while admitting of determinate physical facts described unambiguously by science. As we have seen, given the endorsement of ontological relativity, this prerogative granted to science cannot but be prescriptive in nature. Whether this constitutes a sufficient ground for a full blown philosophical realism is an open question, although I remain skeptical for reasons I have been arguing. If Quine wants to restrict realism to knowledge of unobservables or abstract principles not registered through SM, and so not subject to the UTD, he would need to explain why a supplementation of data by fundamental physical facts couldn’t clarify the entirety of statements that supervene on physical facts. A successful resolution to the quandaries brought by Quine’s behaviorism, physicalism, and ontological relativity would entail showing show that the UTD and IOR hold, while not sacrificing the valence of physical knowledge. Even more, it would need to render the UTD relative to the data yielded by physics in particular. This would be to simultaneously endorse the following two conditions without tension:

(Physicalism)
All genuine truths (facts) are supervene on physical truths.

(The underdetermination of translation by physics)

 Translation is not determined by the set of all physical truths (facts), known and unknown. For any pair of languages and theories of translation, incompatible with T, that accord equally well with all physical truths.

     As we have seen, however, this is precisely what Quine’s simultaneous endorsement of behaviorism and physicalism renders problematic. Whether these can be reconciled or not lies outside the scope of the present study, and is reserved for another occasion.

Bibliography

·         Badiou, Alain, The Concept of Model, translated by Z.L Fraser and Tzuchien Tho, re: press, 2007.

·         Brassier, Ray. Badiou’s Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics, in Angelaki 10, 2005.

·         Brandom, Robert, Making it Explicit, Harvard University Press, 1998.

·         Burge, Tyler, The Origins of Objectivity, Oxford Press, 2010.

·         Kim, Jaegwon, Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind, Oxford University Press,  2010.

·         Ladyman, James & Ross, Don, Everything Must Go, Oxford University Press, 2009.

·         McDowell, Mind and World, Harvard University Press, 1996.

·         Orenstein, Alex, W.V Quine, Princeton University Press, 2002.

·         Quine, W.V. Whither Physical Objects?, from R. S. Cohen, P. K. Feyarabend and M. W.
Wartofsky (eds.) Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos, Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1976.

·         Quine, W.V. Theories and Things, London: Belknap Press, 1981.

·         Quine, W.V. Naturalism; Or, Living Within One's Means. Dialectica 49, 1995.

·         Quine, W.V, Word and Object, MIT Press, 1964.

·         Quine, W.V, Ontological Relativity, Columbia University Press, 1977.

·         Soames, Scott, Philosophical Analysis in the 20^th Century: Volume 2, Princeton University Press. 2005. 

·         Follesdal, Dagfinn, In what Sense is Language Public?, in On Quine, P. Lombardi and M.Santambogia (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

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[1] These three terms will be defined technically below.

[2] Quine, W.V, Reply to Anthony, in Knowledge, Language, and Logic, pp. 419.

[3] In this regard, it should become obvious that Quine’s position is continuous with Davidson, and more crucially Wilfrid Sellars, in claiming that perception is a conceptual achievement, insofar as it involves the exertion of judgment in order to yield determinate content. Perception is not self-evidential, and brute sensation is epistemically inert, i.e. sensibilia do not constitute a ubiquitous layer of pre-conceptual determinate content, available for analysis. This will turn out to be a crucial point of contention for thinkers such a Burge (2010).  See Sellars Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956)

[4] We shall not be concerned in this paper in assessing whether Soames' reading of Quine does the latter justice. We shall simply assume, for the moment, that his reconstructions are cogent and consistent with Quine's views.

[5] SOAMES, Scott, Philosophical Analysis in the 20^th Century: Volume 2, Princeton University Press,  pp. 227

[6] Another set of questions concerns the privilege accorded to observation in Quine’s account. Is the priority given to sight and observation merely arbitrary, so that similar example could in principle follow from experiments constrained to other sense-capacities? If not, then Quine would need a separate argument to show why only observation can yield the kind of data needed for translation.

[7] Quine, In Pursuit of Truth, Harvard University Press, pp 47-48

[8] QUINE, W.V, Speaking of Objects, in Quintessence, 91-91.

[9] Soames, 2005, pp. 240.

[10] Of course, Quine could disavow reference without necessarily disavowing ‘representational contents’, i.e. if one somehow construes the latter as high-order iterations of physical facts for which the concept of reference would have no use. I consider this possibility below. We should just keep in mind that here we use representational contents, in the sense in which the latter are determined by a relation to the world, and thus that sentences are tethered to such contents.

[11] I owe this formulation to Peter Wolfendale, who in his excellent (unpublished) Essay on Transcendental Realism provides a brief but elegant account of Quine (and other’s) positions.

[12] FOLLESDAL, Dagfinn, “In what Sense is Language Public?”, in On Quine, P. Lombardi and M.Santambogia (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

[13] See Ladyman & Ross (2007), Chapter 4.

[14] In this regard, Quine famously advocates an extensionalist approach to ontology that reduces reference to being the extension of a concept. According to Quine, intensional determinants are what remains of Aristotelian essences, and are logically opaque instead. Reference in the sense of a relation to a mind independent reality would thus remain tethered to the latter notion, which exceeds the formal transparency of a purely extensional ontology.

[15] Brassier, 2008, pp. 139.

[16] This would not be strictly analogous to the earlier ontological behaviorism, since it could entail the position that internal mental states do relate to the world objectively, but do not require postulating anything like representational contents, or psychological kinds.

[17] Soames, 2005, pp. 256-257.

[18] Marras (2000) shows that this argument generalizes over the other special sciences as well.

[19] Quine, W. 1964. Ontological Reduction and the World of Numbers, The Journal of Philosophy 61: 209-1