Dagfinn Føllesdal’s Photographic Plates and The Point of Naturalized Epistemology

Abstract

This focusses on a certain theme of the 1986 closed conference at Stanford featuring Quine, Davidson, Føllesdal and Dreben, a transcript entitled the ‘Stanford Conversation’ having just been released: the contrast between traditional epistemology and Quine’s naturalized epistemology. A central fixture of the latter is the notion of stimulus meaning. Davidson objects to the notion repeatedly and vehemently, finding it unacceptably private or at least idiosyncratic, and indeed urging that it is of no epistemic or semantic relevance. On the contrary, Davidson contends, what is needed for both epistemology and semantics are simply the ordinary, public objects of reference, at least in typical cases. In opposition to Davidson, Føllesdal makes an interesting counter-suggestion to Quine’s stimulus meaning. It construes observation sentences as having meaning-like properties which are publicly available, yet, unlike the distal items insisted on by Davidson, they are still proximate. I generalize and sharpen Føllesdal’s suggestion, in such a way as to answer the reservations that Quine himself expressed. Meanwhile Dreben and Quine urge that, so far as one has naturalized epistemology firmly in mind, Davidson’s alternative is simply not available, not least because it seems for all the world to presuppose reference. I stress this.