Word and Object is divided into seven chapters: 1) "Language and Truth," 2) "Translation and Memory," 3) "The Ontogenesis

of Reference," 4) "Vagaries of Reference," 5) "Regimentation," 6) "Flight from Intension," and 7) "Ontic Decision." Chapter I is concerned with the role that stimulus-response mechanisms may play in the acquisition of language. Chapter I critically examines the theory that the fundamental purpose of language is to describe our sensory perceptions of the world. Chapter I also questions the theory that the fundamental purpose of language is to describe how physical or abstract objects are related to reality. Chapter II describes language as a system of dispositions to perform verbal behavior. Chapter II also explains how sentences may demonstrate synonymity of stimulus-meaning, and describes how the truth-functions of sentences may be translated. Chapter II also questions the validity of the distinction between analytic and synthetic sentences, and describes the causes of failure to perceive indeterminacy of translation. Chapter III is concerned with the distinction between singular and general terms, and asserts that the distinction between singular and general terms is not based on how they are used to refer to objects, but on how they are used in predication (i.e. how they are used to assert something about the subject of a sentence or proposition). Chapter IV explains how vagueness of the terms of a sentence or proposition may cause that sentence or proposition to have referential opacity. Chapter V describes how freedom of variables involving the terms which are found within a sentence may cause the sentence to have referential opacity. Chapter VI discusses the relation between propositions and meanings, and the relation between propositions and eternal sentences. Chapter VII describes how 'semantic ascent' may lead us from a concern with objects to a concern with words. Chapter VII also explains how this strategy may enable us to avoid being confined to examining words as objects or objects as words. Chapter VII also questions the distinction between Nominalism (the theory that there are no abstract or universal objects) and Realism (the theory that abstract or universal objects are real and that abstract or universal objects exist independently of our perceptions of them). According to Quine, the acquisition of language is a process of conditioning the performance of verbal behavior. Words for concrete or abstract objects may be learned by a process of reinforcement and extinction, whereby the meaning of words may become more clearly understood. Quine argues that the meaning of a sentence as a stimulus to verbal behavior is defined by what type of response it arouses in the listener or reader. A sentence may have an affirmative stimulus-meaning if it prompts a response of assent in the listener or reader. A sentence may have a negative stimulus-meaning if it prompts a response of dissent in the listener or reader. Quine distinguishes between the functions of two kinds of sentences: 1) 'occasion sentences' (which assert something about a present or temporary occasion), and 2) 'standing sentences'
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(which assert something about a more permanent situation). According to Quine, the response to 'occasion sentences' may depend on prompting by simultaneous stimulation, but the response to 'standing sentences' may occur without prompting by simultaneous stimulation. Quine also defines 'observation sentences' as standing sentences whose meanings are less susceptible than occasion sentences to the influence of intrusive information. While occasion sentences may have considerable variability of stimulus-meaning for various listeners or readers, observation sentences may have relative stability of meaning for various listeners or readers. Quine explains that 'occasion sentences' may be synonymous with each other if they have the same stimulus-meaning. The stimulus-meaning of an occasion sentence may be increased by lengthening its modulus of stimulation, or may be decreased by shortening its modulus of stimulation. The verbal responses to stimulus-meanings may be accessible to translation. 'Radical translation' of an occasion sentence may depend on the sentence's having the same stimulusmeaning in one language as in another. Indeterminacy of translation may occur if there is variability of a sentences stimulus-meaning between one language and another. According to Quine, singular or general terms may be concrete or abstract, simple or compound, absolute or relative, definite or indefinite. Singular terms may refer to single objects, while general terms may refer to multiple objects. General terms may have divided reference, in that they may refer to more than one object. However, Quine argues that the distinction between singular and general terms may be based on how they are used to construct sentences, rather than on how they are used to refer to objects. A general term may be predicated of a singular term (e.g. the general term "satellite of the earth" may be predicated of the singular term "the moon" in the sentence "the moon is a satellite of the earth"). At the same time, general terms may be converted into singular terms by demonstrative prefixes such as "this" or "that," as in "this sugar," or "that water." Quine explains that if a singular term is used to refer to a person or thing, then sentence constructions which maintain the same referential use of that term have 'referential transparency.' If a singular term is used to refer to a person or thing, then sentence constructions which interrupt or discontinue the previous referential use of that term have 'referential opacity.' Thus, in a referentially-transparent sentence construction, a term which refers to an object may be replaced by a codesignative term (i.e. a term which refers to the same object), without changing the truth-value of the sentence. In a referentially-opaque sentence construction, however, the replacement of a term by a codesignative or coextensive term may often change the truth-value of the sentence. Quine describes 'eternal sentences' as standing sentences whose truth-values remain constant over time, and whose truth-values remain constant from speaker to speaker.1 Non-eternal sentences are statements whose truth-values may change over a period of time, or whose truth-values may change from speaker to speaker. Standing sentences may be eternal or noneternal. Quine explains that the stimulus-meanings of eternal sentences may be propositions, and that synonymous eternal sentences may express identical propositions. Rather than describing
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propositions as abstract concepts, or as objects of propositional attitudes, Quine describes propositions as meanings of eternal sentences. Quine argues that it is not necessary for propositions to function as vehicles of truth for eternal sentences, because eternal sentences may express their own truth. Propositional abstraction may thus be an unnecessary philosophical strategy.

Quines Observation Sentences: An Interpretation Abstract The following essay is by and large an attempt to understand the centrality of W. V. O. Quines notion of observation sentences to his epistemology. It shall do so by examining Quines notion of the observation sentence within his own writings, but also by comparative analysis with the work of Richard Rorty. It considers Rortys suspicion about what Quines work presumes about human inquiry at the end of the day. The argument presented here is that Rortys attack on Quines Holism misconstrues the role the physiological component plays in Quines thesis of ontological relativity, and that this in turn influences Rorty to attack what he thinks is Quines preferred Physicalism. I hope to show, with an answer to the latter, that Rorty misunderstands Quines overall project, Physicalism and all; and, perhaps more importantly, that all roads in these problems of Rortys with Quine lead to the importance of the observation sentence as concept. When one reads W. V. Quine on human knowledge, and reads of neural input, sensory receptors and so on, one may think a man has lost the plot. Questions abound: Why the psycho-physiological phrases? In what way can an explanation of human knowing invoke terms and phrases of physiology and still remain in line with the spirit of epistemology? Put simply, how do such phrases i.e. how does Physiology in Quines work relate to how and what he thinks we can know? I should like in what follows to answer this question by appealing to what seems central to Quines epistemology, and thus helpful for understanding the role of his sometimes physiologically-imbued language. This is Quines notion of observation sentences. As a result, I hope to indirectly shed light on the reasons for the aforementioned physiological aspect to Quines thought. But, more directly and more importantly, I hope to present an account of the unique basis upon which Quine builds his epistemology. Doing this, however, will mean presenting a view that misses the particularity of and motivations behind the Quinean approach to human knowledge I find such a view in Richard Rorty. I shall argue that Rorty misses the overall intent of Quine by lack of consideration of Quines philosophical project, and by misinterpreting the role physiology and, particularly, observation sentences have within his Holism. Attempting to amend Rortys interpretation shall mean exposing the nuance of Quines position, which is the main goal of the discussion. The following paper, then, divides into four roughly equal sections: (i) an overview first of Quines background and beliefs, so as to give (ii) an introduction to the notion of observation sentences; (iii) a consideration of Rortys problem with Quine; and (iv) a response to Rorty in the Quinean vein which makes use and further clarification of observation sentences. The gross systematicity and unity of Quines work may sometimes implicate me in thinking through Quines thought without direct reference to his words; thus criticism cannot be more welcome on that front. The details I quote here anyway shall pertain primarily to the matter at hand, which is about the entrance into the Quinean system of epistemology, not so much the systems consequences. But as the man says let truth prevail, come what may. I Quines reasons for observation sentences can be explained historically. They are the result of a certain hangover in analytic philosophy that had its members dealing with the problem of
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error, which it had inherited from modern philosophy, through a reconciliation of our scientific concepts of mind and nature, mind and matter. Up to that point, the concept of mind had developed by its own dialectic: it had made the Kantian move of seeing itself as active contributor to its knowledge of the world, having gone beyond the empiricists meagre construal of it as a passive piece of flesh onto which knowledge impressed itself. But, in irony, the analysts by whom we know the foregoing tradition became only stronger empiricists about knowledge. And it was due, it seems, to a particular penchant for scientific knowledge, which served some as a method for epistemic certainty and others as a method for constructing an account of how knowledge could relate to the world, certainty falling where it may (a systematic integration of our scientific concepts of mind and nature). Quine describes Carnap, his influence, as adopting the second method. Carnap had run the gamut of Phenomenalism, which locates knowledge completely in the appearance of the senses, and in the process made mind merely a unit that has perception. But as is customary of Phenomenalism this put the matter of nature in Carnaps analysis on the same footing as Russells sense-data, a throwback to the first method, which uses science to find certainty in the end, or goal, of philosophy. And Quine is reluctant to do this, not because the method feigns to pursue certainty, but because of his common sense about human experience, an experience he thinks has an element that does not waver in its development from childhood to adulthood. For nature, as a child experiences, is not composed of tiny sensible bits, but of physical objects whose bodies we encounter. The element in question, then, is the primacy of objects in the field of experience. Such is Quines appeal, past Carnap, to Physicalism. And as we will see, this basic tenet that Quine takes into his philosophical endeavors guides them at their core. In it is his agenda and epistemological motivation for observation sentences, because Physicalism for Quine, as a belief about the fundamentally physical makeup of what we experience, entails for him adopting a viewpoint of Naturalism, which pursues the project of Carnaps rational reconstruction of knowledge thus: as a rational reconstruction of the individuals and/or the races actual acquisition of a responsible theory of the external world. It address[es] the question how we, physical denizens of the physical world, can have projected our scientific theory of that whole world from our meagre contact with it: from the mere impacts of rays and particles on our surfaces. I emphasize Quines confidence (actual) in Naturalism here because it is my conceit that the latter exists for Quine as a theory that is fundamentally a matter of fact, because it cannot operate, that is explain what it assumes as its ontology, without constant recourse to nature, that is the place of facts, the empirical, etc. for justification. This seems to smack of redundancy saying our theory about physical things cannot explain them except by talking about the physical. But it seems to be what people lose sight of with Quine; moreover, it seems to me to be what we will see Rorty miss in Quine. Rorty will catch Quine here and think all the justification we need is in the talk of objects, and nothing to do with the objects themselves. Rorty would skirt Naturalism in this sense, or call it something else. But Naturalisms heed, in tandem with Physicalism, is that we would not have talk of physical objects without there being physical objects that is, without the mediating role of the physiology that keys us in to the physical. This would constitute Quines appeal to the physical as the basic place for justification. The point may seem uninteresting to Rorty at this point, which may then just constitute an impasse between the two; but Quine, as he says, is

interested in a responsible theory of the world: responsible in that it countenances as its objects only those which have their footing in the physical world. But, to catch our bearings, let us summarize then the key points of Quines background, and move into understanding his motivation for observation sentences. Eve Gaudets summary, I think, merits full quotation: A naturalist is a species of robust realist, one who accepts our experiences of nature as experiences of the real. A physicalist accepts the natural world as physicists characterize it. An empiricist believes that the only evidence there can be for anything, hence the only basis for holding any belief, lies in experience. For one who, like Quine, is an empiricist, a naturalist, and a physicalist all at once, nature is the realm of facts, physics determines what nature actually consists in, and the empirical sets the limits to what reasons we can legitimately have for accepting the physicists account of nature. What we can know on Quines view will ultimately be located in nature, the reality of which we grant as only that which, at bottom, follows the dictates of Physics. But how we can know this reality along with the degree to which we can know it is a mission for empirical investigation. And for Quine, observation sentences fall within the empirical domain here as the means for the mission. To come round full circle from the beginning of the discussion, then, observation sentences for Quine shall be evoked for the task of understanding mans epistemological relationship to the physical world around him for seeing the sense in which humans have integrated with the world. This sense of integration is, I think, worth keeping in mind as the impetus that keeps Quine a naturalist in his account of human knowing. So in the next section, after a further description of the observation sentence, we will do best to approach the papers initial question of how to construe Quines physiology parlance in light of observation sentences, his wedge into the with this sense of integration in mind, since Rortys complaint of Quine, which follows in the third section, appears to lose sight of this. II Observation sentences are the verbal reports of what we perceive in experience. They are, in a way, Quines version of the analysts old dream, the sentential endeavor to extracting human knowledge from sense-data. But observation sentences in Quines work boast a basic air in their genesis, or story, and in their structure. They lead Quine into depicting an account of human, scientific knowledge that is primitive in two ways: on the one hand, they begin from the basic points of contact humans have with the world as children; on the other, they are actuated and governed by a neuro-physical basis in perception. At their most primitive, observation sentences are the human counterparts of birdcalls and apes cries. They are inseparable on this count from terrestrial behavior, and thus have behavior as their vehicle for expression. The behavior of interest to Quine is the kind that leads to our scientific theory of the world, and it is formed from the first day we witness an occasion and utter a report about it: It is milk, It is raining, the basic stuff. Observation sentences, therefore, are occasion sentences true on some occasions, false on others. Furthermore, they report intersubjectively observable situations.
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What determines the truth and falsity of them, according to Quine, is their intersubjective status. Consider a language community, composed of new and experienced users; the fact that we have a community here at all, let alone experienced users, means that communication takes place. Experienced users serve as arbiters for the passing down of language proficiency to those younger users. According to Quine, we hypothesize that an element of human empathy accounts for this: the adults validate the childs verbal reaction to the occasion with praise or correction, according to whether they would issue the same associative linguistic reaction, and (usually) the child catches on. Language learning occurs this way, not because Quine says so, but because learning says so: In psychology one may or may not be a behaviorist, but in linguistics one has no choice. Thus the behaviorist approach is mandatory to Quine if ones goal is to construct a theory of the world based on the relationship we observers have to its physical reality: this is because, according to Quine, what we have with the observation sentences of language is an interface that best represents our cognitive relationship to the world. Because of his Naturalism, Quine believes we are physical denizens of a physical world, and that our experience of that world is, given the hitherto unchallenged status of Physics, thus our experience what is real. And observation sentences, for him, figure in depicting this picture best because they are the result of the physical world impinging on our physical being. But here is where the physiology starts, a lot of which Quine takes for granted since it is accords with the tenets of physical science; as we will see, his point is not to emphasize that our human physiology is the only way of conceiving knowledge, but to countenance what kind of normative theory of the world it commits us to if we accept it. We learn, albeit without much reflection, to associate certain states of affairs with certain stimuli. Of course, we do not see stimuli when the rain is falling. We just see falling rain. Stimuli key the phenomenal aspect of empirical events, at their most micro-physical level, into the appropriate range of receptors built into human sense. That they are built into our senses is a tenet of Physicalism (of the Physics of the body); but that this keying actually obtains in the physical world is a tenet, for Quine, of experience and common sense, because for Quine the ever constant triggering of these receptors and evidence of this theory gets cashed out in the fact that we unreflectively assent or dissent to most occasion sentences when they are presented to us. In an instant, I can know if it is raining within three feet of me or not, because through a life of conditioning via the stimulation of my sensory receptors I have come to associate a certain range of stimulations to stand for a state of affairs that is linguistically expressed as It is raining or Rain or Lo, Rain. This partially explains why Quine will sometimes say that the heart of scientific, empirical knowing is the ability to predict episodes of further stimulations: because if observation sentences form the bedrock of our theoretical means, they will ensure that our guesses about events in nature will, at bottom, just be guesses about how we will be stimulated. Observation sentences, then, key us physical beings into our physical world, since they employ the means for constructing a scientific theory of that world, a theory we can call responsible since its means the observation sentences cannot exist without a foothold in the physical world, that is, without having content for the theorys construction. With this definition under our belt, then, we turn to Rorty. III

In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty evokes Quine as an important philosopher for the reason that he helps us out of modern philosophys obsession with a certain mind-reality process of justification. Rorty reads into Quine the thesis that justification is not a matter of a special relation between ideas (or words) and objects, but of conversation, or social practice. According to Rorty this leads Quine to a thoroughgoing doctrine of Holism, of the interconnectedness, about what we say and what there is. But Rorty thinks Quine is ultimately led back into the very problems the former thinks philosophy would do best to jettison, namely the Kantian intuition-concept distinction. He thinks Quine still harbors this dichotomy since the latter sometimes invokes a stimuli-posit/postulate distinction. For Rorty both these distinctions, in their various guises in the past, have led to talk about ourselves and the world in a way that usually has engendered a dualistic ontology that tacitly assumed these entities beyond or outside the world around us. He thinks Quine is probably in agreement with him on the issue that all things are physical and that dualism is unwanted, but that he cannot let go of a scientistic/physicalistic bias when he is offering justification for adequate ways of knowing the world. This, for Rorty, leads to a paradox in Quine in the sense that, on the one hand, he represents for Rorty (along with Sellars) a philosopher who does away with a theory of knowledge, but on the other is also a philosopher who seems tacitly inclined to favor a single way of knowing. But let us turn to Rortys issue with Quine on justification, since it is there that we can see the misunderstanding arise. The basic thrust of Rortys problem is with how he takes Quine to be justifying our knowledge of things scientifically. For Rorty, this is ultimately a problem with Quines Empiricism. If we think of it in terms of Rortys comment that the problem Sellars dissolves is the problem of the Given in Quine, and vice-versa, we can read Quines problem in Sellarsian terms as a problem of pre-linguistic awareness. Rortys issue is with how Quine decides to give an empirical account of this awareness in terms of physiological phenomenon. It smacks of a preoccupation with the givenness of the phenomenon, or stimuli as we saw above in Quines account. This preoccupation, according to Rorty, does not usually put us in the correct dialogue or conversation with the world that is required for the kind of justification he thinks Quine should be offering, given the latters demolition of any privileged access requirement for matters of epistemic justification. Rather, it seems to make justification a recourse to something located outside the needs of knowledge as a phenomenon in waking life. Rorty thinks we need justification for a theory of knowledge, but thinks Quine misses the point, or rather changes the goal, of justification by locating it in a causal mechanism at a prelinguistic/pre-cognitive stage in inquiry. Rorty just does not think people pursue the problem of their epistemic needs for awareness of their knowledge in this recondite way. For even if we forget justification and look for causal mechanisms, we are certainly not going to be talking about color patches in a two-dimensional visual field, but rather about the causal chain of justification between speakers. We do not need any psychophysiological account of causal mechanisms, according to Rorty, to isolate what is intersubjectively agreeable we just do this in ordinary conversation. This seems to lead Rorty to rethink the Empiricism of Quines epistemology. Is there something rather too physicalistic about observation sentences? Their role of housing, on Rortys reading of Quine, superfluous, misleading and perhaps uninteresting means for epistemic justification may be indicative, he thinks, of an ontological bias in Quine. For why
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else, he thinks, would Quine not discuss forms of knowing outside the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) and in, say, the social sciences (Geisteswissenschaften). This has Rorty, then, questioning very deep theses in Quine, like the one of ontological relativity. I mention it here because it connects up with what I see as Rortys misreading of the epistemic status of the neuro-physical (physiological) in Quine. Rorty quotes Quine at length on ontological relativity to point out the err. Since it puts the thesis straight, we will quote most of it: What our present reflections are leading us to appreciate is that the riddle about seeing things upside down, or in complementary colors, should be taken seriously and its moral applied widely. The relativistic thesis to which we have come is this, to repeat: it makes no sense to say what the objects of a theory are, beyond saying how to interpret or reinterpret that theory in another. . . . Talk of subordinate theories and their ontologies is meaningful but only relative to the background theory with its own primitively adopted and ultimately inscrutable ontology. Rorty voices his problem as the phrase primitively adopted and ultimately inscrutable ontology. He thinks there is a Physicalism predetermining the relativity of ontology here, in the sense that he thinks Quines goal of limning reality via logic and an extensional language conditions the relativity of his ontology. Perhaps, he thinks, the primitive one is the same in every case. On a full-blooded holistic view Rorty thinks there should be no privileging in Quines web of belief of one kind of statement over another. He puts the points of Quines position in a way that seemingly spells out a contradiction; here it is in part: (2) There is no special epistemological status which any sentence has apart from its role in the maintaining that field of force which is human knowledge and whose aim is coping with sensory irradiations. (4) So epistemology and ontology never meet, since our scruples about what objects to assume are not dictated by our acquaintance with either universals or particulars (5) But there is nevertheless a distinction to be made between those parts of the web of belief which express matters of fact and those which do not, and ontology insures that we can detect this difference. Rorty thus sees a problem with Quines Holism, since he seems to suggest here that he finds Quines aesthetic preference for Physicalism nevertheless inducing in the philosophers web of belief a distinctive fact of the matter of knowledge that exists apart from anything conventional in nature. IV Right away we can answer Rorty and launch into a further, end-discussion that immediately implicates observation sentences. We can take our lead off the heals of a reply to Rorty from Quine himself, whose departure from (2) [above] is on the score of observation sentences, which do have the special epistemological status of being keyed directly to sensory stimulation and thus linking theory with outer reality.

So to appeal to (4) then we can say epistemology and ontology can meet in this case of observation sentences, because, to answer Rortys initial suspicion, it is really only at their level where Quine will dissolve the fact-theory, or stimuli-posit, dichotomy. Just notice how fluently Quine thinks we can transfer from talk about the perpetually recondite neurophysical (theory) to talk of what is all-too-humdrum: By the stimulation undergone by a subject on a given occasion I just mean the temporally ordered set of all those of his exteroceptors that are triggered on that occasion. Observation then drops out as a technical notion. So does evidence, if that was observation. We can deal with the question of evidence for science without help of evidence as a technical term. We can make do instead with the notion of observation sentences. The point of take-off for Quines ontological relativity thesis is found in this gesture. So we can settle Rorty on this score using the observation sentence. Part of Rortys criticism of the foregoing thesis misses the important role the neuro-physical actually plays in relativizing our ontology. Take, for example, two people who are devising a name for one and the same global stimuli in their visual field though at different times. The first person calls it X and associates with it all that the stimuli relays to the full range of his sense receptors. The second person calls it Y in her encounter with it, and associates all the same stimuli that had been given over the same range of her sensory receptors. What have been countenanced here and deemed knowable, for Quine, are not two objects but a range of stimuli relevant to the occasion when language users uttered X or Y. Two theories, one to be of X and one of Y, relatively co-exist. What matters for knowledge in cases like this one is that the focus of evidence for the theory to be had isnt put towards objects themselves but towards that wedge through which we enter scientific discourse the observation sentences. Thus if we interpret ontological relativity this way, we see that Rorty is misled about Quine in two ways. First, he is misled in his Kantian suspicion of Quine, that is, to think that Quines epistemology is going to emphasize making the observation sentences of our scientific theories true of its objects or in other words, for Rorty, have our intuitions conform with our concepts. Quines epistemology for science is always going to have as its impetus the predictional value of what its observation sentences collectively (or what Quine calls their conglomerate form as hypotheses about stimulation observation categoricals) will entail about the world. But it is about a world that, towards epistemological ends, is described intersubjectively not as objects but simply as obtaining for competent language users. This would preclude the possibility of an ontologys relativity and take us back to the tradition that, along with Rorty, yes, Quine would like jettison. Given our reading of ontological relativity, Rorty also seems misled in another sense, and it is perhaps more important than the first, and a piece with Quines Holism. Ontology can be relative and accessible on all counts (that is, with each ontology) precisely because each obtains its own means for its first utterance, generation, and construction from a theory that starts from the meagre means of what is primitively human: that is, from impacts on our sensory surfaces. Holism, or the interconnectedness of what there is, says two things on Quines account: what there is physical, and what connects them holistically is, at bottom, their physical relation to us. Physical things relate to us via the Physiology of receptors and stimulations, which thus constitutes the evidential support we may have about the bits of experience of the physical
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world we can predict the vehicle of such evidential support and predictions, moreover, is a linguistic phenomenon. And since language marks the differences across human cultures, it will likely result in various theories of what there is, but which will each have no better or worse way for empirically advancing in a scientific endeavor outside the Naturalistic constraints the physical world imposes upon us. Such is Quinean Holism. It is often misconstrued, however, that as a result of the hegemony of the physical in Quines philosophical endeavors, he ends up consigning human existence to nothing more than something that can be bottled. It is true, this sounds like the conclusion of his philosophy of the linguistic link of humans to the world. Quine does follow this link all the way up the chain of events involving humans in the world, but just not in some absolute sense that has him saying his is the only account of human existence. No, his account follows the link of language and the world but only up the chain of events that sees humans as physical denizens of a physical world. This is why we do not see Quine developing his philosophical points by giving readings of, say, the Armenian genocide of the twentieth century. Observation sentences show Quine to be more serious about the role of language in our human knowing. For Rorty it derives its power ultimately from its conversational justificatory role about things for which we seek coherence. But for Quine, language derives its epistemic power (i.e. usefulness for prediction) from its neuro-physical basis, from the fact that it begins in and arises out of our mediation with the world. Whatever anyone wants to make of language, Quine will never divorce it from its physicalist origins in his account of knowledge because he does not think it can be divorced. He does not think it possible for someone to have come up with a theory of the world encased in a language that has been divorced from its physical context (which is why there is no Cosmology in Quine). Language arises out of and develops from our shared situations with other users. The moral to take from this about Quine is that the neuro-physical reality, of which he often speaks about liberally, is something about language he takes as certain but it is because his Naturalism has him do so. Nothing hitherto has disproved the idea that we are sentient beings at this level of physics. Thus Rorty can miss the plot then when he talks about the causal mechanics behind what he sees as Quines physiological justification for epistemology. Rorty fails to take into account Quines Naturalism here, and I mean this quite literally: for, on the one hand, Rorty seems to forget how important the following is for Quines project: that the inaugural interface of language employment and human beings is, and cannot be anything other than, a physical thing. It cannot be anything other than the physical because human beings cannot rid themselves of the mortal coil when it comes to language, that is, the physical circumstances in which language occurs. So when he thinks Quine is justifying human knowing on the basis of our Physiology, he is merely knocking on the open door as far as Quines project is concerned. For Quine, as much as Rorty, includes the social conversation between language users as means for justification. But, in a very crucial sense, Quines presuppositions, as outlined in section one above, commit him to an element of justification that is physical because an exhaustive understanding of what is physical (known to some as science, others as philosophy) is Quines project. Coda We conclude then with something to remember. Quines Naturalism has him trying to further and better understand, empirically, how exactly we are connected with the physical world around us. And I have tried to make the case here that his notion of observation sentences ties
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together what is for most, as it was for Richard Rorty, a seemingly disparate element of physiological terminology within Quines epistemology. So Quine, to give a characteristic example, will believe in beliefs and intensions and the like because, since they cannot exist (i.e. cannot fall within the bounds of some human sense) without a physical ground (i.e. the somatic human being), they are fundamentally physical things. Intensions, as we know, cause problems for Quine, but only because the perplexity of their subjective character induces epistemic quandaries whose discussion is beyond the purview of this paper that contaminate, unfortunately, what the subject interprets by way of ontology. Put simply, intensions induce in inquirers an urge to believe in a special (different) grounding for existence of intensions that is other than something physical. Much of what is negative in Quines thought is a constant return to this issue. But I digress.

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