Reviewed by:

• Working from Within: The Nature and Development of Quine’s Naturalism by Sander Verhaegh
• Sean Morris

Verhaegh’s excellent book provides the first complete account of Quine’s naturalism. Guiding Quine’s view is the idea that we cannot stand outside our theory of the world. We are always working from within. Only by understanding this idea do we see what Quine’s naturalism comes to.

While many philosophers casually treat Quine’s naturalism as something already well-understood, Verhaegh does not, and he dedicates part 1 to its systematic exposition. According to him, this consists of two components: “the principled rejection of transcendental perspectives and the adoption of a perspective immanent to our scientific conceptual scheme,” both based on Quine’s view that we must always be working from within (11). Verhaegh discusses Quine’s epistemology and metaphysics. I will consider the latter, as it is less familiar and also shows some of the significance this book has beyond Quine scholarship. [End Page 162]

Quine’s claim that he is blurring the boundary between metaphysics and natural science has often been taken as rescuing metaphysics from attacks by Rudolf Carnap and other logical empiricists. Verhaegh explains that this reading does not fit with Quine’s own claims against metaphysics, sounding like those Carnap made in terms of internal and external questions. Carnap distinguishes between two types of internal-external distinctions:

(I/E₁) that between meaningful internal questions and meaningless metaphysical external questions; and

(I/E₂) that between internal theoretical questions and external practical questions.

According to Verhaegh, Quine would have to reject (I/E₁) if he intended to resurrect the metaphysics Carnap railed against. Instead, Quine attacks (I/E₂) on grounds that he sees no in-principle distinction between theoretical and practical questions. Interesting here is Verhaegh’s account of Carnap and Quine on the (I/E₁) distinction. Carnap and Quine appear to agree on traditional metaphysics, dismissing it as meaningless. We have to be careful, though, since Quine, unlike Carnap, rejects any general metalinguistic criterion for what counts as meaningful. Quine, Verhaegh explains, understands “meaningless” as “useless from a scientific point of view” (53). He then dismisses traditional metaphysics from within science, which shows that working within is fundamental to Quine’s naturalism. I find this interpretation important also in furthering our understanding of Carnap and Quine by, on the one hand, uniting them in philosophical attitude, while, on the other, showing their differences more clearly. Furthermore, this point has general consequences for understanding the development of analytic philosophy. Instead of seeing Quine’s views on metaphysics as a significant break with Carnap and the empiricist tradition, we see Quine and Carnap take a similar stance on this topic. We might then view them as the culmination of a scientific tradition in analytic philosophy, distinguished from much of the ensuing contemporary analytic metaphysics.

In part 2, Verhaegh provides a developmental account of Quine’s naturalism, starting with his earliest attempt at a comprehensive philosophy: the book project Sign and Object, begun in 1941 and halted in 1946 as the result of two problems. First, Quine had not been able to develop a comprehensive account of language, meaning, and the nature of logical and mathematical knowledge. He had long been unsatisfied with Carnap’s account in terms of the analytic-synthetic distinction but had not yet found anything better. Second, although Quine had already committed himself to realism, he still lacked a response to phenomenalist views that sense experience is more fundamental than physical objects (93–94).

Interestingly, Verhaegh observes that Quine’s solutions to these problems come after the 1951 “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” True, Quine rejects the analytic-synthetic distinction in the latter, adopting a holistic epistemology, but the point was largely negative, with only a sketchy replacement. Verhaegh suggests that many readers overlook this, reading instead Quine’s mature epistemological holism back into that paper (98). Furthermore, Quine says nothing about phenomenalism and the problem of epistemic priority (99). Only in the following year...

审核人：

• 从内部进行工作：桑德·韦尔哈格（Sander Verhaegh）的奎因自然主义的本质和发展
• 肖恩·莫里斯（Sean Morris）

韦尔海格（Verhaegh）的出色著作首次完整地介绍了奎因（Quine）的自然主义。指导奎因的观点是，我们不能站在我们的世界理论之外。我们始终在内部开展工作。只有了解了这个想法，我们才能了解奎因的自然主义的含义。

尽管许多哲学家随意地将奎因的自然主义视为已经被很好理解的东西，但韦尔海格却不这样认为，他将第1部分专用于其系统的论述。他认为，这包括两个部分：“对先验观点的原则性拒绝和对我们科学概念方案固有的观点的采纳”，这都是基于奎因的观点，即我们必须始终从内部进行工作（11）。Verhaegh讨论了Quine的认识论和形而上学。我将考虑后者，因为它不那么熟悉，并且也显示了本书在Quine奖学金之外所具有的重要意义。[完页162]

奎因声称自己模糊了形而上学与自然科学之间的界线，通常被认为是从鲁道夫·卡纳普和其他逻辑经验主义者的攻击中拯救形而上学。韦尔哈格（Verhaegh）解释说，这一解读与奎因（Quine）自己对形而上学的主张不符，听起来像卡纳普（Carnap）在内部和外部问题上所做的那样。Carnap区分两种内部-外部区别：

（I / E ₁）在有意义的内部问题与无意义的形而上学外部问题之间的联系；和

（I / E ₂）在内部理论问题和外部实践问题之间。

根据Verhaegh的说法，如果Quine想要复活Carnap所反对的形而上学，他将不得不拒绝（I / E ₁）。相反，Quine攻击（I / E ₂）的理由是他认为理论问题和实践问题之间没有原则上的区别。有趣的是Verhaegh在（I / E ₁）区分。卡尔纳普和奎因似乎同意传统形而上学，认为它毫无意义。但是，我们必须要小心，因为Quine与Carnap不同，它拒绝了任何有意义的通用语言标准。Verhaegh解释说，奎因将“无意义的”理解为“从科学的角度来看是无用的”（53）。然后，他从科学内部排除了传统形而上学，这表明在其中进行工作对奎因的自然主义至关重要。我发现这种解释也很重要，一方面是通过以哲学的态度将它们结合在一起，另一方面则是更清楚地表明它们之间的差异，从而加深了我们对卡尔纳普和奎因的理解。此外，这一点对于理解分析哲学的发展具有普遍的影响。我们没有看到奎因关于形而上学的观点与卡尔纳普和经验主义传统的重大突破，而是看到奎因和卡尔纳普在这个话题上采取了类似的立场。然后，我们可能会将它们视为分析哲学的科学传统的顶峰，与随后的当代分析形而上学大相径庭。

在第2部分中，Verhaegh从最早尝试一种全面哲学的角度出发，对Quine的自然主义进行了发展阐述：这本书项目Sign and Object始于1941年，由于两个问题而于1946年终止。首先，Quine未能对语言，含义以及逻辑和数学知识的性质进行全面的描述。长期以来，他对卡尔纳普的账户在分析综合性方面不满意，但尚未找到更好的解决方案。其次，尽管奎因已经致力于现实主义，但他仍然缺乏对现象列表观点的回应，认为感知经验比物理对象更为根本（93-94）。

有趣的是，韦尔海格（Verhaegh）注意到，奎因（Quine）对这些问题的解决方案是在1951年“经验主义的两个教条”之后提出的。是的，Quine拒绝了后者的分析-综合区分，而是采用了整体认识论，但这一观点在很大程度上是负面的，仅是粗略的替代。韦尔哈格（Verhaegh）建议许多读者忽略这一点，而是将奎因（Quine）成熟的认识论整体论重新读到该论文中（98）。此外，奎因对现象主义和认识论优先权问题一无所知（99）。仅在第二年...