Righting Epistemology by Johnsen Bredo;

Author:Johnsen, Bredo;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

II. Observation Sentences

Observation occupies a central place in Quine’s epistemology for two principal reasons: its roles within the scientific enterprise, and in the transmission of that enterprise down the generations. Observation affords us whatever evidence we have for or against our theories, and our acquiring a language turns on our sharing observations with our teachers.

But Quine takes observations themselves—the events—to be ill suited for philosophical purposes; that is, for making clear how observations, or something intimately related to them, can play their two roles. Here he expresses the first of two misgivings, and gestures toward his solution of the problem:

[T]‌he notion of observation is subject to a curious internal tension. Observation affords the sensory evidence for scientific theory, and sensation is private. Yet observation must be shared if it is to provide the common ground where scientists can resolve their disagreements. The observation must be the distillate, somehow, of what is publicly relevant in the private sensations of present witnesses. This delicate process of distillation is already accomplished, happily, in our most rudimentary learning of language. One learns the word “blue” from another speaker, in the presence of something blue. The other speaker has learned to associate the word with whatever inscrutable sensation it may be that such an object induces in him, and one now learns to associate the word with the sensation, same or different, that the object induces in oneself. All agree in calling the object blue, and even in calling their sensations blue. (Quine 1975a)

Here he expresses the second, and identifies his solution fairly clearly:

What are observations? They are visual, auditory, tactual, olfactory. They are sensory, evidently, and thus subjective. Yet it was crucial to the use of observations, both as evidence and as semantical reference points, that they be socially shared. Should we say then that the observation is not the sensation after all, but the shared environmental circumstances? No, for there is no presumption of intersubjective agreement about the environing situation either; two men will assess it differently, partly because of noticing different features and partly because of entertaining different theories.

There is a way out of this difficulty over the notion of observation. It consists of talking neither of sensation nor of environing situation, but of language: talking of language at the observational end no less than at the theoretical end… . I propose that we drop the talk of observation and talk instead of observation sentences, the sentences that are said to report observations: sentences like “This is red,” “This is a rabbit.” No matter that sensations are private, and no matter that men may take radically different views of the environing situation; the observation sentence serves nicely to pick out what witnesses can agree on. (Quine 1974, pp. 38–39)

Elsewhere, Quine speaks more obliquely of the “finicky task” of defining observation and the “awkwardness” of analyzing it as reasons for shifting to talk of observation sentences. Rather oddly, however, he mentions only occasionally one overriding reason for doing so, namely that in order

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