This little book is based on the Ferrater Mora lectures given by Quine in 1990. In his preface he writes:

The Ferrater Mora lectures are a semiannual event at the Universitat de Girona, in Catalonia, honoring the memory of the late philosopher and novelist Josep María Ferrater Mora. The lecturer meets a selected group of some forty auditors ten times, over a period of two weeks, for a total of twenty-odd hours of lectures and discussion. Four eminent colleagues are invited along with the lecturer to participate in the discussion.

In 1990 the four additional Eminences were Donald Davidson, Burton Dreben, Dagfinn Føllesdal, and Roger Gibson.

Chapter One, “Days of Yore,” starts with a seven-page history of philosophy. That’s followed by a description of Russell and Whitehead’s attempt to construct mathematics from minimal beginnings. There is no sign, here, that Quine sees anything problematic about either their project or their actual construction. The chapter ends with an account of Rudolf Carnap’s somewhat similar attempt, in Der logische Aufbau der Welt (1928), to construct knowledge (science) from minimal beginnings.

Chapter Two, “Naturalism,” describes Quine’s own try at constructing science on a small foundation. Carnap had taken sensory phenomena as the basis for “the logical construction of the world.” Quine rejects this version of the epistemological project, not because it won’t work but because it allows the possibility that not everything in the world is material. His own option is to assume that everything that exists is physical and to ask: How do human beings construct knowledge (science) out of experience? How do they acquire the language needed to so much as mention physical objects? He posits a minimum set of the physical items that have eventually to be explained: “rays and waves and nerve endings.” The proposed foundation for knowledge of the physical world is itself made up of physical things.

Reductive philosophy never seems to work. Someone once said that the Universe was too big a rabbit for Carnap to pull out of his phenomenalist hat, and it is surely also too big to pull out of “rays and waves and nerve endings.” Be that as it may, in no time at all we find Quine sneakily beefing up his basic physical bricks with some extremely theoretical cement: viz, dispositions, innateness, induction, and evolution.

Chapter Three, “Reification,” examines the linguistic differentiations needed before creatures can have such thoughts as “all ravens are black” and “if lightning occurs, thunder will occur.” The idea is to explain the origins of the differentiations by looking at biology and child psychology. One might wonder how much of the material here is empirically based. One might ask, nit-pickingly, whether Quine is engaging in armchair science, in a priori neurology. In the bibliography all the texts, bar two, are on mathematics, logic, or computational theory, the exceptions being J. B. Watson’s Psychology (itself an armchair work) and Piaget’s Genetic Epistemology. There’s nothing on biology as such. Still, I think one must assume that there is empirical evidence behind Quine’s assertions about neurology and evolution. He just happens not to mention it.

Years ago Quine attacked the analytic-synthetic distinction in a paper called “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Many philosophers have since said that he demolished the distinction once and for all. Yet those very same philosophers continue to surreptitiously rely on the supposedly discredited notions. Why so? Well, the analytic-synthetic distinction is not a solitary isolated target. It belongs to a family of concepts whose other members include the empirical versus the logical; the a priori versus the a posteriori; the probable, the possible, and the necessary; implication and evidence; inference and experiment; and so on and so on. That family of distinctions will never be abolished because philosophy can’t do without it. It’s interesting to see (shock, horror) that on page 45 Quine produces his own definition of the analytic-synthetic distinction! The account is psychologistic, but since his whole project is based on the axiom that there are hugely important connections between logic and psychology it looks as if the distinction has now been resuscitated by its chief detractor.

Chapter Four presents a traditional, i.e., quasi-Popperian, quasi-Hempelian view of the relationship between observation and theory; viz, respectable theories can always be tested by observation, so all theoretical statements must imply observation statements. Hence we need to ask: What does “imply” mean? What is implication? Quine defines the concept via elementary predicate logic. He claims that formal logic originates naturally in the histories of individual children as they learn their native languages.

After defining implication, our author turns to a number of related topics in philosophical logic. He considers ways to define mathematics and set theory and logic itself. He also looks at the paradoxes seemingly generated by the concept of truth, and at the problem of semantics and the question of intentionality.

The somewhat brief remarks that make up chapters five through eight are undoubtedly thought-provoking—readers might notice the several provokingly disparate descriptions of mathematics, for example— but the connection, if any, between the first and second halves of the book is not very clear.

What of the overall project? I haven’t space to discuss Carnap’s term “Aufbau,” but the (usual) English translation, “construction,” is a weasel word indeed. A building, such as a skyscraper, is a construction, but construction is also an activity, a trade; it is the kind of work carried out by bricklayers, for instance. What then is meant by the expression “The logical construction of the world”? Are we talking about the way the world just is? Or about the way we construct (create) it? The first alternative is Realism, the second is not, and the alternatives are not compatible. Now look at “The logical construction of knowledge (about the world).” Is this “construction” an entity or an activity? For a Realist (or, anyway, for one type of Realist), “the logical construction of our knowledge of the external world” is something to be discovered by inquiring into the nature of the world plus the way language hooks onto it. If, however, you hold that “construction (of the world)” means “making (the world),” you are not a philosophical Realist.

Quine’s account seems to me to combine both senses of “construction.” In other words, he presents himself in this book as a Realist Non-Realist or a Non-Realist Realist. Strange beasts, these.

Reading From Stimulus to Science reminded me a bit of long-ago encounters with the Pre-Socratic fragments. One discovered that Thales thought that everything is made of water and that Anaxiwhoosit said that the world is made of fire, or lemon pips, or whatever, but one could never discover why they believed those things. An apt subtitle for From Stimulus to Science would be: “Several Things Believed by Quine (But Not Argued For by Him).” Russell told the young Wittgenstein that he needed a slave to think up some arguments in favor of his conclusions; he could have said much the same thing about the older Quine. Yet here the absence of argumentation is a kind of plus because it means this book will be useful to anyone who needs to find out, fairly quickly, about the conclusions reached by an eminent American philosopher now in his ninth decade.