Abstract

“There ceases to be any reason to count awareness as an essential trait of observation.”-from “Stimulus and Meaning”As W. V. Quine sees it we must, in the interests of science, resist “the old tendency to associate observation sentences with a subjective sensory subject matter,” because such sentences are “meant to be the intersubjective tribunal of scientific hypotheses“; observation sentences are meant to be the independent and objective control of scientific theory. Accordingly, Quine has developed a behaviouristic operational definition of an observation sentence for the purpose of dispelling the air of subjectivity which surrounds the notion of observation.In this paper I argue that his observation-sentence definition, or criterion, fails to fulfil this purpose. In the first half of the paper, I describe in particular the kind of subjectivism which most worries Quine-what he calls the epistemological nihilism of Hanson, Kuhn and Polanyi-and I then turn to Quine's remedy, his observation criterion.