You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
July 23, 1999. As a trained philosopher, and a clinician in training, I am often frustrated and dismayed by the casual swing some of my clinical betters take at complex philosophical questions. So I was delighted that both Lawrence Friedman J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn. 47/2, 401) and Charles Hanly ( J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn. 47/2, 427) spoke up with such sophistication on the side I have recently been arguing (Cavell , 1998a, b). Hanly quite rightly says that epistemological subjectivism is self-defeating. (He explains in a particularly lucid way, incidentally, some prevalent confusions in the understanding of quantum mechanics.) Friedman insists that we are justified in making claims about how things “really” are.
More in the spirit of friendly amendment than criticism, I want to take up a few points in Friedman's essay that may undermine his own case for “reality.”
In tracing the historical move toward a postmodern kind of relativism, Friedman (p. 410) describes Quine as holding “that our reasoning is supported not by logic but by the success of our species; even the strictest reasoning, he insists, is more a matter of belief than of justification.” Friedman's reference is to an essay by Quine called “Five Milestones of Empiricism” (1981). The particular passage I believe Friedman has in mind reads as follows: “The fifth [milestone] brings naturalism: abandonment of the goal of first philosophy. It sees natural science as an inquiry into reality, fallible and corrigible but not answerable to any supra-scientific tribunal, and not in need of any justification beyond observation and the hypothetico-deductive method …” (p. 72).
“The goal of first philosophy” is a reference to Descartes' hope of founding science on some intrinsically indubitable bits of knowledge. Several things, according to Quine and many other philosophers, are wrong with this goal: (1) the idea that a belief or proposition might be meaningful, let alone knowable, independently of some wider context