Lawrence Friedman Responds

September 19, 1999. I appreciate Marcia Cavell's letter as an appraisal by a psychoanalyst who is a professional philosopher, and I am pleased to find that on the philosophical issues we are at one. She does, however, gently reproach me on four counts: (1) She charges unfairness to Quine. (2) She thinks my use of the term representation is hazardous. (3) She corrects a reference to an argument of hers (Cavell 1998). And (4), to my overall thesis that the reality story should not be told in the usual way, she responds that indeed it should be.

1. Cavell thinks my reference to Quine is misleading. She takes Quine's lesson to be that meaning depends on context, and that knowledge is always fallible but nevertheless possible. She implies that these seemingly solid principles do not warrant my raised-eyebrow characterization. But I think it is Cavell's summary that is misleading. Quine is an interesting philosopher just because he carried those seemingly modest principles to a logical conclusion that is far more radically skeptical than others realize who maintain those principles in the general way Cavell has stated them. Quine is one of the modern thinkers who taught that every part of language and theory depends on the other parts for meaning. These thinkers challenge the notion that we can tie individual assertions and descriptions uniquely to individual facts, or establish common divisions and constancies in the world that run through different languages and theories (the famous “nontranslatability of languages” doctrine). I referred to that argument (as presented by Wittgenstein) in discussing the challenge to logical positivism. What I cited Quine for was his provocative doctrine that science teaches that nature has caused us to believe in science, although we cannot justify the belief in science. (He substituted psychology for epistemology.) Repeatedly dismissing the anticipated charge of circularity, he relied on natural science (and the argument of evolutionary ad