Comment on Levine
pp. 295-298
in: Abner Shimony, Debra Nails (eds), Naturalistic epistemology, Berlin, Springer, 1987Abstract
I approach Levine's paper with a very mixed response-pattern, and this fact makes me as nervous as any Pavlov dog. In my disposition to respond with pleasure to Quine's writings but with suspicion to any behavioristic writings, I was naturally conditioned to gloss swiftly over behaviorist passages in his writings.. I always responded, then, with surprise and incredulity, to friends and colleagues citing Quine's behaviorism.1 The displeasure incurred by finding myself not well acquainted with the works of an author I have invested some effort in an attempt to master should now disappear with my reading of Joseph Levine's coherent interpretation of Quine's philosophy as inherently physicalist and (thus) as inherently behavioristic2 (although without the ability to justify science as a whole except scientifically). It is still a fact that any detailed reduction of any theory of scientific activity to psychology is repellent to me on account of the fact that psychology is universal and science is a product of some cultures and so is not universal. Here, then, is the analysis of my response-pattern to Joseph Levine's paper. It is for me both anxiety reducing and anxiety raising.
