In earlier essays, not reproduced in this volume, Quine wrote, 'Philosophy, or what appeals to me under that head, is continuous with science'; and, more bluntly: 'Philosophy of science is philosophy enough.' There are pages in the present collection of 26 papers which seem to invite a still narrower construction of these apparently restrictive remarks: to invite one, in a word, to gloss 'science' as 'physics'. Deploring Goodman's proliferation of worlds or world-versions, Quine holds out for one world only: the world of physical theory. To the question, 'Why this special deference to physical theory?' he has a ready answer. Although 'not everything worth saying, not even all good science, can be translated into the technical vocabulary of physics,' yet 'nothing happens in the world, not the flutter of an eyelid, not the flicker of a thought, without some redistribution of microphysical states ... Full coverage, in this sense, is the business of physics, and only of physics.'

LRB 18 February 1982 | PDF Download