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From Stimulus to Science

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Quine traces the path from simple stimulus to man's most advanced response to his environment, the pursuit of science. For those not familiar with mathematical logic, the going will be almost impossible, but a knowledge of the predicate calculus and standard symbolism will carry you through. The ideas are brilliant and entrancing, but you have to work through them carefully to catch the full implication. While this is mostly for those familiar with Quine's other work, the general reader can still get quite a lot from it.

Faster than a speeding bullet and able to leap corporate bodies of theories in a single bound, Quine stands up for the American way by showing the reader just how silly and utterly unconnected from reality modern analytic philosophy has become. True to form, Quine has cut and pasted a number of Martha Stewart's hors d'oeurve recipes into his text, disguising them in clever formal logic symbolism. But it is easy to see through this and one can hardly put the book down without musing on how Quine would have made a great chef instead of an incomprehensible Harvard philosopher. Indeterminacy of translation? Right. But when one thinks through Quine's latest reflections on this matter it becomes clear that Quine is really describing a very palatable salad dressing with just the right amount of balsamic vineager. Finally, one puts the text down with the clear understanding that Hilary Putnam's Representation and Reality is really the confession of a closet pastry chef who took a wrong turn in life and ended up on the Harvard philosophy faculty. Nice going, Quine.

Quine traces the path from rudimentary particles impinging on human sensory organs to man's most highly evolved behavior, the construction of strip malls. For those not familiar with postmodernist synchrocyclotron engineering, the going will be virtually impossible, but a basic knowledge of addition and subtraction will go a long way toward helping the reading become totally confused. The ideas are both painful and tasty, but it's important to floss your teeth carefully after reading in order to grasp the full ramifications of Quine's point. For those who were driven psychotic by Quine's other work, this book will prove immensely helpful in whiling away the hours while waiting for the nurse to bring your Haldol.