Abstract

Willard Quine has recently defended his brand of scientific realism and naturalism (1992). He has expanded his defense (1993, 1996), utilizing observation sentences in their holophrastic guise. He also argues that the latter bear “... significantly on the epistemology of ontology” and provide for the commensurability of theories. I argue that they fail in all these tasks. Further, Quine’s long‐standing commitment to a kind of scientific realism, on the one hand, and his frequent employment of proxy functions and the rejection of transcendental metaphysics, on the other, constitute an untenable position. A consistent Quinean must abandon scientific realism and ontology.