W. V. Quine (1908 to 2000), an American philosopher at Harvard, held that experience never tests a single belief on its own; in his phrase, our statements about the world “face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body”. Knowledge is a connected web in which any belief can be revised, and he held that the question of how experience justifies belief belongs within natural science itself. Therapeutic Shamanism shares his trust in experience and his sense that what we bring shapes what we find, but not his view that the physical senses are the only evidence there is.
Who was W. V. Quine? #
Willard Van Orman Quine was born on 25 June 1908 in Akron, Ohio. He took his doctorate in philosophy at Harvard in 1932, was a Junior Fellow there from 1933 to 1936, and then taught at Harvard until 1978. His work ranged over logic, language and knowledge. His best-known essay, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, appeared in 1951, and his major book, Word and Object, in 1960. He died in Boston on 25 December 2000.1
What were the two dogmas? #
Two assumptions he found at the heart of the empiricism of his day, the view that all knowledge comes from experience. The first was a sharp line between statements true simply because of what their words mean and statements true because of how the world is. The second was that each meaningful statement could, in principle, be translated into statements about immediate experience, and so confirmed or refuted on its own.2
Quine rejected both. Against the second he put holism, the view that “our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body.” A single sentence rarely has testable consequences by itself; only a larger body of theory does.3
What is the web of belief? #
His picture of knowledge as a whole. Everything we believe, from ordinary facts of geography and history to the laws of physics, logic and mathematics, is, in his words, “a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.” When an experience clashes with what we expect, something in the web has to change, but experience alone does not dictate what. We usually adjust beliefs near the edge and protect those near the centre, such as arithmetic, because giving them up would unravel so much else. Still, “no statement is immune to revision.”4
He went further. Physical objects themselves enter our picture of the world as posits, “comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer”, and “Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits.” As a lay physicist, Quine still believed in physical objects and not in Homer’s gods, and thought it a scientific error to believe otherwise; the reason for preferring them is that “The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.”5
How did Quine think experience justifies belief? #
Through science, not from outside it. Philosophers had long hoped to find a foundation, prior to science, on which all knowledge could be justified. Quine gave up that hope. Our only information about the world comes through the impact of the world on our sensory receptors, and the study of how we get from that thin input to our rich theories is itself part of natural science. Epistemology, the study of knowledge, is “contained in natural science, as a chapter of psychology.” This became known as naturalised epistemology.6
How does Quine’s work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
First, in the place given to experience. Shamanism is about direct personal experience, and not about an act of faith; whatever anyone says about their own journeys, the invitation is to journey and find out for oneself.7 Quine’s tribunal is the experience of the senses, and his whole account keeps beliefs answerable to it.
Second, in holism. No experience comes to us bare. Shamanic journeys are not an objective experience but something co-created between us and Spirit, shaped by our frameworks, beliefs and prior knowledge, and to experience the realms at all we cannot help but fashion them into something. Hence the practice of stalking oneself, bringing thoughts, preconceptions, belief-systems and biases into awareness so that they do not unconsciously distort a journey.8 Quine’s web makes a parallel point for all knowing, since what an experience seems to show depends on everything else we already hold. See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
Third, in judging stories by what they do. Quine preferred the ‘myth’ of physical objects because it works better than other myths. The shamanic test is “Does it grow corn?”, never mind the dogma, does it work, with the fuller question of what kind of corn it grows.9 And views in the web can change. When brain imaging found no evidence that either hemisphere dominates in brain activity, the account was revised: both hemispheres are equally active, but people differ in which hemisphere’s responses they attend to, and in that sense some people are indeed more ‘left-brained’.10
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On what counts as experience. For Quine the only evidence is stimulation of the physical senses, and the final word belongs to natural science. Therapeutic Shamanism holds that left-brain analysis is only one way of knowing the truth, and that a right-brain approach is equally valid.11 Journeys are not read through the physical senses at all, and the beings met in them are not posits. Shamans are clear that the shamanic realms are a world as real as this one, and the more people journey, the more they experience that it goes beyond any personal imagination.12
On myth. Quine used ‘myth’ loosely, for any posit, and ranked myths by how well they organise sense experience. In Therapeutic Shamanism mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this is a different kind of truth altogether. LogosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this is literally true, mythos metaphorically true, and journeys are mythos, never objectively true in the way facts are, yet carrying something real.13 A journey is not a failed attempt at physics, any more than a poem is.
What have critics said about Quine? #
On the first dogma, the philosophers H. P. Grice and P. F. Strawson defended the line between truths of meaning and truths of fact in 1956, arguing that Quine’s scepticism about meaning led to absurd consequences. On naturalised epistemology, the philosopher Jaegwon Kim objected in 1988 that once epistemology becomes a branch of psychology it can only describe how we come to believe things, not say what we ought to believe, and so loses the very question of justification. Quine replied that such critics are “wrong in protesting that the normative element” goes by the board.14
