Quine's Linguistic Demotion of Phenomenal Consciousness

W.V.O. Quine offered no theory of phenomenal consciousness, but his philosophy of language supplies one of the twentieth century's most consequential instruments for demoting it. Where Quine’s primary entry treats his physicalism and naturalized epistemology, the concern here is narrower and more distinctive: the linguistic machinery through which the phenomenal is stripped of foundational standing. Quine's claim is not that qualia are unreal but that they are second-grade—admissible in the loose idioms of daily life yet excluded from the extensional, public language in which he holds that the true structure of reality must be described. Two moves accomplish this: the "flight from intension," which bars meanings and other intentional entities from serious ontology, and the thesis that the vocabulary of subjective quality is a derivative idiom, parasitic on shared reference to public things. Grounding both is a behaviorist account of meaning on which there is nothing to linguistic content beyond dispositions to verbal behavior in observable circumstances.

The Flight from Intension

The demotion of the phenomenal is executed through Quine's philosophy of language. Intentional and mentalistic idioms—belief, desire, meaning, and by extension the felt characters ascribed in introspective report—are referentially opaque: they resist the substitution of co-referring terms and so violate the extensionality Quine requires of any language that limns "the true and ultimate structure of reality" (Quine, 1960). Intensions—meanings, propositions, attributes—he judged to lack adequate criteria of identity, famously "creatures of darkness," governed by his dictum of no entity without identity. Propositional attitudes are therefore reconstrued, where possible, as relations to sentences rather than to inner contents, and where they cannot be so tamed they are consigned to a "second grade" of idiom: usable for everyday and even scientific purposes, but not admitted into the canonical, extensional description of what there is. Whatever is distinctively first-personal and qualitative about consciousness falls on the wrong side of this line.

Radical Translation and the Publicity of Meaning

The exclusion rests on a positive doctrine of what meaning is. In the thought experiment of radical translation, a field linguist confronts an untouched language with nothing to go on but the natives' utterances and the observable circumstances that prompt them (Quine, 1960). Pointing at a passing rabbit, the linguist hears "gavagai" and hypothesizes "rabbit"—but no accumulation of behavioral evidence can decide whether the term picks out a rabbit, an undetached rabbit-part, or a momentary rabbit-stage, since rival translation manuals fit all the dispositions equally well. From this indeterminacy of translation and the accompanying inscrutability of reference, Quine draws a stronger conclusion: there is no fact of the matter, no language-independent meaning, beyond what can be gleaned from overt behavior in observable circumstances (Quine, 1987). Meaning is exhausted by publicly conditioned dispositions to assent and dissent. According to Quine, the consequence for consciousness is decisive. If even the meaning of an ordinary term has no residual force behind its public behavioral profile, then there is a fortiori no private, first-personally given inner content that words for experience could be reporting from behind the behavioral facts. The publicity of meaning removes the very space in which an autonomous language of qualia might live.

Sense Quality as a Derivative Idiom

Quine's most direct remark on the phenomenal follows from this: subjective sense qualities are a derivative idiom (Quine, 1960). When one tries to describe a sensory quality, one reaches for public comparisons—a color as orange or heliotrope, a smell as of rotten eggs—so that even the language of the inner is built by reference outward to shared things. Sense data, far from being the bedrock of the phenomenalist tradition, are for Quine a sophisticated, physicalism-laden construction one arrives at late, by reflection, not a given from which knowledge or language could begin. This does not make Quine an eliminativist or illusionist about experience in the manner of Dennett or the Churchlands or Frankish; he neither declares that there are no qualia nor argues that consciousness is a systematic error. His deflation is quieter and more grammatical: the qualitative is genuine, but its vocabulary is secondary, and it earns no descriptive role that public, extensional language cannot in principle supply.

The Public Roots of Inner Language

These commitments give Quine a distinctive position on the Language Relationships subcategory's animating question—whether consciousness requires language, or language consciousness. Its contemporary consensus, which Quine shares, is that phenomenal consciousness does not require language, language being both a recent evolutionary emergent and absent in the many creatures we take to be sentient (Berwick and Chomsky, 2016). Quine's contribution is orthogonal to that nexus. He does not claim that experience needs language; he claims that the vocabulary of experience is parasitic on public language. Because meaning is exhausted by dispositions to verbal behavior conditioned in shared, observable circumstances, there is no autonomous private language of qualia from which quality-talk could draw its sense—a conclusion that converges, from a behaviorist rather than a grammatical direction, with Wittgenstein's considerations against a private language. Where Chomsky locates a native language faculty, and Searle takes language and consciousness as mutually constitutive—language crucial for consciousness as consciousness is for language—Quine's linguistic behaviorism, the position against which mid-century nativism partly defined itself, makes the idiom of the inner a late public construction resting on no private foundation. His is therefore a language relationship of a different order from the subcategory's others: not language as a condition of consciousness, but the logical regimentation of language as the sieve that decides what consciousness-talk may contribute to a scientific ontology.

Placement and Assessment

Quine is placed within the Landscape's Language Relationships subcategory (under Materialism) as its deflationary limiting case—the theorist for whom language bears on consciousness not because experience requires it, but because the logical regimentation of language demotes the ontological significance of phenomenal consciousness and it decides what talk of experience may contribute to science.

For consciousness studies, Quine's contribution here is a boundary rather than a mechanism. He explains neither why neural states are felt nor how language might capture their felt character; he argues instead that the felt character never entered the public, extensional language on which science draws, and that the idiom which seems to name it is a construction from outward reference. Set beside the subcategory's other theories, Quine marks its deflationary edge: language is relevant to the phenomenal chiefly as the instrument that keeps it out of serious ontology. Whether that is philosophical hygiene or a premature foreclosure remains, as with his naturalism generally—treated in the companion entry—the contested question.

References

Berwick, R. C., & Chomsky, N. (2016). Why Only Us: Language and Evolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Quine, W. V. O. (1960). Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Quine, W. V. O. (1987). Indeterminacy of translation again. Journal of Philosophy, 84(1), 5–10.