ABSTRACT
According to numerous commentators, ranging from Davidson to Laudan, Quine’s work, especially the strongest version of the D-Q underdetermination thesis, has unmistakable relativist implications, though these implications are expressly rejected by Quine himself. This rejection is not seen as surprising: with notable exceptions, such as Margolis, contemporary philosophers who occupy the conceptual space of relativism emphatically reject any attachment of a relativist label to themselves. Be that as it may, it could be argued that much of the relativism which is said to vitiate Quine’s more intricate writings is given a more tangible, historical expression in the works of Kuhn. Aside entirely from Kuhn’s explicit acknowledgement of an intellectual debt to Quine in his Structures of Scientific Revolutions, (Kuhn 1962) a Kuhnian paradigm can be seen as a specific historico-scientific explication or a novel original articulation of Quine’s milestones of empiricism. In the Kuhnian historico-sociological approach to philosophy of science, scientific description is theory-laden, the emphasis is on the location of sentences within paradigms, which can be viewed as concrete historical exemplars of Quinian conceptual schemes, and the Duhem-Quine underdetermination theses appear to reign supreme. Hence, since Kuhn spells out these central Quinian themes in more concrete historical terms, their relativistic implications are more patently visible there than in Quine’s more abstract approach.
