Evidence and Cause in Nineteenth-Century Naturalized Kantianism: : Helmholtz, Lange, and Quine’s Argumentative Strategies

Abstract

This paper argues that W. V. O. Quine’s twentieth-century evidential and proximal theory of meaning and belief, developed in opposition to Donald Davidson, employs argumentation strategies strikingly similar to those of Hermann von Helmholtz and Friedrich Albert Lange in their nineteenth-century efforts to naturalize Kant’s epistemology. Contrary to Jim Hopkins’s interpretation, which links Helmholtz’s theory of unconscious predictive inferences with Davidson’s causal theory of action and truth-conditional semantics (2018), this paper contends that Quine’s epistemic externalism, rooted in a naturalized account of evidentiality and proximality, aligns more closely with Helmholtz and Lange’s psychophysiological theory of meaning