TADEUSZ SZUBKA QUINE AND DAVIDSON ON PERCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE One of the main differences between Quine's and Davidson's theories of knowl- edge and mind lies in their accounts of the content of perception and the way in which it contributes to our knowledge of the external world. Both thinkers are very sensitive to these differences and it has been the subject of discussion between them in recent publications. To put it very roughly, Quine holds firmly to the posi- tion that although we finally manage to get veridical knowledge of the external world, the content of our perceptions are just the triggerings of our sense receptors that give us reliable clues about the objects and happenings in our environment. Davidson considers this view to be a naturalized successor of an older defective empiricism which should be abandoned. In its place he proposes an externalist theory of perceptual content, according to which content is fully determined or con- stituted by the objects and events in the external world. This move, among other things, bypasses many ofthe troubles that Quine's approach faces and gives a solid ground for our intersubjective communication. In other words, if the central concern of Quine's epistemological project is epistemology naturalized, so the central concern of Davidson's corresponding project is epistemology externalised.! In the present essay I shall outline, in the first part, Quine's view of perceptual knowledge, and subsequently, in the second part, Davidson's arguments against it and his own positive account of perceptual content. In the third and final part I shall try to say why I find both of these options unacceptable, and then make some sug- gestions towards what I take to be a more satisfactory solution. 1. NEURAL INTAKE AND OBSERVATION SENTENCES Quine believes that someone who has given up the idea of philosophy as independ- ent of and prior to science, and who accepts its continuity with science, has only one available option in epistemology: she must endorse a non-mentalistic version of empiricism; one transformed into the physics of stimulus and response. Of course, this does not mean that she is restricted, while doing epistemology, to rely exclusively on the theories and hypotheses of contemporary physics; by no means - she can draw upon such disciplines as neurology, psycholinguistics and evolution- ary genetics. That is, the task of a scientific or naturalized epistemologist is to adhere to the ancient slogan nihil in mente quod non prius in sensu but to give it a distinctive and broadly understood physicalist tum. The assumptions from which the naturalist epistemologist starts would pass today as hardly disputable truisms or platitudes. We are highly complicated living 7 Alex Orenstein and Petr Kotatko (eds.), Knowledge, Language and Logic, 7-19. © 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers.