Your piece has been here for 6 months without any response, which if true is unbelievable to me—flabbergasting. For one thing, I’ve read a few or several of your pieces and think this one is at least as well-written, important and thought-provoking as others that have gotten much more response.

For another, this piece crystallizes a huge piece of my philosophy journey of the last 20 years of reading people like Quine as well as Stroud, Rorty, Davidson, plus Wittgenstein, Ayer and the logical positivists, and trying to understand and synthesize their ideas.

(My only Stroud reading was The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism, which made a big impression on me.)

Your piece follows a careful arc of introducing different ideas on the topic, including their historical antecedents in epistemology, and in effect arranging their arguments on the field of battle and comparing and contrasting them. That seems like quite a feat.

In my reading, writers like Davidson and Quine are oblique in comparing and contrasting their thought with the thoughts of others, and few commentators make significantly further progress. Even Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature seems to fall short.

(Peter Hylton in Quine notes Quine tended to express himself in negative terms and seemed to extrapolate a more positive account of Quine’s thinking.)

I’m wondering what your position is—or maybe better, how you score the different positions you delineate? I’d very much agree with Stroud that causalism is “questionable.” It might seem like a punt to you, but the positivist “pseudo-question” position seems more resolved philosophically than turning to indeterminacy or inscrutability.

Thank you very much for any thoughts you might want to offer, they’d be much appreciated!