Quine and language as a social art: projection, harmony, and the illusion of shared linguistic standards

Abstract Quine is generally taken to be a paradigmatic defender of the idea that language is a shared public resource, learned by internalizing shared standards. I argue that this misreads him. The correct Quinean picture is what I call the Projection Thesis: our linguistic practices result from the projection of individual organization and the harmony among individual neurophysiological mechanisms, not from the internalization of anything shared. Establishing this requires distinguishing Quine’s heuristic vocabulary—behavioral dispositions, which delimit phenomena to be explained—from his explanatory vocabulary—neurophysiology, which actually explains them. Conflating these levels generates what I call the Philosophical Illusion: the seamlessness of practice is taken at face value, leading us to posit shared entities to explain it. I trace the Projection Thesis through two domains. In grammar, I show that the child’s acquisition of grammatical structure is a projection from her own resources, not an extraction from the data—a point connected to Quine’s indeterminacy of translation through the parallel with the radical translator’s analytical hypotheses. In the domain of perceptual similarity standards, I show how the preestablished harmony among innate standards sustains communication without shared resources while generating the illusion of shared language. The philosophical payoff of dissolving this illusion is substantial: negotiation emerges as the real social art, and the absence of shared standards reveals that the only available measure of communicative success is the response of the other—a result that, as I argue in the conclusion, points toward a Cavellian picture of mutual responsibility as the ground of linguistic community.