Quine demolished logical positivism, which is to say he undermined that neo-Kantian grounding of philosophy’s autonomy. Kant called it “transcendentalism,” while the positivists called it “conceptual analysis.” Quine demolished the very idea of analytic truth and thus rejected the utility of pure conceptual analysis. The upshot of that critique was that, on Quine’s naturalism, there’s no distinction between philosophy and science (given the holistic theory of meaning).
See the Stanford Encyclopedia article on Quine, which says that Quine “rejects the idea of a distinction between philosophy on the one hand and empirical science on the other hand. To the contrary: he sees philosophy as essentially in the same line of work as science, but mostly concerned with more theoretical and abstract questions.”
That’s implicitly scientistic. It’s not just that Quine was opposed to cognitive foundations since he also redefined philosophy as a general form of science. Of course, the continuity between the two would allow for the converse reconstruction. Why not redefine science as nitpicky philosophy? But that’s not the tenor of Quine’s work. He favoured science and demoted philosophy. That’s scientistic, which is to say it’s based on esteem for science and on a prejudice against any rival discipline.
The Stanford article points out that analytic philosophy has rejected this scientism: “In the case of naturalism, many philosophers have welcomed the idea that they are free to use concepts and results drawn from empirical science. Fewer have accepted that philosophy should also be constrained by scientific standards of clarity, of evidence, and of explanatoriness.”
Note that last sentence which implies that Quine thought philosophy should be bound by scientific standards, not the converse. And that’s arbitrary, given the continuity posited by holism. That arbitrariness is the sign of a scientistic prejudice or a leap of faith (science worship).
You’re just mischaracterizing my views when you suggest they’re scientistic, which is fine because you probably haven’t read many of my articles. Not only do I say philosophy is separate from science because of its artistic aspect, but I hold out the possibility of a valid religion, depending on its honour and aesthetic merit in dealing with our existential predicament. If anything, my pragmatic approach to knowledge reduces science to instrumentalism, so if a discipline has a different purpose (other than technological control of the environment), its autonomy is secured.
