I'm almost loath to make this post since Quine is one of those philosophers I read and read about but am apt to get wrong at crucial moments. That's primarily because while I read him I don't read him with the rigor, frequency or intensity that I read many other figures. So I know him better than some I know just enough to be dangerous on, but not well enough to feel confident saying what he really believes. That said in the discussion of the analytic/synthetic divide someone suggested Quine as a pragmatist. So I thought I'd discuss that a bit. Just remember my lack of confidence.
Quine seems much like a pragmatist in many ways, especially since he credits several of his ideas to Peirce. (See "Two Dogmas") Probably Quine's big exposure to pragmatism, outside of the logical writings of Peirce, was C. I. Lewis who was Quine's teach and eventual colleague. Lewis, you may know, was one of the last great pragmatists. Although his views were divergent from Peirce and James. (I should note I feel confident on since I know less about Lewis than Quine) Lewis, as I understand it, was trying to understand the notion of the a priori pragmatically and ended up developing some ideas somewhat like Carnap. (i.e. conceptual or linguistic frameworks)
By and large though at the time Quine was ascending in philosophy pragmatism was descending. Certainly Dewey and Lewis were still around but folks looked at pragmatism as a movement that was somewhat passe. (And probably continued to until Putnam and Rorty and perhaps the rediscovery of Peirce in some circles)
Even Quine's colleague Lewis is more the target of attack in the analytic/synthetic critique. After all Lewis' and Carnap's conceptual schemes in effect are undermined by it. Of course Quine says in "Two Dogmas" that this is a move towards a more pragmatic position. But it's important to note Quine's qualification of this.
...the contrast supposed by Carnap and C. I. Lewis between the factual and the pragmatic. 'In repudiating such a boundary', I wrote, 'I espouse a more thorough pragmatism'. This passage had unforeseen consequences. I suspect it is responsible for my being widely classified as a pragmatist. I don't object, except that I am not clear on what it takes to qualify as a pragmatist. I was merely taking the word from Carnap and handing it back: in whatever sense the framework of science is pragmatic, so is the rest of science. ("Two Dogmas in Retrospect", Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21, 272)
Quine even questions the label of pragmatism, writing, "I had been identified with pragmatism, but it was not clear to me what it took to be a pragmatist. In my paper I examined the card-carrying pragmatists on each of a succession of tenets to which I subscribed as an empiricist." ( The Time of My Life: An Autobiography, 415)
Given that Quine at best isn't sure what it takes to be a pragmatist and sees the key issues as more empirical than pragmatic, one should tread carefully.
Going to content, let me quote from Heikki J. Koskinen's "Quine and Pragmatism" in Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 42.3 (2006) 309-346. (From which I confess to getting much of the above, although I've thought similar things myself)
Both Quine and the pragmatists, whatever their exact relation is, have often been regarded as anti-metaphysical thinkers. One of the messages of this paper is that this is a misleading reading of both. Pragmatism, in Quine, was after all originally introduced as something that has to do with our "positing" of objects. Metaphysical elements in pragmatism as well as in Quine ought to be emphasized (see Koskinen, 2004a, 2004b, 2006). Yet, it would be overhasty to conclude that Quine is, therefore, a pragmatist, after all. Generally speaking, pragmatist metaphysics tends to be more pluralistic and tolerant than Quine's "austere" ontology, and this kind of differences should not be denied (cf. McHenry, 1995; Capps, 1996; Shook, 2002). Moreover, Quine's strict reliance on logic and natural science might even be seen as unpragmatic in an important sense: even in his metaphysical reflections, Quine leaves out some ordinary "realities"—not the concrete material things of everyday human experience like sticks and stones, because reification and ontology inevitably begin from such postulations, but realities such as values, agency, practices, and mentality—and this neglect is surely something that pragmatic thinkers drawing attention to the richness of human experience should protest against. Quine is merely interested in questions such as whether there are, in addition to concrete particulars that occupy certain space-time regions, also sets or classes (or properties), modalities, intensional entities, etc., favoring nominalistic, austere rejections of such entities (though he does posit sets or classes). There is, for example, no ontological role for the category of a human being to play in Quine's austere metaphysics, nor for Peircean realism of "generals" that, arguably, ought to be involved in pragmatist metaphysics, though not necessarily in Peirce's own strongly realist manner (cf. Pihlström, 2003, ch. 3).
We may say that Quine, for instance in writings such as "Posits and Reality" (Quine, 1966, pp. 246–254) and "Things and Their Place in Theories" (Quine, 1981, pp. 1–23) employs something like a pragmatic method in metaphysics, evaluating the acceptability of ontological commitments, or "posits", on the basis of their pragmatic value. However, this method can be employed in a tolerant or in an intolerant manner, and arguably Quine's employment of it is intolerantly scientistic, narrowly focusing on the pragmatic value of ontological posits in scientific contexts. If Quine is regarded as a pragmatist, a clear distinction should be made between his pragmatism and the kind of pluralistic pragmatism, with a wide variety of different kinds of (practice- or framework-relative) ontological commitments, that the anti-scientistic current of pragmatist thought from James to Putnam has favored. That a more tolerant, more openly pragmatic method in ontological inquiry is possible by no means diminishes the importance of the fact that both Quine and non-scientistic pragmatists like Putnam are, or should be regarded as, deeply committed to metaphysics, to postulating entities and evaluating (pragmatically) such postulations.
Of course I'm not a fan of the Rorty/Putnam style of pragmatism. (Well, I do like Putnam although I often disagree with him) The issue of practice or framework relative ontological commitments is more complex, as those who are familiar with my attempts to grapple with those notions in the Heideggarian context might recognize.
If we contrast Peirce and Quine rather than merely pragmatism and Quine things are a bit easier, despite the influence on Quine of Peirce. Quine is largely a nominalist whereas Peirce is a thoroughgoing Scholastic realist. Quine often paid lip service to such realism but outside of mathematical objects, and then only later in life, I'm not sure of what universals Quine actually accepted as real.
Have you read Ontological Relativity? If not, then you should, as it is most germane to this topic (he begins by talking about Dewey). I think it's much more illuminating, myself, to think of Quine as a naturalist than as a pragmatist, because when he is a pragmatist, it is always in the serve of naturalism.
I've not read all of that one I must confess. (I've read parts obviously) I really ought pick it up one of these days. I don't recall the parts about Dewey. Maybe after I finish reading Davidson I'll turn to doing Quine in a more comprehensive fashion.
(Edit: This appears to be one of the few books Google Books has up in full. The Dewey passage is on page 27 onward. I should also add that I have read this and actually not that long ago. I don't know why I couldn't remember the title as one I'd read.)
I do think that, with a few caveats such as the pragmatic maxim, Quine's "pragmatism" does seem much more like empiricism.
I admit naturalism is one of those topics that I kind of find frustrating since it's so hard to pin down what someone means by naturalism. One might say neither Peirce nor James were naturalists due to their belief in God. However their religious beliefs were rather idiosyncratic to say the least. Certainly not akin to the traditional Augustine or Thomas Aquinas theology that naturalism ends up normally being opposed to.
To add, primarily because of Dewey, I find pragmatism a pretty wide field. And of course some pretty notable pragmatic scholars do place Quine and Davidson in the pragmatic label. I can't complain too much since they are arguably at least as much pragmatists as Rorty or Putnam are.
I should also note that I'm pretty much an old school pragmatist. while I don't dislike Dewey, he really did change pragmatism pretty significantly. It's probably no coincidence that so many of the borderline pragmatists are influenced by Dewey.
Regarding Quine and Peirce and the analytic divide it is interesting that Quine's critique can be seen as an implication of his nominalism. That is he's taking the positivist notion of verificationalism and simply applying it to analytic meanings and claiming one should reject it. So it may be apt to say that Quine is less criticizing positivism from a pragmatist perspective than purifying positivism in terms of positivism's own conception of naturalism. Davidson is a more complex case I think.
Peirce's rejection of the analytic divide is just because he thinks all reasoning is synthetic and fallible. He also sees logic in terms of ethics and as something learnable in a basically scientific fashion. Given his realism, that's understandable. For someone who rejects realism that move just isn't open in the same way. One ends up with the highly problematic approaches to logic that I think too many empirists have made.
Of course Peirce has his own problems since the pragmatic maxim isn't treated consistently by him. Sometimes it's a verificationalist critique not unlike the positivists and sometimes it's more a way of understanding meaning. Then there are questions about the compatibility of the maxim with his realism. (Although I find that critique far less persuasive)
Getting back to your passage about Dewey, the big issue in equating behavioralism and pragmatism is, I think, in terms of how counterfactuals are handled. Originally Peirce held to a somewhat naive view of the pragmatic maxim. However he quickly realized that the behaviors have to be habits and not just particular instances of behaviors and also has to be potential behaviors and not just the manifest ones. This is obvious to see since without that a diamond only becomes hard when hit. I just don't know how Dewey interpreted this, although I suspect he bought the Peirce line here.
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