Oh, how ironic the world can be sometimes. Those of you following my discussion with “Touchstone” over on Triablogue will understand how ironic this following passage I just read tonight is. (Those who haven’t been following won’t get the full flavor, but the passage is still interesting nonetheless.)
[T]he notions of observation sentence and community agreement are surely ad hoc exceptions to Quine’s general program. Quine is faced with the same choice which Carnap faced when he tried to develop the notion of protocol sentences. Carnap’s move from a completely phenomenalistic interpretation of protocol sentences to a public, intersubjective one was necessitated by the same kind of concerns which now beset Quine. All of the epistemological problems of verification, truth, and evidence surely arise in the process of trying to determine intersubjective, community agreement. Indeed…some way of handling all of those problems is necessary for us even to determine that there is a community to agree or disagree. If we try and imagine how this process would actually take place, we can easily understand the difficulties involved here. The agreement of the community is supposed to provide an “absolute standard” for observation statements which means that we must survey, observe, record and compare the reactions of various different members of the language community to the same sensory simulations under the same conditions. This process is supposed to provide us with a rough description of empirical psychology and a basis for epistemology. But examine closely how this process is supposed to be conducted and look at the fundamental epistemological questions which are being begged. What is to count as a member of the language community? What is to count as the “same” sensory stimulus? How do we know that people agree or disagree? At any given point, how are we to trust our records of our earlier interviews with other members of the community? Without some answers to these questions, the “new” epistemology cannot count as an improvement over the old, and psychology cannot count as an improvement over epistemology.
Harris, James F. (1992).  Against Relativism: A Philosophical Defense of Method, LaSalle: Open Court (p. 138-139)
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