 About the epistemological project, so understood, Quine’s chief observation is hardly news: the Cartesian quest is “a lost cause” (ibid.). Whether in the form Descartes himself practiced, or in any subsequent form up to and including the logical empiricists’, work on both the conceptual and the doctrinal side is bound to fail: no strict translation of the notion of “body” in sensory terms is possible, and “the inferential steps between sensory evidence and scientific doctrine must fall short of certainty” (1969b: 74–75).