Willard Van Orman Quine

peter hylton
5 Quine on Reference
and Ontology
Issues of reference and ontology occupy a considerable portion of
Quine’s work. In the Preface to Word and Object, Quine indicates
that the bulk of that book is the product of his reflecting on “the
development and structure of our own referential apparatus” (WO
ix). His revival of the word ‘ontology’ in a nonpejorative sense marks,
in precise fashion, a central disagreement that he has with the work
of Carnap, who was his greatest teacher. In spite of their centrality
to his thought as a whole, however, Quine’s views on these topics
are not well understood. Nor, indeed, are they straightforward. The
aim of this chapter is to set out those views as clearly as may be and
to indicate points of remaining unclarity.
I
Let us begin with the views of Russell, which form a sharp and useful
contrast with those of Quine on these topics. 1 Russell postulated a
direct and immediate relation between the mind and entities outside
the mind, a relation he called acquaintance; this relation he held to
lie at the base of all knowledge. 2 His insistence on the directness and
immediacy of the relation is to be explained in terms of his opposition
to idealism. The idealists held that our knowledge is always mediated
by a complex structure of which we can have a priori knowledge;
this also gives us knowledge of the world, at least as far as it is
knowable. It was in reaction to this that Russell, along with G. E.
Moore, had postulated the notion of acquaintance. It was to be a
cognitive relation, holding between the mind and objects, that relied
on no kind of structure or theory: an immediate relation rather than
a mediated relation. The mind is, as it were, in direct contact with
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