Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine on Reference and Ontology 119
into language, as Quine says more than once (see, e.g., PTb 5 and FSS
22). It is for this reason also that they can play the role of ultimate
evidence, for while we may disagree about all the sophistication, we
cannot disagree about observation sentences. This last point is not
simply a matter of the definition of observation sentences as those
that all speakers of the language would give the same verdict on in
the same circumstances. It is also that if we come to disagree about
a significant number of (what were formerly) observation sentences,
then communication between us will have broken down.
Observation sentences, then, do not refer to stimulations of our
sensory surfaces, or anything of that kind. Do they refer to other objects?
This question is more complicated, though it may appear to
be simple enough. It looks as if the utterance ‘Mama’ by a particular
child refers (let us say) to that child’s mother; indeed, it may seem
simply to be a name for that person. Equally, it looks as if the sentence
‘There’s a horse’ contains the term ‘horse’, which (of course)
refers to horses. If we think of an observation sentence as it might
occur in the discourse of an adult (someone who has mastered the
language and possesses a range of knowledge about various matters),
then these appearances are correct. Thought of in that way, an observation
sentence will typically contain, or simply be, a referring
term. Quine claims, however, this is true only because the adult has
mastered not only the use of the observation sentence but also the
use of more sophisticated parts of the language. To refer to a horse,
he argues, it is not sufficient to know that it is appropriate to say
‘Horse’ or ‘There’s a horse’ when one is in the presence of a horse.
One needs also to have some idea of the answers to questions such
as these: What counts as one horse and what counts as two? Under
what circumstances do we have the same horse over again and when
do we have a new horse? The beginner, who simply makes the noise
‘Horse’ when receiving (say) the sort of visual stimulations that one
typically receives when looking at a horse (or, more realistically, at
the picture of a horse), cannot even formulate such questions, much
less start to answer them. Yet it is, Quine insists, only in the mouth
of one who has these capacities that such words can be said to refer
at all: There is more to reference than merely making a sound in
response to patterns of stimulation.
Another way to make this point is to say that observation sentences
are indeed sentences. Even a one-word observation sentence,
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