Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine on Reference and Ontology 121
‘Blue pebble’. Someone who does utter these words can already, in
retrospect, be seen as postulating an object – a pebble – and saying
something about it.
It is only with hindsight, however, that this distinction at the observational
level should be seen as genuine reification, as introducing
objects in the familiar sense. Objects such as pebbles have identity
conditions that provide for their reidentification from time to time.
This is a matter that cannot be dealt with at the purely observational
level, for it involves rudimentary physical theory: “[R]eification of
bodies across time is beyond the reach of observation sentences and
categoricals. Substantial reification is theoretical” (PTb 25). Reification
also requires the ability to use words such as ‘same’, ‘if another’,
and ‘an’, means of forming plurals, and so on. These expressions and
transformations, Quine suggests, are acquired contextually, together
and little by little. 8 Merely standing in front of something making a
noise is not yet naming an object, not even if one consistently makes
the same noise when in front of the same object. As another author
put it, “[A] great deal of stage-setting in the language is presupposed
if the mere act of naming is to make sense.” 9 For the adult language
user, the stage is set; hence we are likely to see the child’s first recognizable
noises as already names in the full-fledged sense. But the
capacity to name things, in our sense, is acquired little by little.
There is, of course, far more to be said about Quine’s account of the
acquisition of fully referential language – and far more than Quine
says about the process itself. But it is not our purpose here to explore
these matters in detail. What is important for us is that reference,
for Quine, is not the fundamental relation between language and the
world; it is not the means by which language acquires its empirical
content and comes to be about the world. That relation is, rather,
the relation between an observation sentence and the situations that
typically lead to the sorts of stimulations under which the sentence
is uttered or commands assent when uttered by another. Reference,
on Quine’s account, is a relation between language, or some linguistic
expressions, and the world, just not one that is fundamental in
the sense we have indicated. The capacity to refer is a language-using
capacity that is more sophisticated than the most elementary, purely
observational sort. A child acquires this capacity, little by little, as
it grows up.
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