Willard Van Orman Quine

130 peter hylton
Now what has this to do with ontology? The answer is that, on
this view, ontology becomes language-relative. Ontology will vary
from language to language: This language might take sets as basic and
define expressions for numbers, whereas this other language might
have no set theory and presuppose the existence of the numbers outright.
More drastically, we might choose to speak a language of sensedata
– one in which the basic terms refer to immediate experience –
rather than the language of physical objects that we in fact speak.
So an ontological question, say, ‘Are there sets?’ has no flat-out answer.
The proper initial response is, it depends on what language you
choose to speak. Independent of the choice of language, there simply
is no answer to the question – indeed, Carnap holds that if we
attempt to ask the question absolutely rather than relative to some
particular language, then we are crossing the bounds of sense: There
simply is no absolute question to be asked.
The result of this is that the ontological question vanishes, along
with other metaphysical questions. The ontological question was
precisely the absolute question, and Carnap denies it any meaning.
Thus we may, on Carnap’s account, speak a language that quantifies
over sets, say. But this does not commit us to saying that there really
are sets, in some language-independent sense. There is no languageindependent
sense in which we can say what there is or isn’t. Of
course, while we are speaking that language, we will assert that
there are sets (or at least that sets of this or that kind exist). But
our speaking that language implies nothing more than that for certain
purposes we find it convenient and useful; our saying things in
it implies only that given the language those sentences are correct.
For Carnap, there really is no ontological commitment at all.
This defusing of ontology depends on the idea that the adoption
of a language is, in principle at least, separable from the adoption of
a theory within a language. Carnap’s position here requires that the
two have different epistemological bases: Within a language there
are rules that determine which theory is correct; the lack of corresponding
rules governing choice of language makes it, by contrast, a
fit area for tolerance.
This nexus of ideas is equivalent to an epistemologically significant
distinction between the analytic and the synthetic. If we
could clearly distinguish changes of language from changes of theory
within a language, then we could clearly distinguish analytic
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