Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine on Reference and Ontology 131
sentences from synthetic sentences (the analytic sentences would
be those about which we cannot change our minds without change
of language; the synthetic would be those about which a change of
mind did not involve change of language). And if the two sorts of
changes are justified in quite different ways, as they must be on
Carnap’s picture, then the analytic-synthetic distinction marks an
important epistemological gulf.
Quine’s objections to that sort of distinction between the analytic
and the synthetic have been widely discussed, and I shall not
rehearse them here. (See chapter 2, including the references.) It is
worth emphasizing, however, that Carnap’s way of disposing of ontology
requires more than that we can draw some distinction or other
between the analytic and the synthetic. It requires also that this distinction
be of epistemological significance. Quine himself said, almost
from the start but later with increasing clarity, that we may
well be able to define some distinction, based perhaps on the way in
which language is learnt, but this, he held, will lack any particular
epistemological significance. 21 For Carnap’s defusing of ontology to
succeed, however, it is not only a distinction that we need. We need
also an argument that the distinction we give is of epistemological
significance; constructing such an argument is a much harder task
for Carnap’s defenders. 22
Quine, then, rejects the analytic-synthetic distinction, at least in
Carnap’s epistemologically loaded version. In his view, we have no
reason to accept that there are changes of two epistemologically distinct
kinds. We have, correspondingly, no basis for thinking that
some changes (Carnap’s internal changes) are rule governed in a clear
sense in which others (external changes) are not. Hence we have no
reason to apply the principle of tolerance to changes of the latter sort.
We can reach the same conclusion by a more circuitous but more
informative route. For Quine, all of our knowledge has the same
aim: obtaining the best theory for predicting and understanding
the course of events in the world. The idea of the “best” theory here
has to do with simplicity as well as with conformity to observation.
Carnap’s external changes may contribute to this goal just as much
as his internal changes: The change from the language of Newtonian
mechanics to the language of relativistic mechanics made possible
a simpler theory of the world. Even mathematics contributes to this
goal, by the role that it plays in our scientific theories. So all changes
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