Willard Van Orman Quine

134 peter hylton
best theory of the world to be real, in the only sense that word has.
In another sense, it is not metaphysical, for it is not to be settled
by anything resembling a priori speculation. It is settled, rather, by
the ordinary processes by which our theories of the world are constructed.
For Quine, his own reflections on ontological commitment
and his use of regimentation and of reduction (e.g., of ordered pairs
to sets) are part of that process of theory construction – the part that
is particularly concerned with the clarity of the theory and with the
avoidance of useless questions.
Quine is thus a realist about ontology, not a relativist, at least not
in the way in which Carnap was. Carnap’s relativism was a relativism
of language based on the principle of tolerance; Quine’s rejection of an
epistemologically grounded distinction between the analytic and the
synthetic undermines that principle entirely. This is not to say that
for Quine questions of ontology have nothing to do with language.
On the contrary, many ontological questions can be conveniently
phrased as questions about language, such as the choice between the
language of Newtonian mechanics and the language of relativistic
mechanics. The contrast with Carnap is that for Quine there is a
correct answer to the question of language choice. If one theory enables
us to predict and deal with events better than another, then the
language of the first is the one we should accept. And in accepting it,
we no doubt accept a certain range of entities as existing – we accept
an ontology.
IV
In one way, then, Quine is not a relativist about ontology; in another
way, however, he is. Indeed, the Quinean doctrine known as
ontological relativity or the inscrutability of reference has become
famous, even notorious. This form of relativism about ontology is
not derivative from relativism about truth: On the contrary, it occurs
even if we suppose all problems about truth to be settled – even if
we suppose that we possess a theory of the world whose complete
truth is not in doubt. Such a completely true theory is, after all, a
body of true sentences. The referential burden of language, however,
is not simply a matter of which sentences are true but also a matter
of how we see those sentences as making ontological claims. It is
thus a matter of how the whole sentences are analyzed into parts.
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