Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine on Reference and Ontology 137
the sentence as made up of parts that are themselves significant. The
qualification is that it will in fact be impossible for us to use theoretical
sentences correctly without an analysis of those sentences
into significant constituent parts. Take the most obvious case, that
of the “so-called logical connections” between sentences. A logical
connection may be thought of as summing up infinitely many facts
of the following form: Whenever it is appropriate to assert that sentence,
it is also appropriate to assert this one. But we could not learn
all of these facts one by one. What we learn – implicitly at first, explicitly
from logic books – is that whenever it is appropriate to assert
a sentence of this form, it is appropriate also to assert a corresponding
sentence of that form. But this requires that we attribute forms
to sentences, that is, see them as made up of constituent parts and
patterns that are significant and recur in other sentences.
Let us see where we are in our argument. Reference is a relation
between words – significant constituent parts of sentences – and
objects. The fundamental relation of language to the world, the relation
that guarantees empirical significance to our language, however,
does not take place at that level but rather at the level of the relation
between sentences and stimulations. We are bound to attribute
significance to constituent parts of sentences because it is only in
that way that we can see the patterns and analogies in language that
make it possible for us to use it. This situation leaves it open that
there might in fact be more than one way to attribute structure to
our sentences, more than one way to attribute significance to their
constituent parts – more than one way to analyze them so as to
make perspicuous sense of our language. And note that if there were,
then there would be no way to bring evidence to bear on the question
which of the methods of analysis is correct. Evidence, as Quine
conceives it, bears on whole sentences, and the imagined dispute
is between two ways of breaking sentences down into constituent
parts, ways that will make no difference to which sentences are to
be accepted.
Here we have, in outline, Quine’s doctrine of ontological relativity,
or at least the necessary background to that doctrine. Let us see
how Quine encapsulates some of the points we have been making:
Reference and ontology recede thus to the status of mere auxiliaries. True
sentences, observational and theoretical, are the alpha and omega of the
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