Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine on Reference and Ontology 143
theory of the world. The lesson of inscrutability, by contrast, is that
there is no more to an object than its role in theory. 31
V
Finally, I want to raise, and very briefly to address, a difficult question
on which Quine’s own writings give us comparatively little guidance.
To what extent does the relativity of ontology, as we discussed
it in the previous section, undermine the importance that Quine
attributed to ontology and to reference, at least in earlier decades?
There was certainly a shift of emphasis in his work as he came to formulate
the inscrutability of reference and then to lay greater stress
on it. The present question is whether this was merely a shift of
emphasis or did it also have repercussions on the central Quinean
tenets relating to reference?
For Quine, as we saw in §II, studying the referential structure of
our language is a central way of gaining insight into its functioning;
clarifying that structure – replacing it with a better – is a central
way in which we may clarify and improve our language and our
conceptual scheme. These ideas seem to me quite untouched by an
acceptance of ontological relativity. The insight into our language
that studies of reference afford is precisely an insight into its referential
structure, and this is not affected by ontological relativity.
That idea suggests that it is indifferent whether we take ourselves
to be referring to one set of objects or to another set of objects that
play the exact same roles in our theory. And it is the roles that are
at stake in Quinean studies of reference.
When Quine suggests ontological reform, the sort of clarification
he offers also survives, I think, an appreciation of ontological relativity.
Thus he offers a definition of ordered pairs, for example, and a
way of reconstruing talk of states of mind as talk of states of body. 32
The ontological reforms Quine favors can perfectly well be understood
in terms of an object’s theoretical role (i.e., its place in the
structure of our theory). Let us consider minds and bodies. Quine’s
reasons for not wanting to take talk of states of mind at face value,
such as their lack of clear identity criteria, will apply equally to anything
playing the same theoretical role – that is, to any proxy for
states of mind. And by the same token, any proxy for states of body
will have the advantages that lead Quine to prefer them to states of
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006