Willard Van Orman Quine

148 peter hylton
Chapter 16 of his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1919). Note that Quine uses it to show the possibility
of eliminating all names. Russell’s concern was with the elimination
only of those names that name objects with which we are not
acquainted. In the end, however, Russell comes to hold that we are
acquainted with almost none of what we ordinarily think of as objects;
from some points of view, the net result is not so far from Quine, though
there are great differences along the way.
14. We can, of course, form sentences such as ‘(∃x)(∃y)(x is an object. y is
a property. x has y)’; but in this sentence the predicative work is done
by ‘has’. The issue here, in any case, is whether every sentence using a
predicate is thereby committed to the existence of properties. Whether
there might be some limited class of sentences of which this is true is a
different question; Quine’s answer is the same, though his reasons are
not.
15. This is not to say that Quine rejects all abstract entities. On the contrary,
he accepts the existence of classes. But this is because any convenient
statement of our knowledge will include sentences that explicitly quantify
over classes. It is not because a naturalistic account of how we use
and understand such sentences postulates causal contact between us
and classes: It does not.
16. This passage is from TPT 9; it overlaps, to a large extent, a passage from
FM 160.
17. Quine says explicitly, “I use ‘science’ broadly,” and he includes psychology,
economics, sociology, and history among the “softer sciences” (FSS
49). I follow this usage.
18. Some critics have tried to make out a difference in Quine’s use of these
two phrases, but Quine himself intends no such difference. See RPR 459.
19. I hope it is unnecessary to stress that the treatment of Carnap given
here is very cursory and, inevitably, does not do justice to the force of
his position.
20. See The Logical Syntax of Language (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1937; first published in German, 1934), esp. 51–2; see also Carnap’s
“Intellectual Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap,
ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1963), 54–5.
21. See, e.g., CLT 396, RR78–80, PTb 55–6, and esp. RGH 207.
22. In “Analyticity and the Indeterminacy of Translation” (Synthese [52]:
1982, 167–84), 1 argue that Quine’s arguments against the epistemological
significance of the distinction are to a large extent separable from
his claims that there is no distinction.
23. It is clear at this point that talk of “language” here is not exactly talk
of languages in the ordinary sense. Modern scientific French, German,
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006