Willard Van Orman Quine

154 robert kirk
world. Experiences can suggest that our theory needs revision, yet
which revisions we should make depend not just on the parts of it
most directly associated with the experiences but on the system as
a whole. Seeing drops of water on the window would normally lead
me to believe it was raining, but if I happened to know there were
builders on the roof using a hose, I might not acquire that belief.
In that and similar ways, “Our statements about the external world
face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as
a corporate body” (TDEb 41). So the meanings of individual statements
cannot be paired off with sets of experiences. For the same
holistic reason, they cannot be paired off with patterns of behavior
either. That starts to make the whole idea of meaning seem less firm
and objective than we tend to assume. True, meaning and sameness
of meaning (synonymy) can be defined quite neatly if we may rely
on such notions as those of analyticity, proposition, and necessity.
But those notions themselves are all hard to define in reasonably
clear terms, and Quine’s view is that they are in the same leaky boat
together.
Quine tends to associate his rejection of the objectivity of meaning
with rejection of the conception of meanings as mental entities – the
myth of the mind as a museum where “the exhibits are meanings
and the words are labels” (OR 27). However, those are distinct issues.
It seems possible to join with him (and Dewey and Wittgenstein) in
rejecting that primitive conception while still insisting that it is a
matter of fact whether two sentences mean the same. (It is not the
notion of meanings as entities that Quine objects to. He points out
that if synonymy were a matter of fact, meanings could be defined as
classes of synonyms. His objection is to the assumption that meaning
and sameness of meaning are objective.) 3
He concedes that the situation would be different if the notion of
meaning, even if not definable in reasonably clear terms, had a useful
role to play in explaining behavior. We tend to assume it plays such
a role. Why did that German say, ‘Das Neutrino hat keine Masse’?
Because she believes photons have no mass, and that is what the
sentence means. Such remarks appear to be explanatory. However,
Quine has called that sort of thing “spurious explanation, mentalistic
explanation at its worst” (MVD 87). Of three levels of explanation of
behavior, the mental is “the most superficial” and scarcely deserves
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