Willard Van Orman Quine

234 daniel isaacson
science.’ Semantics was wanted, not just syntax” (TDR 267). Quine’s
passionate opposition to (one might say intolerance of) the intensional
leads him to insensitive overstatement: “I fear your principle
of tolerance may finally lead you even to tolerate Hitler” (TDR 241).
Carnap replies patiently to Quine’s outburst in a letter dated February
11, 1938:
Your sermon against my sin of intensionality has made a great impression
upon me. But I may say as an apology, I do not indulge in this vice generally
and thoroughly. I used an intensional meta-language only for certain special
purposes and I found it useful and even necessary for these purposes, namely
for the investigation of the relation of translation between an extensional
and an intensional language. It seems to me that certain interesting results
are found in this way. Although we usually do not like to apply intensional
languages, nevertheless I think we cannot help analyzing them. What would
you think of an entomologist who refuses to investigate fleas and lice because
he dislikes them? Now, for a syntactical analysis of an intensional
language an extensional meta-language will do; but not for a semantical
analysis. (Creath 1990, 245)
In “Two Dogmas in Retrospect,” Quine quotes the pre-penultimate
and penultimate sentences of this passage and comments sardonically,
“Well, the fleas and lice proved addictive. By 1946 he was
championing modal logic” (TDR 267).
The next important philosophical exchange between Quine and
Carnap was in the fall and winter of 1940–1, when Carnap was at
Harvard as a visiting professor. Tarski was also at Harvard that year
on a “makeshift research appointment” (TL 149). Quine, Carnap, and
Tarski met for regular discussions, which Quine described in these
terms:
By way of providing structure for our discussions, Carnap proposed reading
the manuscript of his Introduction to Semantics for criticism.
My misgivings over meaning had by this time issued in explicit doubts
about the notion, crucial to Carnap’s philosophy, of an analytic sentence: a
sentence true purely by virtue of the meanings of its words. I voiced these
doubts, joined by Tarski, before Carnap had finished reading us his first page.
The controversy continued through subsequent sessions, without resolution
and without progress in the reading of Carnap’s manuscript. (TL 150)
(For an expression by Tarski of doubts he had about the notion of an
analytic sentence around that time, see his letter to Morton White of
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