Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine and Logical Positivism 235
September 23, 1944, published by White [1987] as “A Philosophical
Letter of Alfred Tarski.”)
Carnap was not deterred from publishing his Introduction to Semantics,
which appeared in 1942, and there was a substantial exchange
of letters between Quine and Carnap over it during 1943. As
Quine recalled,
I wrote him a long letter about his Introduction to Semantics. One issue
was analyticity and another was my criterion of ontological commitment as
applied to abstract objects. The two issues were linked, for Carnap viewed
his appeal to abstract objects as empty convention, and their quasi-existence
[as] analytic. (TDR 267)
The year after Introduction to Semantics appeared, Carnap published
Formalization of Logic, and in 1947 he published Meaning and Necessity.
(Carnap saw these three volumes as forming a single work,
to which he gave the collective title Studies in Semantics.)
Carnap attempted to meet Quine’s objections, both published
and from their correspondence. In Meaning and Necessity, §44, he
discussed Quine’s “Notes on Existence and Necessity” (1943) and
quoted extensively from comments Quine wrote to him on October
23, 1945, and January 1, 1946. 23 In 1950 Carnap published “Empiricism,
Semantics, and Ontology,” an important article in which he
responded to Quine’s rejection of any notion of meaning based on
the notion of analyticity (or of analyticity based on meaning) so far
as these notions are bound up with Quine’s treatment of ontology,
summed up in his famous dictum “To be is to be the value of a
variable.”
After the war, Quine began finally to see that his rejection of analyticity
might indeed be “the stuff of revolution,” and in 1947 he
focused on the issue of analyticity in a triangular correspondence
with Nelson Goodman (who had joined in some of the discussions
of 1940–1 between Carnap, Tarski, and Quine) and Morton White
(who had corresponded with Tarski during the war over this and related
issues). Word of these developments got around, and in 1950
the program committee of the American Philosophical Association
invited Quine to present a paper on this subject at the December
meeting, held in Toronto. Quine’s response was “Two Dogmas of
Empiricism.” “Truth by Convention” had made no reference to Carnap.
“Two Dogmas” was forthrightly critical of him.
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