Willard Van Orman Quine

236 daniel isaacson
Five weeks after presenting “Two Dogmas” at the Toronto meeting,
Quine gave a paper to Carnap’s seminar at the University of
Chicago 24 (part of which he published under the title “On Carnap’s
Views on Ontology”). In it, he again addresses his disagreements with
Carnap:
[A]n issue has persisted between us for years over questions of ontology and
analyticity. These questions prove to be interrelated; their interrelations
come out especially clearly in Carnap’s paper “Empiricism, semantics, and
ontology.” I shall devote particular attention to that one paper in an effort
to isolate and reduce our divergences. (OCVO 203)
In “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology,” Carnap had accepted
Quine’s notion that ontological commitment is carried by the variables
of a given theory, but he did this in the context of a distinction
between internal and external questions, which Quine rejected on
the basis of his rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction.
In 1952 Carnap published a short paper, “Meaning Postulates,” in
response to Quine’s attack on his reliance on the notion of analytic
truth. Also in 1952 he wrote a note replying to Quine’s attack on his
use of the notion of analyticity, which he left unpublished (Creath
1990, 427–32; see also p. x for Creath’s remarks on this note). At this
time a forum for a significant public reply to Quine on these issues
was promised by Paul Arthur Schilpp’s invitation to Carnap to be the
subject of a Library of Living Philosophers volume. Schilpp issued invitations
to contributors during 1953. Quine completed his contribution,
“Carnap and Logical Truth,” in time to meet Schilpp’s deadline,
in the spring of 1954. The volume was not published for another nine
years. In 1956 Quine published a Carnap-free half of the essay under
the title “Logical Truth,” and in 1957 he published the whole
of it in Italian translation in Rivista de Filosofia. The entire essay
appeared in English in 1959 in an issue of Synthese honoring Carnap,
and finally, in 1963, it appeared in the Schilpp volume, with Carnap’s
reply.
This was the first publication of Carnap’s main reply to Quine’s
sustained critical discussion of his views in “Carnap and Logical
Truth,” though Carnap had already published a paper, “Meaning and
Synonymy in Natural Languages” (1955), consisting of material that
had outgrown his reply to Quine for the Schilpp volume (see Creath
1990, 37). Also during this period Carnap made one more attempt
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006