Willard Van Orman Quine

244 daniel isaacson
by definition; would that all species of synonymy were as intelligible. For
the rest, definition rests on synonymy rather than explaining it. (TDEa 26)
Grice and Strawson (1956) comment trenchantly on this passage. 30
Now if we are to take these words of Quine seriously, then his position as a
whole is incoherent. It is like the position of a man to whom we are trying
to explain, say, the idea of one thing fitting into another thing, or two things
fitting together, and who says: “I can understand what it means to say that
one thing fits into another, or that two things fit together, in the case where
one was specially made to fit the other; but I cannot understand what it
means to say this in any other case.” (pp. 152–3)
Note that the force of this defense of meaning as something that
can be conventionally stipulated does not turn on the reification of
meanings, which need be no more thinglike than a usage.
Quine and Carnap both made occasional statements, in passing, of
their respective conceptions of philosophy. Quine, in his paper “Natural
Kinds” (dedicated to Carl G. Hempel), declared the following:
[M]y position is a naturalistic one; I see philosophy not as an a priori
propaedeutic or groundwork for science, but as continuous with science.
I see philosophy and science as in the same boat – a boat which, to revert
to Neurath’s figure as I so often do, we can rebuild only at sea while staying
afloat in it. There is no external vantage point, no first philosophy. All scientific
findings, all scientific conjectures that are at present plausible, are
therefore in my view as welcome for use in philosophy as elsewhere. (NK
126–7)
And in “Epistemology Naturalized” we find the following:
We are after an understanding of science as an institution or process in the
world, and we do not intend that understanding to be any better than the
science which is its object. This attitude is indeed one that Neurath was
already urging in Vienna Circle days, with his parable of the mariner who
has to rebuild his boat while staying afloat in it. (EN 84)
In “Ontological Relativity” Quine again articulated a conception of
philosophy as of a piece with science:
With Dewey I hold that knowledge, mind, and meaning are part of the same
world that they have to do with, and that they are to be studied in the same
empirical spirit that animates natural science. There is no place for a prior
philosophy. (OR 26)
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