Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine and Logical Positivism 263
(Carnap 1942, 247). For a good account of the continuity between Carnap’s
move to semantics and his earlier espousal of syntax, see Sarkar
1992, 220–3.
30. But see Orenstein 2002, 107–14, for cogent exposition and defence of
Quine’s rejection of the claim that logic and mathematics are true by
convention and thus analytic.
31. Peter Strawson attributes this declaration to Quine in Strawson 1982
(p. 12) and Strawson 1990 (p. 310), on both occasions without reference.
Robert Cummins also attributes this declaration to Quine and uses it
as the epigraph of his book Meaning and Mental Representation (1990),
also without reference. I have been unable to locate this sentence in
any of Quine’s publications, nor have a number of Quine experts I consulted.
However, Strawson’s (1990) paper is published with a comment
by Quine (CS), and we may suppose that Quine would there have demurred
from this imputation to him had he found it alien.
32. “The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences....Itisapale grey lore,
black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial
reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in
it, or any white ones” (CLT 406).
33. In “Two Dogmas in Retrospect,” Quine remarks of this passage that it
“had unforeseen consequences. I suspect it is responsible for my being
widely classified as a pragmatist. I don’t object, except that I am not clear
on what it takes to qualify as a pragmatist. I was merely taking the word
from Carnap and handing it back: in whatever sense the framework for
science is pragmatic, so is the rest of science” (TDR 272).
34. Cf. Gibson 1982, 174.
35. I plan to do this in another paper.
references
Abbagnano, Nicola. 1967. Positivism. Translated by Nino Langiuli. In The
encyclopedia of philosophy, edited by Paul Edwards. Vol. 6. New York:
Macmillan; The Free Press.
Anschutz, R. P. 1953. The philosophy of J. S. Mill. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Ayer,A.J.1936. Language, truth and logic. London: Victor Gollancz; New
York: Oxford University Press. Rev. ed., 1946.
ed. 1959. Logical positivism. Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press.
Ayer, A. J., in dialogue with Brian Magee. 1978. Logical positivism and its
legacy. In Men of ideas: Some creators of contemporary philosophy.
London: British Broadcasting Corp.
Ayers, Michael. 1991. Locke. Vol. 1, Epistemology. London: Routledge.
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