Willard Van Orman Quine

Aspects of Quine’s Naturalized Epistemology 35
a naturalistic standpoint is that Quine actually embraces indeterminacy
of translation as a substantive doctrine of his own.
A similar concern arises with respect to the doctrine perhaps most
dear to Quine’s heart, which he variously calls ontological relativity,
inscrutability of reference, and indeterminacy of reference. Since I
am primarily interested in the broad question of the relationship between
Quine’s views concerning ontology and his naturalistic commitments,
I will sketch his position concerning ontology in broad
strokes. In “On What There Is,” Quine asked, “What is there?” and
gave a startlingly simple answer: “Everything” (WTI 1). Quine, of
course, was not saying that everything that could exist does exist.
He was offering the empty answer “There is what there is” as preface
to raising a different question: “[How can we determine] what the
ontological commitments of a theory are?”
Roughly, when we talk about things, we seem to commit ourselves
to the existence of those things we are talking about. The
most transparent way of doing this is to make an explicit claim that
something exists – for example, that condors still exist in coastal California.
More formally, we can put this remark about condors this
way: There is at least one x such that x is a condor and x is in coastal
California. This phrasing makes it transparent that employing this
sentence commits one to the existence of condors and of coastal California.
To reveal the ontological commitments of sentences that do
not speak explicitly of something existing, we try to find a way to
translate them into a form that does. Thus, ‘Some condors are female’
becomes ‘There exists an x such that x is a condor and x is a
female’, thus showing that the original sentence involved a commitment
to the existence of both condors and females. Reflections along
these lines, developed, needless to say, with more rigor and subtlety,
led Quine to formulate his criterion of ontological commitment as
follows:
To be assumed as an entity is, purely and simply, to be reckoned as the value
of a variable. (WTI 13)
It seems, however, that there is a more obvious – more direct –
way of referring to something in the world and thereby getting committed
to its existence: the use of a proper name. The standard way
of talking about Nixon is to use his name, to wit, ‘Nixon’. Why not
also take the use of proper names as indicators of ontological commitment?
Quine’s answer is that doing so raises difficult problems
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