Willard Van Orman Quine

36 robert j. fogelin
with fictitious entities. What, for example, are we to make of talk
about Pegasus – in particular, what are the ontological commitments
involved in the claim that Pegasus is not actual? If we take the use of
a proper name as a mark of ontological commitment, then in saying
that Pegasus does not exist we commit ourselves to the existence
of the very thing whose existence we are attempting to deny. A bad
result. One way out of this difficulty, according to Quine, is to find a
way of translating ‘Pegasus is not actual’ into the canonical notion of
quantifier logic in a way that avoids commitment to an entity named
‘Pegasus’. There are a variety of ways of doing this, but the shortest,
most direct method is to treat ‘Pegasus is not actual’ as equivalent
to ‘Nothing pegasizes’ (see WTI 7 ff.). If that or something like it is
right, then it has been shown that the use of a proper name does
not eo ipso commit one to the existence of an entity corresponding
to it. This is shown by the fact that there is a way of saying the
same thing that carries no such commitment. As Quine puts it, “We
need no longer labor under the delusion that the meaningfulness of
a statement containing a singular term presupposes an entity named
by the term. A singular term need not name to be significant” (WTI
8–9). Quine’s treatment of proper names is, of course, reminiscent of
Russell’s analysis of definite descriptions. Where Quine worried
about the reference of such fictitious entities as Pegasus, Russell
was concerned about the reference of such empty descriptions as
‘the present King of France’. In each case, a contextual definition is
presented in which a term that seems to refer to a problematic entity
is made to disappear, and with this an ontological bother is defused.
The project of defusing ontology, initiated in “On What There Is,”
was given a radical development twenty years later in Quine’s essay
“Ontological Relativity.” In Word and Object, Quine put forward
arguments in behalf of the indeterminacy of translation; in “Ontological
Relativity,” he pressed things further by arguing for the indeterminacy
of reference as well. Invoking gavagai the rabbit, gavagai
the undetached rabbit part, etc., used in Word and Object, Quine
tells us,
It is philosophically interesting...that what is indeterminate in this...
example is not just meaning, but extension; reference. My remarks on
indeterminacy began as a challenge to likeness of meaning....Reference,
extension, has been the firm thing; meaning, intension, the infirm. The
indeterminacy of translation now confronting us, however, cuts across
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