Willard Van Orman Quine

Aspects of Quine’s Naturalized Epistemology 37
extension and intension alike. The terms “rabbit,” “undetached rabbit part,”
and “rabbit stage” differ not only in meaning; they are true of different things.
Reference itself proves behaviorally inscrutable. (OR 34–5)
In effect, Quine has moved from the ontological pluralism of “On
What There Is” to embrace something much stronger: ontological
inscrutability, or ontological indeterminacy.
In “Ontological Relativity,” Quine subsequently presents a further
argument for ontological indeterminacy that reappears, in various
forms, throughout his later writings. This argument invokes
what Quine calls proxy functions. Unfortunately, the discussion of
proxy functions in “Ontological Relativity” relies on technical matters
not accessible to the nonexpert. In his later writings, however, he
introduced examples of proxy functions that are more easily grasped.
In his last book, From Stimulus to Science, Quine defines proxy functions
as functions that are “one-to-one reinterpretations of objective
reference. They leave the truth values of the sentences undisturbed”
(FSS 72). To explain this, he offers an elegant example: a proxy function
that he calls a cosmic complement. The cosmic complement of
Quine, for example, is the whole universe except for a hole where
Quine is. 10 Using his favorite objects of reference, rabbits, Quine asks
us to imagine a world where our referring terms would shift their
standard reference to the reference of their cosmic complements.
The word ‘rabbit’ would now denote not each rabbit, but the cosmic complement
of each, and the predicate ‘furry’ would now denote not each furry
thing but the cosmic complement of each. Saying that rabbits are furry would
thus be reinterpreted as saying that complements-of-rabbits are complements
of furry things, with ‘complements-of-rabbits’ and ‘complements-offurry’
seen as atomic predicates. The two sentences are obviously equivalent.
(FSS 71)
Given the simple logical result that the two sentences are equivalent,
it follows that anything that counts as confirming or disconfirming
evidence of the one will equally count as confirming or disconfirming
evidence of the other. Evidence, then, will be completely neutral
with respect to which ontology is the correct one. From this example
and others like it, in From Stimulus to Science Quine proceeds
to draw a very strong conclusion:
I conclude from [the indeterminacy of reference as shown by proxy functions]
that what matters for any object, concrete or abstract, is not what they are
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