Willard Van Orman Quine

Aspects of Quine’s Naturalized Epistemology 41
Russell urged the all-importance of structure in his Analysis of Matter,
and Ramsey made the point more rigorously with his Ramsey sentences.
Russell and Ramsey were urging the indifference only of theoretical objects,
as against observational ones. Once we take observation sentences
holophrastically, however, reference and objects generally go theoretical.
The indifference or inscrutability of ontology comes to apply across the
board. (RS 473, emphasis added)
An even more striking passage to the same effect occurs in the abstract
of “Naturalism; Or, Living within One’s Means”:
[O]bservation sentences themselves, like ape cries and bird calls, are in
holophrastic association with ranges of neural intake. Denotation of determinate
objects figures neither in this association nor in deducing the categorical
from the scientific hypotheses. Hence the indeterminacy of reference;
ontology is purely auxiliary to the structure of theory. Truth, however, is
seen still as transcendent at least in this sense: we say of a superseded scientific
theory not that it ceased to be true, but that it is found to have been
false. (NLWM 251)
In order to see the force of these remarks, it is essential to take
Quine’s reference to “ape cries and bird calls” quite literally. Apes
perhaps and birds more certainly do not advance beyond these primitive
vocalizations to develop a complex articulated linguistic structure
of the kind that human beings possess, but if Quine is right, our
starting point is precisely the same as theirs.
Quine’s holophrastic interpretation of observation sentences is an
innovation with enormous systematic power, for if it can be made
good, we would then have the resources to resolve a wide range of difficulties
that have previously plagued empiricism. But is this conception
of observation sentences itself tenable? Proving that it is would
require showing how, starting from unarticulated observation sentences,
a route can be established leading to highly articulated theoretical
sentences. It is, however, far from clear that Quine made the
case that this project can, in principle, be carried out successfully.
A difficulty seems to arise in the very first step in the road from
observation sentences to theoretical sentences. Quine’s first move
from the homogeneity of observation sentences to the heterogeneity
of theoretical sentences involves the seemingly unproblematic
move of forming a conjunction of observation sentences. But does it
even make sense to speak of conjoining observation sentences where
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