Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine on the Intelligibility and Relevance of Analyticity 49
But all demands for further clarification, if pushed far enough, have
nowhere to turn but to terms earlier in the series; the complaint of
circularity could be lodged everywhere. So Quine’s worry must lie,
not with circularity, but with some defect of each of the terms in this
sequence. Quine does not say so explicitly here, but his basic demand
is for behavioral criteria. 1 This is a demand about which we need to
ask several questions: What precisely is the demand? Is it legitimate,
and if so, to what extent? What would be required to satisfy the legitimate
portion of the demand? And can this be done? Quine’s demand
for behavioral criteria is best understood as an instance of the many
empiricist criteria of significance. Empiricists in the Viennese tradition
had long sought to rule out metaphysics. Their strategy was to
presume an observational basis and require some connection (in the
form of observational criteria, correspondence rules, and the like)
between that observational basis and the claims in question. Claims
lacking the appropriate connection were said to be without empirical
content. This is just what Quine says about the division of truths into
the analytic and synthetic: it lacks empirical content and is, hence,
a metaphysical article of faith. Since his favored observational basis
is observable behavior, this is certainly methodological behaviorism,
but by itself it need not rule out theoretical episodes of a fully mental
sort. Quine does not spell out in any great detail what sort of connection
he would approve between behavior and admissible concepts.
Given the parallel with the demands of Carnap, however, we are left
to surmise that the tie would permit theoretical concepts that are
not fully expressible in the observational/behavioral framework.
There is an irony in all this, besides the obvious one that Quine is
pushing against Carnap the very demands that Carnap had pushed
against the metaphysicians. This second irony is that many philosophers
such as Hempel came to reject analyticity because they
thought it could not meet Quine’s demands and at the very same time
came to reject the whole idea of empiricist criteria of significance. 2
On this issue, however, Quine never wavered. Carnap’s demand for
empirical significance is among the features of Carnap’s philosophy
that Quine most enthusiastically and enduringly approves.
But is Quine’s demand legitimate, however much it may be modeled
on Carnap’s? Quine thinks that it is because he thinks that the
theory of language must be an empirical theory. Putting the matter
this way, though, begs the question against Carnap. Carnap would
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