Willard Van Orman Quine

50 richard creath
and did quickly agree that his own talk of analyticity had no empirical
content. But Carnap distinguished the pure from the descriptive
study of language. The latter is empirical linguistics, and here
criteria of empirical significance are perfectly appropriate. The former
Carnap thinks of as philosophic and hence as analytic. Since
the pure study of language is not construed as empirical, it neither
needs empirical content nor can have any. Quine, of course, makes
no such differentiation between kinds of linguistic study because he
has already abandoned the analytic-synthetic distinction. Whether
Quine is ultimately right or not, he can hardly use his conclusion as
a premise against Carnap.
Thus, Carnap rejects Quine’s demand for behavioral criteria, making
instead what I will call his proposal gambit: Carnap claims not
to be describing English or any other natural language. He claims
rather to be making a proposal, that is, to be articulating an artificial
language system for the purpose of explicating or even replacing
a natural language in a given context. He claims further that the
analytic-synthetic distinction is drawn clearly only for such artificial
systems. Because he is proposing rather than describing, demands for
empirical content are misplaced.
There is some force in this proposal gambit, but it is open to a
devastating reply (and one which does not beg any questions against
Carnap). Quine can say that Carnap is not even making a proposal
unless it is at least possible in principle to determine whether such
a proposal has been adopted. Without behavioral criteria, there is no
such possibility. This can be illustrated in an example that Carnap
himself had discussed. Carnap had argued that the notion of an entelechy
was without empirical content. Assuming that to be the case,
one cannot intelligibly propose to get one’s entelechy adjusted, and
one cannot defend the attempt by saying that it was only a proposal
and not an empirical claim. A further analogy may be helpful. Carnap
distinguished between pure or mathematical geometry and physical
geometry; the former was to be analytic and hence in no need of
correspondence rules, such as may be provided by measurement or
surveying techniques. The corresponding Quinean point can be put
by noting that without such measurement techniques at least waiting
in the wings the purely mathematical work forfeits the right to
the name ‘geometry’, for there would be no reason to suppose that
it is in any way about points, lines, or space. The system would,
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