Willard Van Orman Quine

52 richard creath
the theory of meaning – for example, ‘analyticity’, ‘synonymy’, ‘intension’,
and ‘meaning’ – are fully interdefinable. Thus, behavioral
criteria for synonymy, say, would suffice for all the rest.
It is important to note that the issue with behavioral criteria is
intelligibility, not truth. This is what makes the Quinean response
to the proposal gambit extremely powerful. So construed, however,
it cannot be further demanded, if and when behavioral criteria are
provided, that they must also turn Carnap’s claims as to what is
or is not analytic into a true theory of English. (Note: And so it is
with geometry as well. Correspondence rules [observational criteria]
were needed to make the axioms deserve the name ‘geometry’ at all.
There can be no further requirement that they turn, say, Euclidian
geometry into a true description of physical space.) Carnap says that
logic and mathematics are to be counted among the analytic truths
and that quantum mechanics, taken as a whole, is not. This need
not be taken as a claim about English, and Carnap himself is explicit
that what he says is to be taken as a proposal. Granted, Carnap undoubtedly
thought that logic and mathematics were in fact analytic
in English. But it is irrelevant to the merits of Carnap’s proposal as
a proposal whether English already embodies it. Now it would be
a serious objection to a set of criteria if nothing or everything always
turned out to be analytic under the criteria. More specifically,
it would be equally objectionable if there were no possible language
in which logic and mathematics turn out to be analytic while quantum
mechanics and the general theory of relativity (taken as wholes)
turn out to be synthetic. These objections would be grave, but they
would also be very difficult objections to sustain, even if one wanted
to talk about all possible languages, which Quine certainly does
not.
Moreover, Quine attempts no direct argument that suitable behavioral
criteria cannot be provided. Instead, what he does in “Two
Dogmas” is to survey various attempts to clarify the theory of meaning.
Does Quine look in all the right places? For the most part, yes,
but given the conspicuously epistemic role of analyticity (it was,
after all, a replacement for the apriority), the best place to look for
meanings for a natural language ought to be in the community’s epistemic
activity. Thus, when the issue is translation, what the natives
say about rabbits should matter less than what they say, in justification
or criticism, about what they say. The questions to ask include
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