Willard Van Orman Quine

54 richard creath
analyticity. He is concerned no longer with behavioral criteria or
even with the intelligibility of analyticity. Rather he is now concerned
with epistemic matters, with the shape and structure of an
account of confirmation. And the thrust of Quine’s discussion is that
analyticity (along with other concepts from the theory of meaning)
has no place in the account he offers. Therefore, if that account is
accepted, analyticity is epistemically irrelevant. This is a dispensability
claim, much as one might reject as irrelevant the very idea of
phlogiston because it simply has no place in modern chemistry.
The view about confirmation that Quine wants to reject we shall
call sententialism, namely, the idea that sentences taken individually
are susceptible of empirical confirmation or disconfirmation.
What he wants to replace this with is the idea that “[t]he unit of
empirical significance is the whole of science” (TDEa 39). Presumably,
here, ‘unit of empirical significance’ is to be equated to ‘unit
that can be confirmed or disconfirmed’. Unfortunately, the structure
of Quine’s argument is extremely unclear. He offers no argument
directly against sententialism. What he does argue against no one
holds, which he virtually admits. And when he presents his positive
view, the reader is left to guess what virtues Quine supposes that
view to possess. The interpretive problem here is not so much to
discern his views as it is to make a modicum of sense out of the way
that Quine presents them. I think that that can be done, though at a
half-century’s remove there is probably no telling whether Quine’s
original intention is thereby recovered.
The discussion begins by considering the verification theory of
meaning, formulated first as “the meaning of a statement is the
method of empirically confirming or infirming it” and then as “statements
are synonymous if and only if they are alike in point of empirical
confirmation or infirmation” (TDEa 35). This implicitly ties
the verification theory to sententialism, and Quine was to do so explicitly
a few pages later. While these formulations treat only statements
or sentences, other expressions can be accommodated easily.
As Quine says, “[w]e could explain any two forms as synonymous
when the putting of the one form for an occurrence of the other in
any statement (apart from occurrences within ‘words’) yields a synonymous
statement” (TDEa 35). Synonymy thus generally defined,
analyticity could then also be defined via the devices canvassed earlier
in his essay. Without refuting or even rejecting the verification
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006