Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine on the Intelligibility and Relevance of Analyticity 55
theory of meaning, Quine turns the discussion toward methods of
confirmation.
Quine certainly means to give the impression that the verification
theory is closely, even logically, tied to sententialism. This is not the
case. The unit of confirmation could be a quite large chunk of theory.
Then, as in Quine’s own discussion, two expressions are synonymous
just in case if whenever one is substituted for any occurrence of the
other in any suitable (dis)confirmable chunk, its (dis)confirmation
conditions are left undisturbed. This yields synonymy conditions
for both sentences and terms. As in Quine’s formulation, this will
need a restriction against substitution within words. We shall return
to this version of the verification theory later on.
When Quine turns to the methods of confirmation, he reformulates
the question thus: “What...is the nature of the relation between
a statement and the experiences which contribute or detract
from its confirmation?” (TDEa 36). And the answer he considers first
is radical reductionism. This is the view that every meaningful statement
is translatable into a statement about immediate experience.
The best version of this is that the translations are to proceed sentence
by sentence rather than term by term. The best example of the
best version is Carnap’s Aufbau, but this fails in principle. It requires
a second primitive, ‘is at’, which is not about immediate experience.
Only general (holistic) directions are given for the use of this second
primitive.
Because the best example of the best version fails, against radical
reductionism there is a genuine argument. But, as Quine concedes,
“Reductionism in its radical form has long since ceased to figure in
Carnap’s philosophy” (TDEa 38). And one would be hard pressed to
name anyone at all who held the radical view in 1950. Of course,
there are other forms of reductionism. As Quine says,
The dogma of reductionism survives in the supposition that each statement,
taken in isolation from its fellows, can admit of confirmation or infirmation
at all. My countersuggestion, issuing essentially from Carnap’s doctrine of
the physical world in the Aufbau, is that our statements about the external
world face the tribunal of experience not individually but only as a corporate
body. (TDEa 38)
This last comment at least helps to account for why Quine discussed
the Aufbau at all; such reflections are intended to tar radical
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