Willard Van Orman Quine

56 richard creath
reductionism, of course, but also to inspire and legitimate the holistic
countersuggestion of modest reductionism.
In any case, it is unclear whether we are to suppose that Carnap
was a modest reductionist in 1950. In fact, Carnap was some sort of
holist as early as the 1930s, 4 and he used notions from the theory
of meaning to identify the wholes that could be confirmed, to determine
which observations would be germane to those wholes, and to
specify the degree of support or the kind of revisions required. Analyticity,
therefore, is highly relevant to Carnap’s holistic epistemology
even if not to Quine’s. Sententialism, that is, modest reductionism,
can be considered quite apart from the question of whether Carnap
endorsed it, and that seems to be what the issues of §5 resolve to.
Unfortunately, Quine did not show such a view to be a dogma of
any kind. In fact, the countersuggestion, amplified in the final section,
“Empiricism without the Dogmas,” is all we ever get. Surely,
Quine could not have intended to indict modest reductionism on
the grounds of its parentage; who of us and what form of empiricism
would survive so stern a judge? Not only is there no explicit
argument against a form of reductionism that someone might currently
hold, there is no explicit argument for the countersuggestion
either. We are left to conclude that the elegance and coherence of his
positive views were intended by Quine to be the argument, both for
those views and against modest reductionism.
Unfortunately, even in amplified form those positive views are
presented in such sketchy terms that it is difficult or impossible to
assess their merit. Now sketchiness is not always a vice. Sometimes,
especially in the early stages of a project, it is actually better to lay
out the general structure of a view without filling in details that have
not yet emerged. But the details must eventually be forthcoming. As
Quine himself said of another example,
Russell had talked of deriving the world from experience by logical construction,
but his constructions were sketchy and slight. Carnap, in Der logische
Aufbau der Welt (1928), set himself to the task in earnest....Ifthebook did
not achieve its exalted purpose, it did achieve a great deal. It afforded for the
first time an example of what a scientific philosopher might aspire to in the
way of rigor and explicitness. 5
It is fair to say that Quine’s own argument against the definability
of physical concepts in experiential terminology was possible only
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