Quine's Scientific Semantics

ABSTRACT. The theory that I shall seek to elaborate here puts considerable emphasis on Quine's rejection of analyticity, his naturalized ontology, his holophrastic interpretation of sentences, and his version of naturalized empiricism. This study is grounded in the considerable body of scholarship examining the development of Quine's philosophy of language, Quine's objections to the notion of analyticity, his construal of behaviorism as externalized empiricism, and his of belief metaphor.Keywords: Quine, analyticity, scientific semantics, language, meaning1. IntroductionThe mainstay of the paper is formed by an analysis of Quine's attack on meanings, propositions, and analyticity, his views concerning the empirical status of logical principles, his web-of-belief-type metaphors, and his holistic verificationism. The paper generates insights about the Quinean position on the concept of analyticity, Quine's account of the acquisition of fully referential language, his rejection of an epistemologically grounded distinction between the analytic and the synthetic, and his views on the shortcomings of the notion of meaning.2. Quine's Behavioristic Classification of SentencesJuhl and Loomis hold that Quine's extensional and empirical approach to meaning1 spills over to the notion of synonymy. Meaning and synonymy involve the hypostasis of either abstract or mental entities and are not explicable in empirical, behavioral terms. We begin with the empirical theory of physics and the language used to express it. The notion of logical entailment is itself theory-dependent, and ultimately justified empirically. Arithmetical statements are unlikely to be revised on the basis of empirical data. The statements of logic and mathematics possess no empirical content. Philosophers have a particular task, distinct from the conduct of empirical experiment and observation, beginning their investigation from the standpoint of our being embedded in the physical world as physical entities.Quine shows how sentences as universale can be analyzed in terms of sets. Sets are admissible elements of our description of the physical world (they are an indispensable part of our best theory of that world). Sentence meanings should be strictly connected with overt behavior and the use of sentences. The intelligibility of a sentence comes from the theory of which it is a part. Juhl and Loomis maintain that Quine' s web of belief ' metaphor claims that the collection of sentences that we are disposed to assent to at any time is analogous to a spider's web. Our beliefs are connected to the entirety of experience in such a way that no particular need affect other more theoretical beliefs that we have. Quine accounts for the apparent nonrevisability of seemingly analytic or necessary statements: such statements should play a particularly central role in our of belief. Quine renders sentence-truth invariant with respect to speaker and occasion, and replaces sentences containing indicator words with observation categoricals.Quine proposes treating the analysis of language from the standpoint of radical translation, seeing in radical translation the possibility of giving an attempted characterization of synonymy from his empirical perspective. Radical translation forces us to treat meaning and synonymy in a way that coheres with the theory of physical science. Juhl and Loomis emphasize that Quine views reference as relatively unproblematic:2 it is an extensional notion, not an intensional one. Truth is also an unproblematic notion. Reference is relative to a particular background language. Language should be treated as a physical phenomenon fundamentally consisting of strings of marks or series of phonemes: it is best regarded as a physical phenomenon (it is first and foremost a physical phenomenon/occurrence). The criteria for individuating and identifying the referent of a term themselves require a command of the native language. …