The aim of this paper is threefold; its first part contains an account of the Quinean argument in which he elaborated the idea of radical interpretation. Secondly, several historical and theoretical facts are cited in order to demonstrate that Quine not only influenced Richard Rorty, the postmodernist, but also point to interesting affinities between Quinean and Derridean conceptions of language, something which continues to worry advocates of empiricist realism. The paper concludes with a metaphilosophical argument according to which the idea of inscrutability of reference, relativism, holism and other Quinean doctrines which put him at odds with the traditional dogmas of realism, need not be seen as particularly troubling; the argument is supported by an extended metaphor of the translator's work as consisting in an attempt at identifying appropriate meanings in different languages, while the languages themselves are compared to partly isolated shoals on which octopi dance continually holding each other by their all multiple flexible hands.
The article has been inspired by Quine's investigations of the status of the second order logic. Following his mentor, the author adopts an ontological interpretation of the second order logic as a logic that is a general theory of individuals, classes and relations. Here the dependence ends, however, as the author undertakes to defend a new, specific status of a theory of such kind, different from the status that was assigned to it by Quine in the usual interpretation of his arguments.
The paper discusses Quine's views on quotation and attitude reports within the context of the debate on linguistic metarepresentations and their place in the architecture of language and mind. The author argues for the hypothesis that linguistic metarepresentations involve a special kind of language performance, one which makes special cognitive demands.
The critique of the concept of analyticity undertaken by Quine in 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' met with various objections. In particular, he was criticized for certain alleged inconsistency. He was ready to accept an intra-linguistic definition of truth as truth-in-L for any established language L, but at the same time he required that the general notion of analyticity were conceived inter-linguistically and unrelativized to any language in question. The author attempts to defend Quine against this attack. He assumes that definitions are instruments introduced with a view to a purpose they should serve. It is essential therefore to find out what purpose was to be served by the introduction of the concept of analyticity by those authors who used it. The author tries to answer this question and focuses on the problem whether an intra-linguistic definition of analyticity serves the required function. Then he goes on to inquire if the inter-linguistic definition of truth serves its function. He argues in the end that the negative answer to the former question and the positive answer the latter are right and save Quine from the objections.
According to Quine, the way the term 'philosophy' is usually used does not delimit philosophy as a relatively homogeneous and cohesive domain of inquiry. In fact, any piece of inquiry which does not belong to some mature branch of science is readily classified as 'philosophical'. However, there is a way in which philosophy can be conceived that makes it continuous with science as its branch, in which the methods, language and tasks of science are studied. Such concept of philosophy found Quine's approval. His own contribution to philosophy consists in: disproving of some dogmas of the earlier stages of empiricism (concerning the concept of empirical content and analytic-synthetic distinction), recognizing the nature of the fundamental problem of ontology (as decided in the frame of a given theory by stipulating a set of quantified variables), and 'naturalizing' epistemology (by the thesis that the main tasks of epistemology are empirical ones and belong to cognitive psychology). But it seems questionable to assume that Quine's reluctance to develop philosophy as a normative or aprioristic discipline led him to adopt a pragmatic point of view.
In various accounts of contemporary and recent philosophy W.V.O. Quine is presented as a towering figure which to a large extent shaped the philosophical landscape of the second half of the twentieth century, at least as far as the Anglo-American philosophy goes. There are, however, two different, and to some extent incompatible, ways of construing his thought in the historical perspective. The prevailing view is that although he was highly critical of logical positivism, and even brought this powerful philosophical movement to an end, he should be seen as a pupil and follower of Rudolf Carnap. Nevertheless taking into account his Harvard milieu, and the concluding paragraph of his famous 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism', where Quine declared that by washing out the boundary between the analytic and the synthetic he put forward a more thorough pragmatism, he is quite often portrayed as a characteristically pragmatist thinker. In his later writings Quine distanced himself from the latter construal, insisting that it is not clear to him what it takes to be a pragmatist. He also admitted that his knowledge of classical pragmatism was limited: 'I must say that I have not read widely in it. Some of it came through in a modified form from C. I. Lewis, who taught me during one of my two years of graduate study'. The auyhor thinks that this passing remark is a useful historical hint that can shed a new light on Quine's pragmatism by construing it almost exclusively in the context of Lewis' philosophy, and its distinctively pragmatic features.
The paper analyzes notions of indeterminacy of translation and indeterminacy of reference. The author discusses the differences between the two and contrasts them both with the cases of merely verbal differences that can arise when several translators attempt to translate one text. He then sets apart the different mechanisms that generate the two kinds of incongruence. He takes indeterminacy of translation to be the effect of the existence of two concurrent translations of a given expression that are stimulus-synonymous but syntactically different. Because of the close connection between the indeterminacy of translation and the indeterminacy of reference the latter does not occur between people speaking their native language. It is so, because they have internalized their grammatical apparatus without possessing a prior grammatical apparatus to correlate it with .
W.V.O. Quine declared more than once that he was a naturalist. This claim must not be limited to one or another field of philosophy but should be understood as pertaining to every possible aspect philosophy. In ontology Quine wrote about 'ontological commitments of theories', in philosophy of logic he spoke of 'existence being a value of a variable', in semantics he opted for 'semantic behaviorism', and in epistemology he urged to 'make do with psychology'. The author concentrates on Quine's epistemology and shows how his views were different from other positions held in that field. The common key is naturalization. This view is supported by showing how Quine responded to his critics. To fend off skeptical doubts he argues that sceptical doubts are to be placed within science and not used as an external criterion of its results. When defending himself against the acusation that he eliminated all normative claims from science, Quine argued that axiological investigation have ultimately a scientific character. Finally when he proposed to naturalize epistemology his justification was based on the concept of holism, which was to be construed as one more plank in the naturalisatic boat that must be repaired at open sea, in his favorite metaphore invented by Neurath.
The authors address various versions of the so-called slingshot argument, which Quine uses in his various attacks on modal logic. They sketch out various formulations of the argument and explain different interpretations of them. Then they show that none of the interpretations is logically sound - each of them tacitly assumes some premise regarding identity or equivalence that is unacceptable. Subsequently they provide some insights into the motivations that might have led Quine to present repeatedly a fallacious argument, and they surmise that the rejection of the slingshot arguments would require a revision of Quinean holism.
The paper considers Quine's maxim: 'To be is to be the value of a variable'. After some remarks on the actual and possible Polish translations of ontological commitment, an analysis of the doctrine follows. In conclusion, Quine's restriction of ontology to the possible referents of terms, to the exclusion of the possible referents of predicates, is claimed unjustified, both in the light of subsequent development of Quine's thought and in the light of empiricism in general. Next, an attempt is made to account for the question of the referents of predicates in the framework of empiricism. A solution is sketched in terms of a revision of the so-called syntagmatic presuppositions. In this account, Quine's maxim is generalized to 'to be is to satisfy a syntagmatic presupposition'.
Between count and mass terms there are syntactic, semantic and pragmatic differences. Although the differences of each kind can be put into question, the distinction between count and mass terms is unquestionable. In particular, it is not obliterated by the fact that mass terms can be used as count terms (and vice versa). Quine thought that the count term - mass term distinction is very important and can be noticed in the process of learning the language. Count terms are harder to learn because they involve divided reference. On the other hand - according to Quine - mass terms are protean in character: at the subject position they function as singular terms whereas at the predicate position they are general terms. As far as natural kinds are concerned, Quine argued that they are intuitive nominal kinds and claimed that humans have many different systems of classification into kinds adequate for different purposes. Kripke and Putnam are mostly interested in natural kinds and natural kind terms, but do not pay any attention to the distinction between count- and mass natural-kind-terms. Their natural kinds are real kinds, whose extensions are delimited by 'hidden natures'. The authoress argues that the notion of natural kind used by Kripke and Putnam is more philosophically interesting than that of Quine and that Quinean idea of many equally good classifications into kinds is mistaken. On the other hand, it seems that Kripke's and Putnam's analysis of natural kind terms should take into account the count term - mass term distinction. Such a distinction allows to explain the differences between Kripkean theoretical identifications and makes the solution of Johnston's problem easier.
The article contains a brief presentation of Quine's arguments in favor of metamathematical realism and raises the problem of the dependence of ontological commitments of a theory on 'ideological' assumptions concerning the range of logical concepts. The problem is discussed by reference to Henkin and Boolos quantifiers. If these quantifiers are chosen and introduced as semantically primitive terms, fully understandable without recourse to set theoretical semantics and paraphrases presented as logical sentences with function variables and set variables, the resulting theory makes different ontological commitments from those that are made by Quine. The difference is illustrated by discussing a theory proposed by Hellman
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