Inscrutability of Reference as a Result of Quine’s Structuralism

In his later writings Quine is increasingly explicit about the fact that his view of language is, in a certain sense, structuralistic. Structuralist interpretations of non-empirical, especially mathematical theories are now commonplace, but this chapter argues that Quine’s thought experiment with radical translation can be interpreted as showing that even empirical theories cannot be anchored in reality so firmly as to evade the same structuralist nature. Therefore, this peculiar form of structuralism extends to all our theories––the terms of all of them are best seen as meaning not definite substances, but nodes in certain structures. Moreover, radical translation shows––or purports to show––that the structure behind any natural language allows for some non-trivial ‘automorphisms’––that mapping the meaning of rabbit on that of undetached rabbit part, provided we make an appropriate remapping of many other meanings, does not change the language. Inscrutability of reference is then only a direct consequence.

W. V. Quine and David Lewis: Structural (Epistemological) Humility

This chapter argues that W. V. Quine and D. K. Lewis, despite their differences and their different receptions, came to a common intellectual destination: epistemological structuralism. The chapter begins by providing an account of Quine’s epistemological structuralism as it came to its mature development in his final works, Pursuit of Truth (1990) and From Stimulus to Science (1995), and the chapter shows how this doctrine developed out of his earlier views on explication and the inscrutability of reference. It then turns to the correspondence between Quine and Lewis which sets the scene for Lewis’s adoption of structuralism vis-à-vis set theory in the Appendix to his Parts of Classes (1990). The chapter concludes, drawing further from Lewis’s correspondence, by arguing that Lewis proceeded from there to embrace in one of his own final papers, ‘Ramseyan Humility’ (2001), an encompassing form of epistemological structuralism, whilst discharging the doctrine of reference magnetism that had hitherto set Lewis apart from Quine.

The Place of Willard Van Orman Quine in Analytic Philosophy

This chapter discusses the achievements of W. V. O. Quine and his place in analytic philosophy. It begins with Carnap’s logical empiricism, which set the context for Quine’s first major article in philosophy, “Truth by Convention” (1935). It explains both Quine’s largely effective critique of analyticity and the problems that plagued his combination of holistic verificationism with an underdetermination thesis that paired each consistent empirical theory T with alternative theories logically incompatible with, but empirically equivalent to, T. It discusses the impetus for Quine’s movement from his critique of analyticity to his later doctrines of the Indeterminacy of Translation and the Inscrutability of Reference. The chapter closes with an explication of these radical doctrines, the role played by Quine’s physicalism, and his ineluctable march to a so-called radical and self-undermining semantic eliminativism.

Representation and Reference According to Peirce

The paper investigates Peirce’s semiotic solutions to the alleged problem of the inscrutability of reference (Peirce’s object) and examines Peirce’s terminology in the context of the notions of representation and reference. It elaborates on the distinction between representation of the object in the sign and the determination of the sign by its object, expounds the differences between the positivist view of the referent and the Peircean object of the sign, and describes the consequences of the distinction between the immediate and the dynamical objects. The paper provides examples of signs with imaginary, fictional, or mythological objects.

The Indeterminacy of Translation and the Inscrutability of Reference

W.V.O. Quine's doctrines of the indeterminacy of translation and the inscrutability of reference are among the most famous and influential theses in philosophy in the past fifty years. Although by no means universally accepted, the arguments for them have been widely regarded as powerful challenges to our most fundamental beliefs about meaning and reference — including the belief that many of our words have meaning and reference in the sense in which we ordinarily understand those notions, as well as beliefs about the particular things meant and referred to in specific cases, such as my belief that in the past my son Brian often referred with affection to his pet rabbit Bigwig. If Quine's doctrines, and the arguments for them, are correct, then beliefs such as these cannot be accepted as true.One might expect that with consequences like these Quine's theses would widely be regarded as obviously incorrect.