Truth and Interpretation

Abstract

Quine’s outlook is destructive of most earlier programmes for philosophical analysis. Russell, for example, at one time conceived of analysis as a process in which complex denoting expressions are replaced successively by definite descriptions, analysed according to the Theory of Descriptions, until the process terminates in sentences containing only logically proper names and truth-functional operators. Quine’s holism, ontological relativism and scepticism about particulars makes nonsense of talk of logically proper names (experience, in the shape of stimulus meaning, does not suffice to determine reference to particulars and so cannot determine the reference of a logically proper name) and in thus destroying the goal of Russellian analysis makes it pointless. Similar arguments, as we have seen, defeat the programme of phenomenalist analysis characteristic of Vienna Circle positivism and Carnap’s Aufbau. And Quine’s strictures against quantifying into modal contexts raise reverse difficulties for any conception of analysis founded upon modal logic and the notion of a possible world.