Word and Object

Introduction

Quine’s main book appeared in 1960, dedicated to Rudolf Carnap, and opens with Otto Neurath’s image of sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea. In the famous second chapter a linguist without any dictionary faces the task of radical translation: when a native speaker says “Gavagai” as a rabbit runs past, the evidence cannot decide whether the word means rabbit, rabbit part or rabbit-stage. Quine draws the conclusion that translation is indeterminate. Later chapters develop a “canonical notation” based on first-order logic, in which our theory of the world can be regimented and its ontological commitments made explicit.

Connections

Builds on

• Two Dogmas of Empiricism1951 · W. V. O. Quine

More works by W. V. O. Quine

• 1951Two Dogmas of Empiricism
• 1969Epistemology Naturalized