STUDY QUESTIONS
WEEK 3
Text: Quine, ‘Speaking of Objects’
The main claim of this paper is:
The main argument supporting this claim is:
What are three objections to this argument?
What are three questions that you have about this paper?
1. Why are we ‘bound’ to speak of objects in interpreting the speech behaviour of
others?
2. Does it follow from a native’s regular use of a sentence only in the presence of
rabbits that the sentence is about rabbits?
3. What is the linguist’s task?
4. How does the linguist read our ‘ontological point of view’ into the native’s talk?
5. How does a linguist go about interpreting the speech behaviour of others?
6. How does a child learn language?
7. When does a child begin to speak of objects?
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8. How can we tell whether a child can individuate objects?
9. How can there be empirical evidence against existential statements?
10. What are the six phases of word learning?
11. What role do coherence considerations play in deciding whether to accept abstract
and highly theoretical objects?
12. What role does identity play in deciding whether a term is referential?
13. Does the inscrutability of reference imply that there are no adequate identity
conditions for attributes?
14. Why is the positing of classes preferable to the positing of attributes?
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15. Are there adequate identity conditions for propositions?
16. What does Quine mean by ‘no entity without identity’?
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Text: Quine, ‘Ontological Relativity’
The main claim of this paper is:
The main argument supporting this claim is:
What are three objections to this argument?
What are three questions that you have about this paper?
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17. In what way is language a ‘social art’?
18. Does language’s being a ‘social art’ entail that there are no mentalistic meanings?
19. What is a ‘museum’ theory of meaning, and why is it a myth?
20. What encourages a ‘pernicious mentalism’ in semantics?
21. What are the two parts of learning a word?
22. What does the naturalist claim about word learning?
23. Does Quine’s naturalism-cum-beavhourism entail that there are no determinate
meanings?
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24. What is Quine’s ‘gavagai’ thought experiment and what conclusion does he draw
from it?
25. What roles do the assumptions that there is no entity without identity and that
mastery of a term requires the capacity to individuate an object play in Quine’s
argument against determinate meanings?
26. Why does the method of analytical hypotheses not deliver determinate meanings?
27. What is the inscrutability of reference, and how does it relate to the indeterminacy
of translation?
28. What is the distinction between direct ostention and deferred ostention?
29. How does the inscrutability of reference persist even given a fixed language and a
fixed apparatus of individuation?
30. In what way does ‘radical translation begin at home’?
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31. What is the principle of charity?
32. Why does Quine’s argument for the inscrutability of reference not depend
essentially on considerations relating creating a manual of translation for a foreign
language?
33. In what way is the inscrutability of reference even closer to home than that of the
indeterminacy of translation?
34. What is the structure of Quine’s argument for the claim that ‘reference is nonsense
except relative to a coordinate system’?
35. Is it sensible to ask what the objects of a theory are?
36. What is Carnap’s dichotomy between internal and external questions, and is this
dichotomy tenable?
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37. What makes ontological questions meaningless when taken absolutely?
38. How is identity implicated in the same sort of relativity that characterises
reference?
39. What is a proxy function?
40. Why is one ontology reducible to another given a one-to-one proxy function?
41. What is the Löwenhein-Skolem theorem, and why is it relevant to Quine’s
discussion of the ontologies of theories?
42. How can the discussion of the ontology of a theory vary with the stringency of the
demands upon the background theory in which the discussion is couched?
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