Many informed readers of Carnap (and Quine) have taken Quine’s objections to Carnap’s account of analyticity in terms of semantical rules to have failed. This paper counters this, arguing that Quine actually saw himself as applying Carnap’s own philosophical standards more strictly than Carnap himself did. Quine was, as he later reported, “just being more carnapian than Carnap.” This paper offers a careful analysis of Section 4 of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” which shows Carnap conflating two senses of “semantical rule.” Although the first is clear, Quine sees it as being of no use in defining analyticity. The second, though integral to Carnap’s method of defining analyticity, Quine shows to be left unexplained by Carnap’s definitions.

Recognition that people are divided by a common language is typically marked by a search for culprit ambiguities – but rarely so when name philosophers are involved, for whom continued talking past each other may seem the easier option.Whether the case of Carnap and Quine fits this profile is my quarry here. I begin with Quine’s conjecture that it was Neurath’s influence that made Carnap introduce the paragraphs into the Aufbau that promised, without elaboration, a conceptual genealogy on a physical basis. I argue that are good grounds to support Quine here. The analysis will be supplemented with remarks about later disagreements between Carnap and Neurath.

While a number of commentators have argued that Quine’s account of Carnap’s paper in terms of the category/subclass distinction is simply a misunderstanding of Carnap, this essay argues that it is not. Instead, Quine was correct to construe Carnap’s external questions of existence as all being category questions. Quine’s second claim – that answers to internal category questions of existence are trivial and analytic – was, however, incorrect. Here, this essay then dissents from a view of Ebbs, who has recently argued that Quine was right on both points. Instead, it is argued that epistemic considerations that support Quine’s first point undermine his second point.

W. V. Quine is famous for insisting that translation is indeterminate and Ludwig Wittgenstein widely believed, not least by Quine himself, to have been committed to the same view of translation. Taking Quine at his word, I explore why he would think those conversant with the later Wittgensteins remarks on meaning would take the argument about translation in Word and Object in stride. I argue that Quine and Wittgenstein are, for all their differences, reasonably regarded as battling a commonly held philosophical conception of the determinateness of translation. As I read Quine, he had it right when in later work he emphasized that he should be understood as mounting an argument against propositions, and he – and Wittgenstein – are on much firmer ground than usually supposed. Also in an Afterword I point out that Rudolf Carnap, arguably Wittgensteins most important successor and Quines most important predecessor, largely agreed with the argument I attribute to Quine and Wittgenstein in the body of the text, his reservations about many of their views notwithstanding.

While Quine is often taken to have broken the Viennese straitjacket of Logical Positivism, which rejected metaphysics, as an a priori but non-analytic, substantive discipline, allowing speculative metaphysics to be reborn, this paper argues against this. Instead, for all their much-discussed disagreements over analyticity and ontology, Quine shared Carnap’s more fundamental commitment to ‘scientific philosophy’: to the idea that legitimate philosophy is the work of handmaidens, site managers or accountants of science. Their primary role is to act to clarify, precisify and make explicit the methods and deliverances of science. The essay then brings Carnap and Quine to bear on more recent analytic trends towards metaphysics by specifically contrasting Carnap and Quine’s scientific philosophy with recent work by Timothy Williamson. This essay stresses Carnap and Quine’s considerable distance from Williamson; and that from Quine’s point of view as well as from Carnap’s, this recent ascendance of metaphysics will seem a departure from science without sufficient justification.

Both Carnap and Quine see an element of practical choice in our scientific theorizing but that they diverge on its significance, particularly with regard to a theory of meaning. From Carnap’s standpoint, linguistic frameworks are practically adopted without any prior constraints and then provide for a theory of meaning. In contrast, Quine sees a theory of meaning presupposing a more general assumption that all meaningful elements stand in a systematic relation before translation begins. Without this assumption, there is no work for a theory of meaning to do. In this sense, the dogmas of empiricism can only do explanatory work if the meaningful elements are already systematically linked in a way that translation might recapture.

The arguments for the indeterminacy of Translation in Quine’s Word and Object (1960) form a turning point in his thinking. Quine may have started out as a disciple of Carnap’s, but in the 1940s and 1950s the most salient feature of Quine’s work is a deep asymmetry. Such extensional notions as reference and ontology are central and fully intelligible. Intensional notions such as analyticity and synonymy are not intelligible, and epistemic concerns are, in his published writing, not central. The arguments for the indeterminacy of translation undermine the asymmetry and initiate changes to the role of ontology and reference, to the status of simplicity, to Quine’s understanding of analyticity and synonymy, and to the character and centrality of his epistemology, ultimately including even a return to a two-tier epistemology. The changes do not amount to a wholesale rejection of earlier views, but exist uneasily alongside those previous views. In the aggregate, however, the changes were significant and brought Quine’s position back much closer to Carnap’s.

The Introduction provides an overview of the book and the individual chapters.

It has become a commonplace that Carnap is the lead empiricist in Quines Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Recent work by Richard Creath, Robert Sinclair, and others stirs up this comfortable narrative, pointing to broader areas of agreement between Quine and Carnap, including Quines positive assessment of the Logische Syntax in his Lectures on Carnap, and the influence of pragmatism on both.  Following a hint from a colleague, I investigate whether at least some strains of empiricism that Quine rejects in Two Dogmas belong to Quines mentor, C. I. Lewis, instead. The paper assesses the philosophical and historical consequences of reading Two Dogmas in this way.

This essay examines the very beginning of Carnap and Quine’s philosophical relationship, focusing on Quine’s visit to Europe during the academic year 1932–33, during which he spent five weeks in Prague with Carnap. Verhaegh details what initiated Quine’s trip, the events leading up to his arrival in Prague, and finally the momentous philosophical exchange between Quine and Carnap that began there and that would carry on for the rest of Quine’s career, even after Carnap’s death in 1970.

This essay considers Carnap and Quine’s views on ontology. While both Carnap and Quine see their disagreement over the status of ontology as a legitimate philosophical undertaking as ultimately rooted in their disagreement over the analytic/synthetic distinction, it argues that this cannot be so since Quine comes to accept a notion of analyticity without changing his views on ontology. Instead, it is argued that the more fundamental point underlying the disagreement about the status of ontology is Carnaps advocacy of the Principle of Tolerance, which Quine never comes to accept.

This essay argues that despite Quine and Kuhn’s reputation for bringing to a close the era of Carnap and logical empiricism as the dominating philosophy of science, Carnap, Quine, and Kuhn all share in rejecting traditional realist and anti-realist analyses of ontology. They all reject a version of what Putnam called metaphysical realism and then also resist making the move to an equally extra-scientific anti-realist position. For all of them, science itself is to be the final arbiter of what there is.

This essay contrasts Rudolf Carnap’s and W. V. Quine’s responses to the challenge that their positions distort the social nature of inquiry. In Quine’s case, the challenge is the heart of Donald Davidson’s insistence that naturalized epistemology fails to capture the objectivity of thought. In Carnap’s case, the challenge may be detected in Charles Morris’s call for semiotic rather than syntax to ground scientific philosophy. Drawing out the challenge in Morris’s proposal requires considering a neglected influence on this neglected philosopher: his advisor George Herbert Mead’s social theory of mind. Meeting the underlying demand that objectivity be socialized, I argue, requires those of us who wish to pursue Carnap and Quine’s scientific vision of philosophy to recognize the ineliminable role other inquirers play in our own investigations.

This essay explores pragmatic aspects of Carnaps and Quines philosophy. It begins with a (schematic) characterization of pragmatism, pointing to recurring themes in the writings of leading American pragmatists, such as fallibilism, the social dimension of language and knowledge, the relation between belief and action, and the critique of skepticism, essentialism, foundationalism, and the fact/value dichotomy. It then examines aspects of Carnaps and Quines thinking that appear to be related (conceptually rather than historically) to pragmatism. Carnaps Principle of Tolerance and Quines critique of the analytic–synthetic distinction are primary examples, but there are others, such as their positions on scientific method, truth, and realism. Despite the similarities between Carnap and Quine emerging from this examination, the paper also identifies significant differences between their ways of understanding pragmatism. These differences, I suggest, are related to the difference between the European and American traditions regarding the meaning and use of the term pragmatism