The paper begins in natural language but eventually proceeds to set theory and arithmetic. In the main the paradoxes or antinomies discussed, which include Zeno's (falsidical), Grelling's (falsidical), Berry's (antinomy), the liar (antinomy), Russell's (antinomy) and Cantor's (antinomy), are shown by Quine either to be veridical or falsidical paradoxes, or they are shown to be genuine antinomies, either in natural language or in some technical language (or both). In the latter case Quine indicates how the languages or their logic might be amended to eliminate the antinomy.

Quine presents no important difference in charater between the natural and more formal languages, not appearing to doubt that antinomies in natural languages can be repaired. The most clearly presented repair is that of the liar paradox and related semantic paradoxes by use of a heirarchy of languages at once, by means of suffixes on semantic attributes such as "true".

By contrast I would say that antinomies in natural languages cannot be fixed, that logical systems cannot be repaired peicemeal, and that the changes necessary to make a natural language into a coherent logical system are sufficiently radical, and must be adhered to with such rigidity that the result would no longer be a natural language.

The essay was written not long after Quine's "Two Dogmas" and in response to Carnap's "Empiricism Semantics and Ontology" . A misunderstanding might have been more understandable if Quine's knowledge of Carnap were exclusively based on that paper, in which the presentation of the issue reflects Carnap's then concern with semantics rather than the much earlier misgivings about metaphysical ontology which were closer to the roots of his philosophy.

Carnap's position is perhaps made easier to misunderstand by his eagerness to give some kind of sense to the metaphysical ontology which he finds without content. The meaningful question which he puts in place of the metaphysics is the question of "acceptability" of a "linguistic framework".

Quine's essay for the most part can be read as his taking apart a less than ideal rendition of Carnap's ontological position, until we come close to the end. In conclusion Quine makes the connection with the analytic/synthetic distinction, argues that Carnap's internal/external distinction is just the same distinction and can be dismissed by the arguments in his two dogmas.

As I have suggested, there are two different interpretations which can be given to the internal/external distinction in Carnap, according to whether the external questions are interpreted as metaphysics or as pragmatics. Neither of these is even faintly like the analytic/synthetic distinction.

In Carnap, the internal questions may be either analytic or synthetic according to whether whether their truth is determined by the L-rules of the language in question. The external question, whether it be metaphysics or pragmatics, is neither analytic nor synthetic.

In one of my undergraduate philosophy essays "Ontology", which so far as I can see was written in ignorance of this essay, I argue that the internal/external distinction is not absolute (not that Carnap said it was) but that these quesions, for different linguistic frameworks, form a hierarchy. Quine makes a similar point in this essay (a couple of decades earlier).

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© created 2001-6-15 modified 2001-6-16