Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to show how the thesis of the inscrutability of reference fits in Willard Van Orman Quine’s semantic and to establish how it is logically related to some other important theses from Quine. I sustain that this thesis is a philosophical one, but not the kind of a naturalized philosophy, but of a philosophy that goes beyond empirical science. It is exactly the philosophical dimension of it that allows Quine to put it as the ground for his philosophy of language, to explain many syntactic and semantic aspects of the constitution of linguistic systems, and to show how the relation between experience and theories is established and sustained. Key words: empiricism, holism, Quine, semantics, reference.