With his customary incisiveness, W. V. Quine presents logic as the product of two factors, truth and grammar--but argues against the doctrine that the logical truths are true because of grammar or language. Rather, in presenting a general theory of grammar and discussing the boundaries and possible extensions of logic, Quine argues that logic is not a mere matter of words.

Our only channel of information about the world is the impact of external forces on our sensory surfaces. So says science itself. There is no clairvoyance. How, then, can we have parlayed this meager sensory input into a full-blown scientific theory of the world? This is itself a scientific question. The pursuit of it, with free use of scientific theory, is what I call naturalized epistemology. The Roots of Reference falls within that domain. Its more specific concern, within that domain, (...) is reference to concrete and abstract objects: what such reference consists in, and how we achieve it. (shrink)

My view of science involves both relativistic and absolutistic strains. I shall try to sort them out.

The distinction between moral values and others is not an easy one. There are easy extremes: the value that one places on his neighbor's welfare is moral, and the value of peanut brittle is not. The value of decency in speech and dress is moral or ethical in the etymological sense, resting as it does on social custom; and similarly for observance of the Jewish dietary laws. On the other hand the eschewing of unrefrigerated oysters in the summer, though it (...) is likewise a renunciation of immediate fleshly pleasure, is a case rather of prudence than morality. But presumably the Jewish taboos themselves began prudentially. Again a Christian fundamentalist who observes the proprieties and helps his neighbor only from fear of hellfire is manifesting prudence rather than moral values.1 Similarly for the man with felony in his heart who behaves himself for fear of the law. Similarly for the child who behaves himself in the course of moral training; his behavior counts as moral only after these means get transmuted into ends. On the other hand the value that the child attaches to the parent's approval is a moral value. It had been a mere harbinger of a sensually gratifying caress, if my recent suggestion is right, but has been transmuted into an end in itself. · 1. Bernard Williams, Morality , pp. 75-78, questions the disjointedness of these alternatives. I am construing them disjointedly. W.V. Quine, Edgar Pierce professor emeritus of philosophy at Harvard University, is the author of many influential works, including The Roots of Reference. "A Postscript on Metaphor," his previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, appeared in the Autumn 1978 issue. The present essay is being published in a festschrift, Values and Morals: Essays in Honor of William Frankenna, Charles Stevenson, and Richard Brandt. (shrink)

Naturalism holds that there is no higher access to truth than empirically testable hypotheses. Still it does not repudiate untestable hypotheses. They fill out interstices of theory and lead to further hypotheses that are testable.A hypothesis is tested by deducing, from it and a background of accepted theory, some observation categorical that does not follow from the background alone. This categorical, a generalized conditional compounded of two observation sentences, admits in turn of a primitive experimental test.The observation sentences themselves, like (...) ape cries and bird calls, are in holophrastic association with ranges of neural intake. Denotation of determinate objects figures neither in this association nor in deducing the categorical from the scientific hypotheses. Hence the indeterminacy of reference; ontology is purely auxiliary to the structure of theory. Truth, however, is seen still as transcendent at least in this sense: we say of a superseded scientific theory not that it ceased to be true, but that it is found to have been false. (shrink)