Abstract

This is a polemical dissertation, aimed at linguistic holism in general, with W. U. O. Quine, Hilary Putnam and Donald Davidson as specific targets. I am particularly intent on refuting Quine's doctrines of the indeterminacy of translation and the inscrutability of reference. To this end, I have identified what I take to be three dogmas and two myths in the works of Quine and brother holists. ;In the second chapter I argue that the holist penchant for glossing significant one-word utterances as one-word sentences, on the ground that the sentence is the basic unit of significant discourse, cannot be good empiricist practice. ;In the third chapter, I argue that the practice of excluding classes of entities from one's ontology on the grounds that the identity conditions of such entities cannot be specified, is a dubious and dogmatic practice. The having of identity conditions specifiable by us is not constitutive, but only indicative, of the having of an identity. ;In the fourth chapter, I seek to give some analysis of the notion of circularity of analysis, and then apply it to Quine's famous argument, in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," that the analytic/synthetic distinction cannot be sharply drawn without falling into circularity; I seek to show that his argument is unsound. ;In the fifth chapter I show that the notion of empirical underdetermination, as employed in Quine's doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation, is itself a notion lacking in empirical significance. ;In the sixth chapter, I contrast Quine's application of the theory of models to natural language with Putnam's, and show that they mutually undermine each other and the shared doctrine of referential inscrutability