Individual and Social in Quine’s Philosophy of Language

Abstract

Anyone who works through Quine’s philosophy of language carefully and without malice cannot fail to be impressed by his achievement. Most of his predecessors appealed to meanings as entities of some kind, abstract or mental, and attempted to explain linguistic behavior on that basis. Quine, on the contrary, made our use of expressions basic and let meanings fall out as they may, showing, whatever one’s objections, how it might be done. He consistently argued that meanings cannot explain our use of expressions because whatever there is to meaning can be explained only in terms of use.