Word and Object: Difference between revisions

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In Chapter 4 of ''Word and Object'', Quine looks at the indeterminacies of reference that are inherent to the (English) language system. A term is ''vague'' if the boundaries of its reference are not clear. For a singular term this means that the boundaries of the object it refers to are not clear, e.g. with the 'mountain': for two neighboring mountains it is not clear where the first mountain stops and the second one begins. General terms can be vague in this same way, but also in yet another way, namely that there are some objects of which it is not clear whether or not they should be included in the reference of the term. For example, the term 'blue' is vague insofar as it is not clear whether or not some objects are blue or green. A second vagary of reference is ''ambiguity''. Ambiguity differs from vagueness in that for a vague term the (boundaries of) its reference are unsettled, whereas ambiguous terms do refer to clearly to objects, however they are clearly true and clearly false of the same objects. For example, the term 'light' is clearly true of a dark feather, but at the same time clearly false of it.

Quine also introduces the term '[[referential transparency]]'. Quine wants to make explicit the ambiguities in language, and to show different interpretations of sentences, therefore, he has to know where the terms in a sentence refer to. A term is used in ''purely referential position'' if its only purpose is to specify its object so that the rest of the sentence can say something about it. If a term is used in purely referential position, it is subject to the substituitivitysubstitutivity of identity: the term can be substituted by a coextensive term (a term true of the same objects) without changing the truth-value of the sentence. In the sentence, 'Amsterdam rhymes with Peter Pan' you cannot substitute 'Amsterdam' with 'the capital of the Netherlands'. A construction, a way in which a singular term or a sentence is included in another singular term or sentence, has ''referential transparency'': it is either referentially transparent or referentially opaque. A construction is referentially transparent if it is the case that if an occurrence of a term is purely referential in a sentence then it is purely referential also in the containing sentence. However, Quine's goal is to make clear which positions in a sentence are referentially transparent, not to make them all transparent.

===Canonical notation===