In Chapter 2 of ''Word and Object'', Quine shows that the total apparatus of grammatical and semantic devices in a language is not objectively translatable into foreign languages. Therefore, in Chapter 3, he proposeproposes to investigate a language’s devices relative to each other. For this, he first describes a child’s process of acquiring reference, by showing the order in which children learn grammatical devices. In Chapter 4 he then turns away from language acquisition, to investigate the vagaries of reference in a particular language (English). In Chapter 5, Quine proposes a system for regimentation, which should help us understand how reference in language works and should clarify our conceptual scheme. He calls this system the ''canonical notation''; it is a system with which we can investigate the grammatical and semantic devices of English by paraphrase.
