Quine and the Species Problem

Abstract

The goal of this and subsequent chapters is to convince the reader that there is a significant analogy between biological entities like species, clades, and population lineages and linguistic and semantic ones such as words, meanings, concepts, and languages. This chapter’s first sections review some obvious facts about language communities and speakers and some elementary facts about the ways biology thinks about species, and points out that there is indeed a prima facie case for thinking that things like word meanings are analogous to species. The chapter’s later sections argue that if we take the analogy at face value, we can embrace Quine’s conclusion in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’—that there is no theoretically interesting notion of analytic truth, no sort of synonymy that can do epistemological work—while still thinking that the notion of meaning can carry a real theoretical load.