Meaning and referring

“Confusion with meaning...”

“...we can acknowledge a worldful of objects, and let our singular and general terms refer to those objects...without ever taking up the topic of meaning.”

Hmm. I’m curious how he sees that happening. It’s kind of a throw-away line, but maybe it’s instructive. Assuming he means by ‘refer’ the standard denotation of some object, does he think that meaning doesn’t come up because he thinks of it as psychological, and reference as denotational (objective, semantic)? Okay, but isn’t that just verbal? I mean, the interesting meaning problem for the Quine of the two dogmas is synonymy criteria being circular—that isn’t psychological, is it? Isn’t that semantic in a similar sense as reference is? And if so, then how could we have enough language to have referential terms, both singular and general, and yet not have meaning?

Not vital, but I’m a little worried.