Quine's _Elementary logic_

The little logic textbook I wish I'd written was published in the 1940s by Quine. I'm using it to teach logic this semester (along with supplemental texts that do more formal things). I figured it would be useful to create screencasts on my iPad as I walk through the book. Those will be parked at my YouTube channel, and embedded at The Smokr Tumblr, the media-robust sibling to this journal. Here's a link to the first video, if you're interested.

Still more on meaning and referring

“Let us then look back...”

No, I was wrong. Quine wants to talk about synonyms. Let’s see how this goes.

More on meaning and referring

“An object referred to...”

I stepped right in it:

“Meanings...purport to be entities of a special sort: the meaning of an expression is the idea expressed.”

So let’s proceed as if this is the notion of meaning that vexes linguists—what may be thought of as Cartesian, frankly—and the synonymy problems may be put to one side for now.

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.