By the end of this paper, Quine will turn to the views he expressed in Two Dogmas, and part of the reason for reading it is to see these ideas in a slightly different context.

• Part of this difference in context lies in Quine’s focus on his views on the nature of “ontological commitment.” He introduces the term in the second paragraph and presents his ideas about it on pp. 65-67. These ideas are somewhat in the spirit of Russell’s view that ordinary proper names are not really names but disguised definite descriptions (and thus really rest on the use of logical expressions like “there is” and “all,” what Quine refers to as “quantification”). There is a relation also to Wittgenstein’s idea that the world consists of facts, not things; for Quine’s views suggest that what is fundamental is not the things we name but the facts that make our claims of existence true.

• The other difference in the context in which Quine sets his views here lies in his concern with views Carnap had recently presented. These are rather different from Carnap’s in the late 1920s that Quine discussed in Two Dogmas, but they are not so different from the views expressed in the paper of Carnap’s that you read. As you read the long quotation from Carnap on p. 68 and Quine’s further presentations of Carnap’s views, look to connections with the distinctions between “formal” and “material” modes of expression and between “proposals” and “assertions” that you saw Carnap make in that paper.

• Quine’s critical aim is to attack Carnap’s distinction between external and internal questions with respect to a framework and the related distinction between “category” and “subclass” questions (see p. 69). The latter terms are Quine’s, not Carnap’s but they usefully suggest connections with ways of thinking about ontology that go back to Aristotle. You don’t need to worry about the details of Quine’s “logical digression” on p. 70 regarding the foundations of set theory. His point is that it is always possible to get by with one sort of variable (or one sort of pronoun) and that Carnap’s distinction must rest not on syntax but on a distinction between the analytic and synthetic. The move away from syntax might have troubled Carnap in the 1930s but, by the early 1950s, he had come to see semantics as central to what he was doing. The quotation from Carnap on p. 71 not only attests to his agreement about what was at issue between him and Quine but also provides a useful way of thinking about Quine’s position.