• Part of this difference 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.

• Another difference in the context in which Quine sets his views here lies in his concern with Carnap’s work in the 1940s and early 1950s. This work develops ideas that are rather different from the views that Quine discussed in Two Dogmas, which date from the 1920s, but they are not as different from the views expressed in the material you read earlier in the semester, which dated from the 1930s. As you read the long quotation from Carnap on p. 68 and Quine’s further presentations of Carnap’s views, you should look for connections between the ideas Quine considers here and the ones you saw Carnap develop in the texts from the 1930s. In particular, look for traces of Carnap’s distinctions between “formal” and “material” modes of expression and between “proposals” and “assertions.”

• Quine’s critical aim is to attack Carnap’s distinction between external and internal questions of existence 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 between Carnap’s views and 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 to semantic issues might have troubled Carnap in the 1930s; but, by the early 1950s, he had found a way to understand semantics that removed its association with metaphysics, and he came to see it 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.