Quine’s main aim in this paper is to exhibit certain conceptual difficulties that he associates with a range of concepts. These concepts include not only the modalities such as necessity or possibility that he attacks in “Two Dogmas” but also propositional attitudes such as belief. In the first two sections, he focuses on propositional attitudes though modalities are his eventual target.
• In §1 Quine introduces two related distinctions, the distinction between occurrences of names that are or are not purely designative (p. 114) and the corresponding distinction between contexts in which the occurrences of names are of one or the other sort (p. 115). In later work, Quine used the term “referential” as he uses “designative” here and spoke of the two sorts of contexts as referentially transparent and referentially opaque, respectively. So contexts in which names are purely designative are referentially transparent (i.e., one “sees through” the name to what it designates), and those in which names are not purely designative (or are, as he often says here, “indesignative”) are referentially opaque. In the opaque context of quotation, for example, one “sees” the name itself rather than seeing though it to what it designates. The best way to come to understand these ideas is to think about the points Quine makes with his examples, and we will approach them in class by talking through some of the examples of this section.
• In §2, he notes that the opaque contexts identified in §1 also interfere with inferences by existential generalization (pp. 116-117)—i.e., inferences from sentences of the form “... t ...” (for some proper name or definite description t) to sentences of the form “something is such that ... it ....” Notice that Quine’s point is not merely that the inference could lead us from a true premise to a false conclusion in such cases; indeed, the conclusion will often be plain nonsense. Since, as he notes on p. 118, no similar problem occurs when the whole clause “something is such that ... it ....” is within the opaque context, people came to refer to this as the problem of “quantifying in.” (See the glossary of notation at the end of these notes for this sense of “quantify.”) Quine later formulated the point he makes at the end of this section as the slogan “To be is to be the value of a variable.”
The points that Quine makes in these sections will have connections with things we will read later, but they are of interest immediately because of the analogous points about necessity that he goes on to make in §§3-4.
• Although Quine may seem more receptive to the analytic/synthetic in §3 than he is in “Two Dogmas”, this earlier paper does not represent a fundamentally different stage in his thinking. He had expressed the basic concerns described in “Two Dogmas” already in earlier work, but he is setting them aside here to focus on a different range of problems that he would regard as infecting modal discourse even if the basic distinction between the analytic and synthetic could be salvaged. These concerns will be expressed in §4, and the examples of §3 are designed to serve as a basis for their statement.
• Quine’s point in §4 is easily stated in general: modalities are subject to the same problems of “quantifying in” that affect quotation and the propositional attitudes. The examples of §3 and the new ones in §4 are designed to be parallel to the examples of §§1-2 and provide the basis for analogous arguments.
• I have not assigned §5, but its final paragraph may be a helpful summary of the paper as the whole. (The aim of the section up to that point is to extend arguments analogous to those you have seen to the distinction between intension and extension that was one of the distinctions he linked in “Two Dogmas” to the analytic/synthetic distinction. In particular, Quine attacks the idea of entities, “attributes,” that correspond to the intensions of expressions in the way classes correspond to the extensions of expressions.)
Quine uses a little logical notation, some of which may be unfamiliar even if you’ve seen logical notation before. Here’s a glossary:
| Operation | Symbol | English | Meaning in context |
| Conjunction | · | and | “A · B” amounts to “A and B” |
| Negation | ~ | not | “~ A” amounts to “it is not the case that A” and says that A is false |
| Universal quantifier | (x) | everything, x, is such that | “(x) ...x...” amounts to “everything, x, is such that ...x...” |
| Existential quantifier | ∃x | something, x, is such that | “∃x ...x...” amounts to “something, x, is such that ...x...” |
The use of the two quantifiers is what Quine refers to as “quantification.” Notice that the form “~ (x) ~ ...x...” amounts to “not everything, x, fails to be such that ...x....” and is therefore another way of stating the existential claim “∃x ...x....” He uses this form in the symbolic example at the bottom of p. 123.