Abstract

For Quine all talk is in mediis rebus, is itself a physical phenomenon. To grasp what a sentence is, its relation to a language, and what it is for a sentence to be true is to be invited to see that notions of shared meaning across languages, of truth, even of knowledge, are far from what they are ordinarily taken to be. To read Quine reflectively is to plunge with him into the midst of things, shunning the vain support of purported transcendental certainties or Archimedean points, and spurning claims of the intuitive clarity of meaning, thought, and belief, for in the midst of things they themselves are what are most lacking in clarity