Abstract

Few disputes have dominated the discourse of analytic philosophy like the one between Rudolf Carnap and Willard Van Orman Quine. Centered originally on the issue of intensionality in the philosophy of logic and language — ultimately the import of the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements — their conflict came to concern the nature of post-foundational epistemology and its relation to ontology. Are we to follow Carnap and explicate the conditions of intersubjectively meaningful speech in a purely formal inquiry that, taken by itself, refrains from underwriting any one such framework? Or are we to follow Quine and naturalize epistemology as an empirical inquiry into the conditions of theory acceptance and thus, perforce, acquiesce in ontological commitments? Perhaps not the least pressing question is whether there is any “cognitive” conflict at all between Carnapean reconstructionism and Quinean naturalism