The indeterminacy result was first articulated in Word and Object (1960)...

The indeterminacy result was first articulated in Word and Object (1960), but it had developed gradually, in Quine’s own thinking, over the twenty-five years of his dialogue with Carnap. Over the period from 1934 to 1950, Quine came by stages to question and then entirely to reject the traditional distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, and with it also the intuitive notions of logical necessity, synonymy, meaning and intention that Carnap and others had used it to explicate.

The publication, in 1951, of Quine’s influential “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” marked a watershed moment in this development; in the article, Quine made explicit his rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction and began to articulate his own, alternative picture of epistemology.

But years before this watershed, the seed of both Quine’s divergence from Carnap and his elaboration of the radical translation scenario had already been planted with a subtle but unmistakable appeal that already appears in some of Quine’s first published writings. What I shall call Quine’s appeal to use appears already in 1934, in Quine’s first published reactions to Carnap’s Logical Syntax .

There it already marks, as I shall argue, the essential difference of emphasis that would eventually grow into Quine’s rejection of Carnap’s entire picture. For from the time of these first philosophical writings, Quine held that it is impossible to understand the structure of language in complete independence of an understanding of the intersubjective practice of its speakers.

In this, Quine already diverged from Carnap, whose vision in The Logical Syntax of Language called for languages to be treated as arbitrary, rule-based calculi, uninterpreted in themselves. By understanding the significance of this difference for the development of Quine’s thought, we can gain insight into both the underlying reasons for his divergence from Carnap and the larger significance of the indeterminacy result itself.

For we can see how it formulates Quine’s far-ranging internal critique of the structuralist picture of language that can otherwise seem, as it did for Carnap, natural and unavoidable, and that continues to determines both ordinary and philosophical thinking about language and its analysis.