I We can begin to understand the development of Quine’s...

I We can begin to understand the development of Quine’s understanding of language and meaning by considering its origins in his initial reaction to the work that was the basis of his first philosophical writings, Carnap’s Logical Syntax .

Conceived and written over a period of three years, and appearing in 1934, Logical Syntax made the bold claim that the problems of philosophy and the logic of science could be treated purely syntactically : that is, in terms simply of formal rules governing the interrelation and combination of symbols, without reference to their meanings.[^218] Logicians had previously recognized the syntactical nature of the grammatical formation rules governing the possibilities of combining symbols into meaningful sentences, given a perspicuous sorting of symbols into grammatical types.

In addition to this, Carnap argued, transformation rules governing inference or derivation of one symbol-sequence from another could also be treated as purely syntactical ones, concerning only the interrelations of symbols.[^219] In this way, the logical analysis of language becomes the purely descriptive “mathematics and physics of language,” the theory of the rules actually governing the inscription and manipulation of signs in a particular language, natural or artificial.[^220] The important notions of analyticity, deducibility, and logical contradiction can then be formulated, Carnap argues, in terms of the syntactical rules for a given language.

Their formal properties, moreover, can be investigated in abstraction from any pre-existing interpretation of the significance of those rules.[^221] Indeed, as Carnap urged, the syntactical conception of logic had the substantial merit of exposing the arbitrariness of the logical rules constitutive of any particular language.

For any particular language, logical syntax displays the rules constitutive of meaning and logic in that language; but we can always imagine, and formulate, alternative sets of rules to suit our particular needs.

This shows, Carnap suggests, that the logical analysis of language need not be an investigation of the “single” logic or the “true” logic, as philosophers had formerly supposed.[^222] Instead, in logical investigations, a “principle of tolerance” reigns, allowing the logician to stipulate arbitrary rule-determined languages to suit particular needs.