Quine Books

“The ideal of explication differs not only from previous philosophy, and from Carnap’s own previous framework of rational reconstruction, but also from most present analytic philosophy. It differs from Quine’s influential programme, for instance, encapsulated in Neurath’s metaphor of reconstructing the boat of our conceptual scheme on the open sea, without being able to put it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from new materials. In Carnap’s framework, our collective mental life is not – to adopt the metaphor – all in the same boat. It consists rather of a give and take between two kinds of communicative devices that operate in different ways. Carnap’s boat is only one of these two parts, not both. It is the medium of action and practical decisions, in which vague concepts of ordinary language have a continuing, perhaps essential, role. This is not, in Carnap’s terms, a proper linguistic ‘framework’ at all. It is a medium not for the pursuit of truth but for getting things done, and it is well adapted to this purpose. To improve it further, we chip away at it and replace its components, a few at a time, with better ones – and this reconstruction, it is true, we carry out at sea. But the better components we acquire from the ports we call at, where we go shopping for proper linguistic frameworks. We take on board better materials and better navigational instruments that help us to reach whatever ports we hope to visit in future – where we can again bring on new and improved materials and instruments. Sometimes, the improved instruments will so influence our knowledge of where we are going that the whole plan of the journey will be revised, and we will change course. But the decision what port to head for next we have to make on board, in our pragmatic vernacular, with whatever improvements we have incorporated up to that point.”
― A.W. Carus, Carnap and Twentieth-Century Thought: Explication as Enlightenment