Claim

Inscrutability of reference

Overview

The inscrutability or indeterminacy of reference (also referential inscrutability or ontological relativity) is a thesis by 20th century analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine in his book Word and Object.

The main claim of this theory is that any given sentence can be changed into a variety of other sentences where the parts of the sentence will change in what they reference, but they will nonetheless maintain the meaning of the sentence as a whole.

The referential relation is inscrutable, because it is subject to the background language and ontological commitments of the speaker.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Philosophers who discussed Inscrutability of reference

• Willard Van Orman Quine

Related ideas

• German language
• Analytic philosophy
• Dutch language
• Reference
• Philosophical skepticism
• Word and Object
• Sorites paradox
• Indeterminacy of translation
• Michael Dummett
• Willard Van Orman Quine
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Relativism
• Thought experiment
• Correspondence theory of truth
• Ontological commitment
• Hilary Putnam
• Proposition
• Trope (philosophy)
• Existence

Place in the tradition

Part of Analytic philosophy.

Explore Inscrutability of reference in the interactive graph →