Jhadeswar Ghosh

Naturalized Semantics: a Critical Analysis of Quine's Philosophy Jhadeswar Ghosh

This book proposes to examine the central notion of how semantics is naturalized in Quine?s philosophy. Quine has raised several questions with regard to meaning in language and communication, and his approach to these issues has been that of a thoroughgoing naturalist. Within the naturalistic framework Quine claims that meaning is indeterminate, reference is inscrutable, ontology is relative, theories are underdetermined by experience, and the truth value of any statement can be revised. He also makes several bold claims such as there are no meanings, no propositions, no attributes, no relations, no numbers, no synonymity, no facts, and no analytic truths. These claims appear to be very puzzling. The author attempted to explain in what sense these claims are to be understood and how far these claims can be defended. Philosophically, this book tries to show that Quine is a very systematic philosopher and his solutions to the problems in different areas of philosophy such as ontology, epistemology, philosophy of mind and language are based on his naturalistic commitments. In the end, this can be said that Quine has been successful in establishing a new form of semantics.