Quine, Carnap, and the Persistence of Intelligibility
The reflections that follow were occasioned by a recent paper by Lucas Ribeiro Vollet, “Sense (Sinn) as a Pseudo-Problem and Sense as a Radical Problem: A Reading of the Motivations of Quine against Carnap" (https://independent.academia.edu/s/c59ed03835). Vollet kindly invited comment on the piece, and it repays careful reading. The article revisits the familiar—but still unsettled—Quine–Carnap dispute over Sense, not as a merely historical episode, but as a diagnostic window into the limits of semantic theory in the twentieth century.
Vollet’s central claim is worth stating clearly at the outset. He argues that Quine’s skepticism about intensions is not eliminativist in the crude sense often attributed to him. Quine does not regard the question of Sense as a pseudo-problem in the way some moral or metaphysical notions are dismissed as meaningless. Rather, he believes the question is incorrectly framed. What Carnap treats as a semantic problem—the need for intensional identity conditions stronger than extensional equivalence—Quine reinterprets as a scientific and methodological challenge: the ongoing task of coordinating empirical investigation, theory revision, and socially stabilized paradigms of meaning.
As Vollet summarizes in his abstract, Quine’s naturalism applies skepticism about intensions not to deny the reality of the problem, but to expose its mislocation. The appeal to sense functions as a semantically dogmatic expression of a broader difficulty already present in scientific practice itself: the challenge of providing coherence to inquiry, securing rational consensus, and stabilizing paradigms of meaning over time. Vollet names this the radical problem generated by the idea of Sense.
This reframing is philosophically serious and historically sensitive. It resists the temptation to caricature Quine as a blunt extensionalist and instead situates his critique of sense within a broader vision of scientific rationality. There is much here with which one can agree. Yet the very sophistication of Vollet’s reconstruction also sharpens a question that neither Quine nor his interpreters fully resolve: what becomes of intelligibility once formal semantics has been dismantled, but scientific practice itself presupposes more than extensional structure can supply?
It is this question—rather than the fate of “sense” as a semantic object—that motivates what follows.
I. The Legitimate Collapse of Intensional Semantics
Quine’s central insight was not merely that intensional entities resist formal definition. It was that the criteria by which such entities were supposed to be individuated—analyticity, synonymy, necessity—could not be specified without circularity. Any attempt to regiment them either presupposed what it claimed to explain or relied on pragmatic judgments smuggled in under the guise of logical form.
Vollet is right to insist that this is not a technical oversight but a structural failure. There is no algorithm for sense. No calculus decides synonymy. No formal rule distinguishes what is merely coextensive from what is cognitively equivalent. To that extent, the Carnapian project fails decisively.
This failure should not be minimized. It forces a clean and non-negotiable distinction between what syntax can secure—derivability, consistency, inferential order—and what it cannot: meaning, reference, or truth. Formal rigor does not rescue sense; it exposes its absence as a formal object. Any attempt to recover sense by enriching syntax, appealing to semantic rules, or invoking linguistic frameworks only relocates the difficulty without resolving it.
In this respect, Quine’s critique remains one of the most important negative results of twentieth-century philosophy.
II. The Non Sequitur: From Failure to Elimination
Where the argument falters is in the inference drawn from this failure. Quine famously concluded that since intensional semantics cannot be formalized, there is no fact of the matter beyond extensional equivalence and the evolving practices of empirical science. Meaning becomes, at best, a byproduct of theory choice, pragmatic convenience, and holistic revision.
But this conclusion does not follow.
The failure of formal capture does not entail the unreality of what resists capture. It shows only that the object in question is not an object of the same kind as formal derivations or syntactic structures. To infer elimination from non-formalizability is to mistake a methodological limitation for an ontological verdict.
Indeed, Quine’s own account of scientific practice quietly depends on distinctions that extensionalism alone cannot generate. Theory revision is not arbitrary. Scientific change is constrained by judgments of relevance, coherence, explanatory power, and unification—none of which are derivable from extensional relations alone, and none of which can be dictated by data without remainder. These judgments are not internal to a theory in the way axioms are; nor are they reducible to convention. They presuppose a space in which theories can count as making better sense of a domain rather than merely succeeding instrumentally.
Quine identifies the failure of intensional semantics correctly. What he fails to identify is what that failure presupposes.
III. Intelligibility Without Intensions
Once sense is rejected as a formal intermediary, we are left with a striking alternative: intelligibility without intensional objects. The question is no longer What is the sense of this expression? but How is sense-making possible at all, if no formal structure can generate it?
Vollet gestures toward an answer by appealing to coordination, rational negotiation, and scientific practice. But these gestures remain descriptive rather than explanatory. They name sites where intelligibility is exercised without accounting for what makes such exercise possible in the first place.
Theory choice, interpretive adequacy, and conceptual revision all presuppose a non-formal orientation toward meaning. This orientation is not itself a theory, nor a rule, nor a convention. It is the condition under which theories, rules, and conventions can be assessed as intelligible rather than merely adopted.
This is the point at which extensionalism quietly depends on what it officially disavows. The rejection of sense does not eliminate the problem of meaning; it relocates it to a level that resists objectification.
IV. Determination and the Space of Orientation
What emerges here is not a new intensional entity, but a structural distinction: the distinction between determination and determinability. Formal systems determine relations within a domain. But the capacity for such determination—to count as relevant, adequate, or successful—depends on a space of orientation that is not itself formally determined.
This space is neither subjective nor sociological, though it is encountered through finite judgments. It does not dictate outcomes, but it orients inquiry toward intelligibility. It guides without necessitating. It grounds without competing with determinate structures.
Attempts to collapse this space into practice, convention, or revisionary habit fail for the same reason that intensional semantics failed earlier: they confuse the exercise of intelligibility with its condition. What is presupposed in every successful act of interpretation cannot itself be reduced to the history of such acts.
V. Translation, Stabilization, and a Persistent Remainder
A brief exchange following Vollet’s paper sharpens this point further. In response to a comment emphasizing the importance of language–metalanguage distinctions, translation procedures, and higher-order logical resources for reconstructing ontological commitments—especially in contemporary AI contexts—Vollet agrees that such distinctions are crucial. They allow ontological commitments to be reorganized through mapping rules that preserve predictive roles while revising theoretical vocabulary.
Yet Vollet also raises an important hesitation. Translation frameworks, he suggests, may not be the only way to model ontological stabilization. Fixed-point constructions, iterative self-mapping, and convergent computational paths might also generate stable ontological frameworks internally, without appeal to pre-given semantic foundations. From this perspective, intensional—or even “supersensible”—structures emerge as products of convergence rather than as metaphysical primitives. Quine, Vollet suggests, might allow such internal stabilization, provided it remains constrained by biological, social, or cultural selection pressures that guide coordination toward shared reference.
This exchange is illuminating precisely because it confirms the deeper issue. Whether one appeals to translation, fixed points, or convergence, the question remains the same: what makes stabilization intelligible as stabilization rather than mere iteration? What distinguishes convergence from coincidence, coordination from collapse, agreement from brute alignment?
No amount of internal reorganization can answer that question from within.
VI. A Limit Quine Cannot Cross
Quine was right to dismantle the myth of sense as a semantic object. He was wrong to suppose that nothing remains once the myth is dispelled. What remains is intelligibility itself—real, irreducible, and non-formal.
Extensional logic shows us, with remarkable clarity, what form can and cannot do. But it also shows us that meaning is not generated by form. It is presupposed by it. The recognition of this fact does not require a return to intensions. It requires acknowledging that intelligibility has an ontological ground that formal systems inhabit but do not produce.
To say this is not yet to speak theologically. But it is to arrive at a threshold. The problem of sense dissolves. The problem of intelligibility does not. And it is precisely at that point—where philosophy has exhausted its formal resources without collapsing into irrationalism—that a deeper account of meaning becomes unavoidable.
That account begins not with semantic enrichment, but with the recognition that the space in which meaning appears is itself grounded.
