Between the Proximal and the Distal: An interpretation of Quine’s Semantics

The debate on internalism/externalism both in semantics and in epistemology con- cerns the core relations between the mind and the world. I will use this dichotomy to assess whether and how optimal coordination can be worked out between the different parts of Quine’s philosophy: semantics and epistemology in his earlier development. Since Quine has emphasized that his examination of translation is epistemological and since his epistemological project is an internalist one, it should be logical to assume that his semantics proceeded in the same way. But in Word and Object it is possible to retrace his externalist steps by examining Davidson’s thesis, according to which we can retrace two different positions in Quine’s work: the proximal and the distal. I will show that it is a fact that in Word and Object we can discern the two positions mentioned above. Even if we all agree that Quine is an internalist, this was not so clear when reading Word and Object, because the empirical semantics at that time was controversial, and not so aligned to his own internalist epistemology. My hy- pothesis is that the dispute with Davidson is one of the main reasons for the adjust- ments that Quine brought to his semantics.