Sense (Sinn) as a Pseudo-Problem and Sense as a radical problem:

a reading of the motivations of Quine against Carnap

Abstract

The conflict between Quine and Carnap over the notion of Sense represents a fundamental debate in the 20th century. The question represents the state to which skepticism about a clear theoretical awareness of the limits of understanding of sentences can reach. It is about whether, as with moral, aesthetic, and metaphysical notions, the characterization of Sense would represent an unnecessary super-notion unable to figure in decidable sentences, as true or false sentences. Going deeper, the problem addresses the ability to characterize the discernment of truth conditions for modal propositions and propositional attitudes, promising an identity criterion stronger than the extensional one for logically compatible propositions. Our article will argue that Quine's naturalism applies skepticism (about intensions) not to enact the absence of a problem or the pseudo-problematic nature of the question of Sense; on the contrary, he believes that the question of Sense is incorrectly framed. It is a semantically dogmatic expression of a broader scientific challenge, present in the practice of providing coherence to empirical investigation and our social production of consensus and paradigms of meaning. We will call this the radical problem generated by the idea of Sense. This shifts to the problem of the dispute between rational parameters and paradigms of linguistic consensus, bringing the question to its true enigmatic face.