On Quine’s Logical Necessity

On the basic of criticism on traditional notion of necessity, especially on traditionalnotion of logical necessity, Quine proposed his logical necessity theory. Generally, thetraditional view is that necessity is a semantic property of a proposition; namely, the necessitymodel word is a description of that proposition. He believed that the traditional view hadgiven rise to many logical problems, which mainly appeared in model logic. In addition theview that regards necessity as a property of proposition causes confusion between the “use”and “mention” of the necessary proposition, and leads to single denotation term turningambiguous; as a result, the rule of identity and quantifier rules become invalid. Quine arguedthat the adverb “necessarily” is not a description of the necessity-led proposition but toexplain the conditional proposition hidden under the literal meaning of that proposition; inother words, to explain relation between the antecedent and consequent of that conditionalproposition. Furthermore, the explanation made by the necessity model word means aninterpretational promise for both natural necessity and logical necessity.In the traditional view, the necessity of logical truth could be ascribed to their analyticity.But Quine opposed to explaining necessity by means of analyticity, for analyticity itself alsoneeds to be further explained. Quine asserted that our knowledge must be taken as a wholewhen it is facing the experiential examination; meanwhile, facing experiential examination,logical truth is also modifiable. However, choosing and evaluating a theory, we should abideby the principle of pragmatism, and according to that principle, logical truth can not befacilely modified in the whole knowledge system.