PEIRCE TO STRAWSON presence of rabbits But—even assuming that this is an observation statement—it may equally well refer to rabbit, rabbit stage, or rabbit part Second, there is indeterminacy at the level of the entire language: the data may support equally well two different, incompatible translation manuals This indeterminacy is a particular example of a more general phenomenon, namely that theories, and not only theories of translation, are underdetermined by sensory inputs More than one total scientific system, therefore, may be compatible with all the data ever available We must indeed give up the idea that there is any fixed furniture of the world What exists depends upon what theory we adopt In his early essay ‘On What There Is’, Quine famously said, ‘To be is to be the value of a bound variable.’ When he said this he was following in the footsteps of Frege and Russell, who insisted that in a scientific theory no names should be allowed that lacked a definite reference When all dubious names have been eliminated with the aid of Russell’s theory of description we are left with sentences of the form ‘There is an x such that x is ’ followed by a set of predicates setting out the properties by which the putative individual is to be identified What exists, according to the theory, will be the entities over which the quantifiers range But because different theories may be equally supported, so may different ontologies What can be said to exist is always relative to a theory Wittgenstein and Quine are often regarded, especially in continental Europe, as the two leading exponents of analytical philosophy In fact, their philosophies are very different from each other.7 In particular the two men disagreed about the nature of philosophy Because of his disbelief in the analytic–synthetic distinction Quine saw no sharp boundary between philosophy and empirical science Wittgenstein, throughout his life, continued to believe what he wrote in the Tractatus (4.111), ‘Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences The word ‘‘philosophy’’ must mean something which stands above or below, but not beside the natural sciences.’ Scientism, i.e the attempt to see philosophy as a science, was his beˆte noire In the Blue Book he wrote, ‘Philosophers constantly see the methods of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to answer questions in the The differences have been luminously detailed by P M S Hacker, Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 183–227 67