ABSTRACT
In this century philosophic theories of language have had a strong impact on the ways we philosophize. For example, the conviction that we can uncover intensions for words, and thereby provide necessary and sufficient conditions determining extensions across all modal projections, led to assigning to philosophy the task of constructing such definitions, with analytic strength, for words like ‘knowledge’, ‘belief’, ‘right’, ‘theory’, etc. Disagreeing with this view, Quine and some of the ‘naturalist’ philosophers deny that there are intensions in this sense, and interpret all of our judgements as having some empirical content. According to this view, there is a continuum between philosophy and science, and the former does not have any special prerogatives for tackling conceptual issues.
