ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the question whether Willard van Orman Quine was a metaphysician and speculate, mainly on the basis of one example, about what Quine might have thought about the analytic metaphysics. The key lies in the simple truth schema, familiar from Alfred Tarski’s writings. Take the stock example ‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white. Quine would probably reply that the existence of the sentence and that the sentence in quotes designates it are truisms. An important difference between the two is that typically Donald Davidson deploys the truth predicate in theoretical discussion where it is in Quine’s terms transcendent. That is quite evident in Davidson’s account of radical interpretation. David Lewis’s theory of possible worlds strikes as more in the spirit of Quine than the embrace of modal logic by many of his contemporaries such as Kripke.
