Daily Inspiration Quote by Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine is taking a scalpel to a comforting habit: treating meanings as tidy little essences that hover behind our words, faithfully attached to things in the world. His line stages a philosophical custody battle. “Essence” belongs to objects, to what a thing is. “Meaning,” he suggests, is what you get after you sever that presumed natural bond and remarry the essence to language itself. The metaphor is pointedly legal and domestic - “divorced,” “wedded” - because Quine wants to show how ordinary talk smuggles in metaphysics as if it were just good housekeeping.

The intent is revisionary, not merely definitional. Quine is warning that when philosophers ask for “the meaning” of a term, they often treat words as if each one carried an internal, stable core - an essence - that guarantees reference. That picture props up projects he distrusts: sharp analytic definitions, synonymy as a clean relation, and the idea that every statement has a determinate “content” separable from the messy business of how language is learned and used.

The subtext is Quine’s larger campaign against foundational certainties in semantics and epistemology. In a world where translation can be indeterminate and theories face experience as a whole, “meaning” looks less like a natural ingredient and more like a bookkeeping device we invent to make language seem anchored. The sentence works because it flips a revered concept into a critique: meaning isn’t a bridge to reality; it’s what we call essence after we’ve moved it indoors, into the word, and started mistaking the furniture for the landscape.