Quine’s critique of Carnap's distinction between internal and external questions of existence

Abstract

This paper aims to make a brief reconstruction of Quine's critique of Carnap's distinction between internal and external questions of existence, in order to clarify one of the points of divergence between the two authors. The first part of the paper, presents Carnap’s distinction (which is the object of Quine’s critique), which is a dichotomy between questions of existence made ​​ internally to a linguistic structure, and questions of existence made externally to a linguistic structure. The former questions are considered by the author as strictly theoretical , while the latter are considered as practical questions concerning the adoption of a language. The second part will expound on Quine’s critique, whose base is focused especially on the rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction.