But in my view, language (and reasoning) is (ultimately) necessarily circular. — numberjohnny5

That's weird. If language and reasoning would be circular, then words would be meaningless (e.g. 'food' would not refer to edible things in the world but only other words), and all reasoning would be invalid.

Regarding Quine and analyticity: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analytic-synthetic/

That's weird. If language and reasoning would be circular, then words would be meaningless (e.g. 'food' would not refer to edible things in the world but only other words), and all reasoning would be invalid. — jkop

Well, I'm an internalist on meaning, so it's not "meaningless" in my view.

Re your example, "food" as a word would refer to particular objects we might eat, but defining the word "food" would involve synonymous definitions.

I meant "reasoning is circular" in the sense that if reasoning relies on the view that (linguistic) meaning is instantiated via words/sentences, then reasoning is circular due to synonymy. So I don't mean "reasoning is circular" in the sense of invalid arguments.

Re his comments on synonymy, Quine always seemed to me to be pulling the ridiculous rhetorical tactic where one pretends to not know what some common term refers to, and where when one is given a definition or explanation in common terms, one continues by pretending to not kinow what those terms refer to either, ad infinitum.

It always goes something like this:

Joe: "I have no idea what a dog is."

Bob: "Dogs--you know canines."

Joe: "I have no idea what canines are."

Bob: "You know the common house pet; not cats, but the ones that are wolf-like . . ."

Joe: "I have no idea what a pet is."

And it goes on and on, where no matter what words you use to explain it, Joe doesn't know those words.

People use that tactic a lot on message boards. Rather than seeming like an argument against the idea in question, it always seems to me like the person is effectively saying that they're either an imbecile or insane or a badly programmed robot or something, because they're apparently competent speakers of the natural language in question, but they can't grasp something required to make them a competent speaker of the language--making it clear that the appearance of them being a competent speaker of the language was mistaken, and suggesting that they instead need serious remedial education, or institutionalization, or better programming, or whatever it might be in the case at hand.