Recall Quine's eloquent description:
The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements. Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections; the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field. Having re-evaluated one statement we must re-evaluate some others, whether they be statements logically connected with the first or whether they be the statements of logical connections themselves. But the total field is so undetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.If this view is right, it is misleading to speak of the empirical content of an individual statement, especially if it be a statement at all remote from the experiential periphery of the field. Furthermore it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements which hold come what may. Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. Even a statement very close to the periphery can be held true in the face of recalcitrant experience by pleading hallucination or by amending certain statements of the kind called logical laws. Conversely, by the same token, no statement is immune to revision. Revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle? -Quine, 1951, p.41-2-
The reason for setting out Quine's metaphor is not to adopt it, but to set it aside. Quine's is not a fabric of sentences except indirectly; it is fundamentally a temporal fabric spun rather than woven, and a convenient image intended to apply in some measure to all of the vocabulary that natural language throws up.
Though Quine's metaphor does not apply, the general concept of a fabric or field does; related is the temporal relationship of a vocable's later uses, relative to its early uses. On the account presented here, roughly parallel remarks apply to the elements of natural language on a metric of attenuation. They can be thought of as constituting a field. The notion of centre and periphery have no direct application, but we may think of the relevant development as it affects a single item as beginning where the vocabulary originates and broadening gradually, roughly speaking in such a way as to track the growing set of items to which the vocabulary has been applied. In the case of adjectives, we may think of tracking the growth of their extension. In the case of binary relational vocabulary as tracking the growing family of pairs of items that are referred to in its attributive uses. There is no periphery of this fabric. But, we claim, there is a function whose values increase monotonically with this extensional growth; for as we move farther away from the origin, we find uses of the vocabulary that are less and less dependent upon the uses nearer to its point of origin. However, those farther from the point of origin are more dependent upon others relatively far from their points of origin. Beneath the fabric lies all of the non-linguistic physical activity upon which the linguistic material initially depends for its effects.