 Again Quine echoes Russell’s language with his mention of a “neat” property that calls out for a “construction” from known entities. Quine distinguishes his project, which he calls “explication”, by the fact that there are alternative possible ways to fix the notion. Although Whitehead and Russell give an account in PM *55, where they are called “ordinal couples”, the first proposal to treat ordered pairs as classes of their members is from Norbert Wiener (1914) who identifies \(\langle x,y \rangle\) with \(\{\{ x \}, \{ y, \Lambda \}\}\), where \(\Lambda\) is the empty class. From this definition it is easy to recover the first and second elements of the pair, and so Quine’s (1) is an elementary theorem. Later, Kuratowski proposed the definition \(\{\{ x \}, \{x,y\}\}\), from which (1) also follows. For Quine it is a matter of choice which definition to use, as the points on which they differ are “don’t-cares”, issues which give a precise answer to questions about which our pre-theoretic account is mute. An explication thus differs considerably from an “analysis” of ordinary, or pre-theoretic language, both in giving a precise meaning to the expression where it might have been obscure, or perhaps simply silent and in possibly differing from pre-theoretic use, as suggested by the name. This fits well with the asymmetries we have noted between analysis and construction, with analysis aimed at the discovery of the constituents and structure of propositions which are given to us, and construction which is more a matter of choice, with the goal being the recovery of particular “neat” features of the construction in a formal theory. The ordered pair is thus a “philosophical paradigm” for Quine just as Russell’s theory of descriptions was a paradigm of philosophy for Ramsey, and each is a “logical construction”.