 Quine also held that decisions about how to make such associations should be made holistically. As he sometimes put it, the “unit of translation” is an entire language, not a particular sentence. On this view, one can translate a sentence S of a natural language NL with a structurally mismatching sentence µ of a formal language FL, even if it seems (locally) implausible that S is used to express the proposition associated with µ, so long as the following condition is met: the association between S and µ is part of a general account of NL and FL that figures in an overall theory—which includes an account of language, logic, and the language-independent world—that is among the best overall theories available. This holistic conception of how to evaluate proposed regimentations of natural language was part and parcel of Quine’s criticism of the early positivists’  analytic-synthetic distinction,  and his more radical suggestion that there is no such distinction