We may say that there is something which my eyes, the sky and my friend's shirt have in common, and thereby posit the existence of an entity. But we may also refuse to make such a statement. In order to make the statement true, I only need to produce a stupid friend, who then represents a value for the bound variable. A physicalist scheme is useful for organizing sensory experiences, and Quine accords epistemological priority to the phenomenalistic scheme. The goal is to develop strategies for dealing with the widest possible variety of situations.
Quine is, in the final analysis, a pragmatist.