W.V.O. Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25, 1908 - December 25, 2000) was one of the most influential American philosophers and logicians of the 20th century.
Overview
Sometimes referred to as the "philosopher's philosopher", Quine is the quintessential model of an analytic philosopher. He served as the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1956 to 2000. His major writings include Two Dogmas of Empiricism, which influentially attacked the logical positivists' conception of analytic and synthetic propositions, and Word and Object.
Life
Quine grew up in Akron, Ohio. He received his B.A. from Oberlin College and his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1932. At Harvard he studied logic with Alfred North Whitehead. For the next couple of years he travelled Europe on a generous research fellowship, coming under the influence of the Polish Logicians, the Vienna Circle, and especially Rudolf Carnap.
At Harvard his own students included many now-famed philosophers, including Donald Davidson, David Lewis, and Daniel Dennett.
Work
Most of Quine's early publications were in the field of formal logic. He gradually began to work on questions of ontology, epistemology, and language, and by the sixties he had substantially developed his project of "naturalized epistemology," the aim of which was to answer all substantive questions of knowledge and meaning using the methods and tools of the natural sciences. Quine roundly rejected the notion that there should be a "first philosophy," a theoretical standpoint somehow prior to and capable of justifying science. Both these standpoints are part of Quine's naturalism.
Rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction
In the thirties and forties discussions with Carnap, Nelson Goodman, and Alfred Tarski, among others, led Quine to doubt the tenability of logical positivism's fundamental distinction between "analytic" sentences--those true in virtue simply of the meanings of their words, such as "All bachelors are unmarried"--and "synthetic" statements, those true or false in virtue of facts in the world such as "There is a cat on the mat."
The indeterminacy of translation
indeterminacy of translation and other extensions of Quine's work is ontological relativity and the related theory of confirmation holism. The premise of confirmation holism is that all theories (and the propositions derived from them) of what exists are not sufficiently determined by empirical data (data, sensory-data, evidence); each theory with its interpretation of the evidence is equally justifiable. Thus, the Greek's worldview of Homeric gods is as credible as the physicists' world of electromagnetic waves.
As to his personal beliefs, Quine clarifies at the end of "Two Dogmas of Empiricism":
- As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer . . . For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits.
Quine's ontological relativism led him to agree with Pierre Duhem that for any collection of empirical evidence there would always be many theories able account for it. Thus it is not possible to verify or falsify a theory simply by comparing it to the empirical evidence; the theory can always be saved by some modification. For Quine, scientific thought formed a coherent web in which any part could be altered in the light of empirical evidence and in which no empirical evidence could force the revision of a part.
Quine's work has helped drive the wide acceptance of instrumentalism in the philosophy of science.
Quotations
- "To be is to be the value of a bound variable"
- "No entity without identity."
- "Philosophy of science is philosophy enough."
- "We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. If each of us were to defy Alexander Pope and be the last to lay the old aside, it might not be a better world, but it would be a lovelier language."
Notable books by Quine
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