W.V.O. Quine

Introduction

Willard Van Orman Quine is the American philosopher whose work in logic, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mathematics, and epistemology shaped the second half of twentieth-century analytic philosophy more deeply than any other single figure. The 1951 paper Two Dogmas of Empiricism dismantled the analytic-synthetic distinction that had organized the logical positivist program; the 1960 Word and Object developed the doctrine of indeterminacy of translation that has structured subsequent philosophy of language; the broader program of naturalized epistemology set the terms for late-twentieth-century philosophy of mind and theory of knowledge.

Quine combined a major research program with a long teaching career at Harvard, where he served as Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy from 1956 to 1978. His characteristic style — spare, technically rigorous prose with logical apparatus and an aphoristic surface that conceals the technical depth — became one of the dominant prose styles of late-twentieth-century analytic philosophy.

Life

Willard Van Orman Quine was born on June 25, 1908, in Akron, Ohio. The family was middle-class; the father owned a small manufacturing company. Quine showed early mathematical aptitude and was reading Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica in high school.

Quine took his BA at Oberlin in 1930 with majors in mathematics and philosophy and his PhD at Harvard in 1932, completing the doctoral dissertation in two years under Alfred North Whitehead. The 1932–33 academic year was spent in Europe on a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship; the experience brought Quine into contact with Rudolf Carnap and the Vienna Circle in Prague (where Carnap was teaching), with the Polish logicians (Tarski, Leśniewski, Łukasiewicz) in Warsaw, and with the broader European mathematical-philosophical scene. The encounter with Carnap was decisive; Quine would later describe Carnap as the dominant philosophical influence on his work.

Quine joined the Harvard faculty in 1936 and remained there for the rest of his career. Wartime service in the U.S. Navy (1942–46) interrupted but did not derail the academic trajectory; he returned to Harvard in 1946 and was promoted to full professor in 1948, taking the Edgar Pierce chair in 1956. The Harvard years produced the major works: Methods of Logic (1950), From a Logical Point of View (1953, which collected Two Dogmas of Empiricism and other key papers), Word and Object (1960), Set Theory and Its Logic (1963), Ontological Relativity (1969), Philosophy of Logic (1970), Roots of Reference (1974), Theories and Things (1981), Pursuit of Truth (1990).

Quine continued to publish well into his retirement and died on December 25, 2000, in Boston.

The problem he worked on

Quine's project across six decades was the development of an empiricism without the dogmas that earlier empiricism had inherited from Cartesian and Kantian sources. The two dogmas of empiricism his 1951 paper named — the analytic-synthetic distinction and reductionism (the claim that meaningful sentences are translatable into sentences about immediate experience) — had organized the logical positivist program in which Quine had been trained. Quine argued that neither dogma could be defended on the empiricist's own grounds and that both should be abandoned in favor of a thoroughgoing holism.

The positive program is what Quine called naturalized epistemology. Epistemology is not a foundational discipline that grounds the sciences from outside; it is a chapter of psychology, continuous with the empirical sciences, that studies how human beings come to have the beliefs and knowledge they have. The framework dissolves the traditional epistemological projects (Cartesian foundationalism, transcendental Kantianism, Husserlian phenomenology) into the empirical study of cognition.

Contributions

Two Dogmas of Empiricism

The 1951 Two Dogmas of Empiricism (published in The Philosophical Review) is Quine's most influential single paper and one of the most influential papers in twentieth-century philosophy. The two dogmas the paper attacks are: (1) the analytic-synthetic distinction — the claim that some sentences (analytic) are true in virtue of meaning alone, while others (synthetic) are true in virtue of how the world is; (2) reductionism — the claim that every meaningful sentence is translatable into a sentence about immediate experience.

Quine's attack on (1) is that no satisfactory definition of analytic can be given without using semantic notions (synonymous, means the same as) that presuppose the very analyticity being defined. The various proposals (Carnap's appeal to meaning postulates, the appeal to conventional rules, the appeal to definition) all face the same circularity.

The attack on (2) is that empirical confirmation is not a relation between individual sentences and experience but between the whole of science (or portions of it) and the totality of experience. Individual sentences do not face the tribunal of experience individually; they face it as members of a larger system whose adjustment in light of experience can be made in many places. The image Quine offers — the web of belief — captures the doctrine: our beliefs form a web that touches experience at the periphery; recalcitrant experience requires adjustments somewhere in the web, but the adjustments can be made in many places, and the principle that the periphery should be adjusted before the center is a pragmatic principle of conservatism rather than a logical necessity.

The holism is consequential. If empirical confirmation is holistic, then no individual sentence is in principle immune to revision in light of experience; the analytic-synthetic distinction collapses because there are no sentences that are simply true by definition and immune to empirical pressure. Even the laws of logic could in principle be revised if their revision proved pragmatically warranted.

Word and Object

The 1960 Word and Object is Quine's major systematic work and the canonical statement of the indeterminacy of translation. The book develops the doctrine through the famous thought experiment of radical translation: a linguist arrives in a community whose language is unknown to her and attempts to construct a translation manual on the basis of observed verbal behavior alone.

The central claim: incompatible translation manuals can be constructed that are equally consistent with all possible behavioral evidence. The famous gavagai example: a native says gavagai when a rabbit appears; the linguist tentatively translates gavagai as rabbit. But the evidence is equally consistent with undetached rabbit-part, rabbit-stage, the universal rabbithood manifested here, and so on. No accumulation of behavioral evidence can in principle settle which translation is correct because the evidence is consistent with each.

The doctrine has consequences. Meaning, on Quine's account, is indeterminate in a way that the conventional account of meaning had not allowed. There is no fact of the matter about whether gavagai means rabbit or undetached rabbit-part; the choice between the translations is a choice between equally adequate systems of interpretation rather than a discovery about a meaning that exists prior to the interpretation.

The doctrine extends beyond translation to the philosophy of mind. If meaning is indeterminate, then mental content is similarly indeterminate; the determinate propositional attitudes that conventional philosophy of mind had presupposed are not available. The framework shapes contemporary debates about mental content, intentionality, and the philosophy of language.

Naturalized epistemology

The 1969 paper Epistemology Naturalized (in Ontological Relativity) is the founding statement of the program. Epistemology, Quine argues, should be naturalized — treated as a chapter of empirical psychology that studies how human cognition actually works rather than as a foundational discipline that grounds the sciences from outside. The traditional projects of foundationalist epistemology (Descartes, the British empiricists, Husserl) had attempted to ground knowledge on indubitable foundations and had failed; the proper response is not to look for new foundations but to abandon the foundationalist project and study cognition empirically.

The program has been continuously contested. Critics (Hilary Putnam, Jaegwon Kim, Barry Stroud) argue that naturalized epistemology cannot address the substantive normative questions that traditional epistemology had pursued; it can describe how we come to have beliefs but cannot evaluate which beliefs are justified. Defenders argue that the substantive normative questions are themselves empirical questions about which cognitive procedures actually produce reliable beliefs. The contemporary literature on virtue epistemology, reliabilism, and naturalized epistemology continues to engage Quine's program.

Ontological commitment

Quine's 1948 paper On What There Is (in From a Logical Point of View) gave the canonical analytic account of ontological commitment. The criterion: a theory is committed to whatever the bound variables of its existential quantifications range over. The famous slogan: to be is to be the value of a variable.

The framework shaped subsequent analytic metaphysics. The question of what exists is, on the Quinean analysis, the question of what variables our best theories of the world require us to quantify over; the resolution proceeds through analysis of the formal commitments of the theories rather than through direct ontological intuition. The framework underlies the contemporary literature on ontological commitment, on the existence of mathematical objects, on the existence of possible worlds, and on metaphysical realism more generally.

Key works

• A System of Logistic (1934)
• Mathematical Logic (1940)
• Methods of Logic (1950)
• From a Logical Point of View (1953, including Two Dogmas of Empiricism and On What There Is)
• Word and Object (1960)
• Set Theory and Its Logic (1963)
• Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (1969, including Epistemology Naturalized)
• Philosophy of Logic (1970)
• The Roots of Reference (1974)
• Theories and Things (1981)
• Pursuit of Truth (1990)

The Harvard University Press editions are the dominant English texts. Quine's collected papers are available in the Bradford Books / MIT Press editions and in the Open Court Library of Living Philosophers volume on Quine (Hahn and Schilpp, eds., 1986).

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Alfred North Whitehead (his Harvard dissertation supervisor); Bertrand Russell (the major formal-logical predecessor); Rudolf Carnap (the dominant single philosophical influence, encountered in Prague in 1932–33); Frege (the founder of the logical tradition Quine extended); Alfred Tarski (the formal semantics that shaped Quine's approach to language); John Dewey and William James (the pragmatist tradition that shaped Quine's holism); Otto Neurath (the Vienna Circle influence, especially the image of repairing the ship of knowledge at sea).

Influenced: Almost all of post-1960 American analytic philosophy. Donald Davidson (Quine's Harvard student and the major developer of the truth-theoretic approach to meaning); Saul Kripke (whose Naming and Necessity is partly a response to Quinean positions); Hilary Putnam (whose career was sustained engagement with Quine); David Lewis (whose modal realism is in part an engagement with Quinean ontological commitment); the contemporary naturalized epistemology tradition through Alvin Goldman and Hilary Kornblith; the contemporary philosophy of language through engagement with the indeterminacy thesis; the contemporary metaphysics through engagement with ontological commitment.

Reception

Quine's reception was within professional analytic philosophy from the 1950s onward and continued through his lifetime. Two Dogmas of Empiricism was widely engaged within years of publication; Word and Object established him as the leading living philosopher of language; the later corpus shaped multiple subfields. By the 1980s Quine was widely regarded as the most important living American philosopher.

The reception outside professional philosophy was more limited. Quine's spare technical prose did not lend itself to popular reception; his lack of engagement with political or cultural questions limited his visibility outside academic philosophy. The contemporary engagement is sustained primarily within professional philosophy through the scholarship on his major works.

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes Peter Hylton's Quine (2007), Gary Kemp's Quine: A Guide for the Perplexed (2006), Roger Gibson's The Cambridge Companion to Quine (2004), the work of Daniel Isaacson, Dagfinn Føllesdal, and Burton Dreben. Active debates concern the relation between Quine's holism and his behaviorism, the contemporary applicability of the indeterminacy of translation, the place of normativity within naturalized epistemology, and the relation between Quine and the post-Quinean tradition (Davidson, Putnam, Brandom).

Further reading

• Analytic Philosophy — the tradition Quine shaped
• Russell — the formal-logical predecessor
• Frege — the founder of the logical tradition
• William James — the pragmatist predecessor whose holism shaped Quine
• Dewey — the pragmatist predecessor
• Pragmatism — the tradition Quine's holism extends
• Coherence Without Certainty — the epistemic posture Quinean holism most directly articulates

The American philosopher whose work in logic, philosophy of language, and epistemology shaped the second half of twentieth-century analytic philosophy more deeply than any other single figure.