Willard Van Orman Quine
American philosopher
born June 25, 1908, Akron, Ohio, U.S.
died December 25, 2000, Boston, Massachusetts
Main
American logician and philosopher, widely considered one of
the dominant figures in Anglo-American philosophy in the
last half of the 20th century.
After studying mathematics and logic at Oberlin College
(1926–30), Quine won a scholarship to Harvard University,
where he completed his Ph.D. in 1932. On a traveling
fellowship to Europe in 1932–33, he met some of the leading
philosophers and logicians of the day, including Rudolf
Carnap and Alfred Tarski. After three years as a junior
fellow at Harvard, Quine joined the faculty in 1936. From
1942 to 1945 he served as a naval intelligence officer in
Washington, D.C. Promoted to full professor at Harvard in
1948, he remained there until 1978, when he retired.
Quine produced highly original and important work in
several areas of philosophy, including logic, ontology,
epistemology, and the philosophy of language. By the 1950s
he had developed a comprehensive and systematic
philosophical outlook that was naturalistic, empiricist, and
behaviourist. Conceiving of philosophy as an extension of
science, he rejected epistemological foundationalism, the
attempt to ground knowledge of the external world in
allegedly transcendent and self-validating mental
experience. The proper task of a “naturalized epistemology,”
as he saw it, was simply to give a psychological account of
how scientific knowledge is actually obtained.
Although much influenced by the Logical Positivism of
Carnap and other members of the Vienna Circle, Quine
famously rejected one of that group’s cardinal doctrines,
the analytic-synthetic distinction. According to this
doctrine, there is a fundamental difference between
statements such as “All bachelors are unmarried,” which are
true or false solely by virtue of the meanings of the terms
they contain, and statements such as “All swans are white,”
which are true or false by virtue of nonlinguistic facts
about the world. Quine argued that no coherent definition of
analyticity had ever been proposed. One consequence of his
view was that the truths of mathematics and logic, which the
positivists had regarded as analytic, and the empirical
truths of science differed only in “degree” and not kind. In
keeping with his empiricism, Quine held that both the former
and the latter were known through experience and were thus
in principle revisable in the face of countervailing
evidence.
In ontology, Quine recognized only those entities that it
was necessary to postulate in order to assume that our best
scientific theories are true—specifically, concrete physical
objects and abstract sets, which were required by the
mathematics used in many scientific disciplines. He rejected
notions such as properties, propositions, and meanings as
ill-defined or scientifically useless.
In the philosophy of language, Quine was known for his
behaviourist account of language learning and for his thesis
of the “indeterminacy of translation.” This is the view that
there are always indefinitely many possible translations of
one language into another, each of which is equally
compatible with the totality of empirical evidence available
to linguistic investigators. There is thus no “fact of the
matter” about which translation of a language is correct.
The indeterminacy of translation is an instance of a more
general view, which Quine called “ontological relativity,”
that claims that for any given scientific theory there are
always indefinitely many alternatives entailing different
ontological assumptions but accounting for all available
evidence equally well. Thus, it does not make sense to say
that one theory rather than another gives a true description
of the world.
Among Quine’s many books are Word and Object (1960), The
Roots of Reference (1974), and his autobiography, The Time
of My Life (1985).
