Willard Van Orman Quine
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Willard Van Orman Quine (; known to his friends as "Van"; June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) was an
American philosopher This is a list of American philosophers; of philosophers who are either from, or spent many productive years of their lives in the United States. {, border="0" style="margin:auto;" class="toccolours" , - ! {{MediaWiki:Toc , - , style="text-al ...
and
logician Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premises ...
in the
analytic tradition Analytic philosophy is a branch and tradition of philosophy using analysis, popular in the Western world and particularly the Anglosphere, which began around the turn of the 20th century in the contemporary era in the United Kingdom, United St ...
, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was continually affiliated with
Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor. He filled the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to 1978. Quine was a teacher of logic and
set theory Set theory is the branch of mathematical logic that studies sets, which can be informally described as collections of objects. Although objects of any kind can be collected into a set, set theory, as a branch of mathematics, is mostly conce ...
. Quine was famous for his position that
first order logic First-order logic—also known as predicate logic, quantificational logic, and first-order predicate calculus—is a collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. First-order logic uses quantifie ...
is the only kind worthy of the name, and developed his own system of mathematics and set theory, known as New Foundations. In
philosophy of mathematics The philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics. It aims to understand the nature and methods of mathematics, and find out the place of mathematics in peop ...
, he and his Harvard colleague Hilary Putnam developed the
Quine–Putnam indispensability argument The Quine–Putnam indispensability argument is an argument in the philosophy of mathematics for the existence of abstract mathematical objects such as numbers and sets, a position known as mathematical platonism. It was named after the phil ...
, an argument for the reality of mathematical entities.Colyvan, Mark
"Indispensability Arguments in the Philosophy of Mathematics"
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
However, he was the main proponent of the view that philosophy is not
conceptual analysis Philosophical analysis is any of various techniques, typically used by philosophers in the analytic tradition, in order to "break down" (i.e. analyze) philosophical issues. Arguably the most prominent of these techniques is the analysis of concep ...
, but continuous with science; the abstract branch of the empirical sciences. This led to his famous quip that "
philosophy of science Philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ult ...
is philosophy enough". He led a "systematic attempt to understand science from within the resources of science itself" and developed an influential
naturalized epistemology Naturalized epistemology (a term coined by W. V. O. Quine) is a collection of philosophic views concerned with the theory of knowledge that emphasize the role of natural scientific methods. This shared emphasis on scientific methods of studying k ...
that tried to provide "an improved scientific explanation of how we have developed elaborate scientific theories on the basis of meager sensory input"."Quine's Philosophy of Science"
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Iep.utm.edu. July 27, 2009. Accessed March 8, 2010.
He also advocated
ontological relativity The inscrutability or indeterminacy of reference (also referential inscrutability) is a thesis by 20th century analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine in his book '' Word and Object''. The main claim of this theory is that any given sentence ...
in science, known as the
Duhem–Quine thesis The Duhem–Quine thesis, also called the Duhem–Quine problem, after Pierre Duhem and Willard Van Orman Quine, is that in science it is impossible to experimentally test a scientific hypothesis in isolation, because an empirical test of the ...
. His major writings include the papers "On What There Is" (1948), which elucidated
Bertrand Russell Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British mathematician, philosopher, logician, and public intellectual. He had a considerable influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, linguistics, ...
's
theory of descriptions The theory of descriptions is the philosopher Bertrand Russell's most significant contribution to the philosophy of language. It is also known as Russell's theory of descriptions (commonly abbreviated as RTD). In short, Russell argued that the ...
and contains Quine's famous dictum of
ontological In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exi ...
commitment, "To be is to be the value of a
variable Variable may refer to: * Variable (computer science), a symbolic name associated with a value and whose associated value may be changed * Variable (mathematics), a symbol that represents a quantity in a mathematical expression, as used in many ...
", and "
Two Dogmas of Empiricism "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" is a paper by analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine published in 1951. According to University of Sydney professor of philosophy Peter Godfrey-Smith, this "paper ssometimes regarded as the most important in all o ...
" (1951), which attacked the traditional analytic-synthetic distinction and reductionism, undermining the then-popular logical positivism, advocating instead a form of semantic holism. They also include the books ''The Web of Belief'', which advocates a kind of
coherentism In philosophical epistemology, there are two types of coherentism: the coherence theory of truth; and the coherence theory of justification (also known as epistemic coherentism). Coherent truth is divided between an anthropological approach, wh ...
, and ''
Word and Object ''Word and Object'' is a 1960 work by the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, in which the author expands upon the line of thought of his earlier writings in ''From a Logical Point of View'' (1953), and reformulates some of his earlier arguments ...
'' (1960), which further developed these positions and introduced Quine's famous
indeterminacy of translation The indeterminacy of translation is a thesis propounded by 20th-century American analytic philosopher W. V. Quine. The classic statement of this thesis can be found in his 1960 book '' Word and Object'', which gathered together and refined much of ...
thesis, advocating a
behaviorist Behaviorism is a systematic approach to understanding the behavior of humans and animals. It assumes that behavior is either a reflex evoked by the pairing of certain antecedent stimuli in the environment, or a consequence of that individual ...
theory of meaning. A 2009 poll conducted among analytic philosophers named Quine as the fifth most important philosopher of the past two centuries. He won the first Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy in 1993 for "his systematical and penetrating discussions of how learning of language and communication are based on socially available evidence and of the consequences of this for theories on knowledge and linguistic meaning". In 1996 he was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy for his "outstanding contributions to the progress of philosophy in the 20th century by proposing numerous theories based on keen insights in logic,
epistemology Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Episte ...
, philosophy of science and philosophy of language".


Biography

Quine grew up in
Akron, Ohio Akron () is the fifth-largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio and is the county seat of Summit County. It is located on the western edge of the Glaciated Allegheny Plateau, about south of downtown Cleveland. As of the 2020 Census, the city prop ...
, where he lived with his parents and older brother Robert Cloyd. His father, Cloyd Robert,''The Cambridge Companion to Quine'', ed. Roger F. Gibson, Jr, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 1 was a manufacturing entrepreneur (founder of the Akron Equipment Company, which produced tire molds) and his mother, Harriett E., was a schoolteacher and later a
housewife A housewife (also known as a homemaker or a stay-at-home mother/mom/mum) is a woman whose role is running or managing her family's home—housekeeping, which includes caring for her children; cleaning and maintaining the home; making, buying an ...
. Quine was an atheist when he was a teenager.


Education

Quine received his
B.A. Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four yea ...
'' summa cum laude'' in mathematics from
Oberlin College Oberlin College is a Private university, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college and conservatory of music in Oberlin, Ohio. It is the oldest Mixed-sex education, coeducational liberal arts college in the United S ...
in 1930, and his Ph.D. in philosophy from
Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
in 1932. His thesis supervisor was Alfred North Whitehead. He was then appointed a
Harvard Junior Fellow The Society of Fellows is a group of scholars selected at the beginnings of their careers by Harvard University for their potential to advance academic wisdom, upon whom are bestowed distinctive opportunities to foster their individual and intell ...
, which excused him from having to teach for four years. During the academic year 1932–33, he travelled in Europe thanks to a Sheldon fellowship, meeting Polish logicians (including Stanislaw Lesniewski and
Alfred Tarski Alfred Tarski (, born Alfred Teitelbaum;School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews ''School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews''. January 14, 1901 – October 26, 1983) was a Polish-American logician a ...
) and members of the
Vienna Circle The Vienna Circle (german: Wiener Kreis) of Logical Empiricism was a group of elite philosophers and scientists drawn from the natural and social sciences, logic and mathematics who met regularly from 1924 to 1936 at the University of Vienna, ch ...
(including Rudolf Carnap), as well as the
logical positivist Logical positivism, later called logical empiricism, and both of which together are also known as neopositivism, is a movement in Western philosophy whose central thesis was the verification principle (also known as the verifiability criterion of ...
A. J. Ayer Sir Alfred Jules "Freddie" Ayer (; 29 October 1910 – 27 June 1989), usually cited as A. J. Ayer, was an English philosopher known for his promotion of logical positivism, particularly in his books '' Language, Truth, and Logic'' (1936) ...
.


World War II

Quine arranged for Tarski to be invited to the September 1939
Unity of Science The unity of science is a thesis in philosophy of science that says that all the sciences form a unified whole. Overview The unity of science thesis was proposed by Ludwig von Bertalanffy in "General System Theory: A New Approach to Unity of Scie ...
Congress in Cambridge, for which the Jewish Tarski sailed on the last ship to leave Danzig before
Nazi Germany Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
invaded Poland and triggered
World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
. Tarski survived the war and worked another 44 years in the US. During the war, Quine lectured on logic in
Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
, in Portuguese, and served in the
United States Navy The United States Navy (USN) is the maritime service branch of the United States Armed Forces and one of the eight uniformed services of the United States. It is the largest and most powerful navy in the world, with the estimated tonnage ...
in a
military intelligence Military intelligence is a military discipline that uses information collection and analysis approaches to provide guidance and direction to assist commanders in their decisions. This aim is achieved by providing an assessment of data from a ...
role, deciphering messages from German submarines, and reaching the rank of lieutenant commander. Quine could lecture in French,
Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
,
Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...
and
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) ** Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...
, as well as his native
English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...
.


Personal

He had four children by two marriages. Guitarist Robert Quine was his nephew. Quine was politically conservative, but the bulk of his writing was in technical areas of philosophy removed from direct political issues. He did, however, write in defense of several conservative positions: for example, he wrote in defense of
moral censorship Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information. This may be done on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient". Censorship can be conducted by governments ...
; while, in his autobiography, he made some criticisms of American postwar academics.


Harvard

At Harvard, Quine helped supervise the Harvard graduate theses of, among others, David Lewis,
Gilbert Harman Gilbert Harman (May 26, 1938 – November 13, 2021) was an American philosopher, who taught at Princeton University from 1963 until his retirement in 2017. He has published widely in philosophy of language, cognitive science, philosophy of min ...
,
Dagfinn Føllesdal Dagfinn Føllesdal (born 22 June 1932) is a Norwegian-American philosopher. He is the Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Stanford University, and professor emeritus at the University of Oslo. Biography and career Følles ...
, Hao Wang, Hugues LeBlanc, Henry Hiz and George Myro. For the academic year 1964–1965, Quine was a fellow on the faculty in the Center for Advanced Studies at
Wesleyan University Wesleyan University ( ) is a Private university, private liberal arts college, liberal arts university in Middletown, Connecticut. Founded in 1831 as a Men's colleges in the United States, men's college under the auspices of the Methodist Epis ...
. In 1980 Quine received an
honorary doctorate An honorary degree is an academic degree for which a university (or other degree-awarding institution) has waived all of the usual requirements. It is also known by the Latin phrases ''honoris causa'' ("for the sake of the honour") or ''ad hon ...
from the Faculty of Humanities at
Uppsala University Uppsala University ( sv, Uppsala universitet) is a public university, public research university in Uppsala, Sweden. Founded in 1477, it is the List of universities in Sweden, oldest university in Sweden and the Nordic countries still in opera ...
, Sweden. Quine's student Dagfinn Føllesdal noted that Quine began to lose his memory toward the end of his life. The deterioration of his short-term memory was so severe that he struggled to continue following arguments. Quine also had considerable difficulty in his project to make the desired revisions to ''Word and Object''. Before passing away, Quine noted to Morton White: "I do not remember what my illness is called, Althusser or Alzheimer, but since I cannot remember it, it must be Alzheimer." He died from the illness on Christmas Day in 2000.


Work

Quine's Ph.D. thesis and early publications were on
formal logic Logic is the study of correct reasoning. It includes both formal and informal logic. Formal logic is the science of deductively valid inferences or of logical truths. It is a formal science investigating how conclusions follow from premis ...
and
set theory Set theory is the branch of mathematical logic that studies sets, which can be informally described as collections of objects. Although objects of any kind can be collected into a set, set theory, as a branch of mathematics, is mostly conce ...
. Only after World War II did he, by virtue of seminal papers on
ontology In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exis ...
,
epistemology Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Episte ...
and language, emerge as a major philosopher. By the 1960s, he had worked out his "
naturalized epistemology Naturalized epistemology (a term coined by W. V. O. Quine) is a collection of philosophic views concerned with the theory of knowledge that emphasize the role of natural scientific methods. This shared emphasis on scientific methods of studying k ...
" whose aim 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 natural science and capable of justifying it. These views are intrinsic to his naturalism. Like the logical positivists, Quine evinced little interest in the philosophical canon: only once did he teach a course in the history of philosophy, on
David Hume David Hume (; born David Home; 7 May 1711 NS (26 April 1711 OS) – 25 August 1776) Cranston, Maurice, and Thomas Edmund Jessop. 2020 999br>David Hume" ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. Retrieved 18 May 2020. was a Scottish Enlightenment philo ...
.


Logic

Over the course of his career, Quine published numerous technical and expository papers on formal logic, some of which are reprinted in his ''Selected Logic Papers'' and in ''The Ways of Paradox''. His most well-known collection of papers is ''From A Logical Point of View''. Quine confined logic to classical bivalent
first-order logic First-order logic—also known as predicate logic, quantificational logic, and first-order predicate calculus—is a collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. First-order logic uses quantifie ...
, hence to truth and falsity under any (nonempty)
universe of discourse In the formal sciences, the domain of discourse, also called the universe of discourse, universal set, or simply universe, is the set of entities over which certain variables of interest in some formal treatment may range. Overview The doma ...
. Hence the following were not logic for Quine: * Higher-order logic and set theory. He referred to
higher-order logic mathematics and logic, a higher-order logic is a form of predicate logic that is distinguished from first-order logic by additional quantifiers and, sometimes, stronger semantics. Higher-order logics with their standard semantics are more express ...
as "set theory in disguise"; * Much of what ''
Principia Mathematica The ''Principia Mathematica'' (often abbreviated ''PM'') is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics written by mathematician–philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and published in 1910, 1912, and 1913. ...
'' included in logic was not logic for Quine. * Formal systems involving intensional notions, especially
modality Modality may refer to: Humanities * Modality (theology), the organization and structure of the church, as distinct from sodality or parachurch organizations * Modality (music), in music, the subject concerning certain diatonic scales * Modaliti ...
. Quine was especially hostile to modal logic with quantification, a battle he largely lost when
Saul Kripke Saul Aaron Kripke (; November 13, 1940 – September 15, 2022) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition. He was a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and em ...
's relational semantics became canonical for modal logics. Quine wrote three undergraduate texts on formal logic: * ''Elementary Logic''. While teaching an introductory course in 1940, Quine discovered that extant texts for philosophy students did not do justice to quantification theory or
first-order predicate logic First-order logic—also known as predicate logic, quantificational logic, and first-order predicate calculus—is a collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. First-order logic uses quantifie ...
. Quine wrote this book in 6 weeks as an ''
ad hoc Ad hoc is a Latin phrase meaning literally 'to this'. In English, it typically signifies a solution for a specific purpose, problem, or task rather than a generalized solution adaptable to collateral instances. (Compare with '' a priori''.) C ...
'' solution to his teaching needs. * ''Methods of Logic''. The four editions of this book resulted from a more advanced undergraduate course in logic Quine taught from the end of World War II until his 1978 retirement. * ''Philosophy of Logic''. A concise and witty undergraduate treatment of a number of Quinian themes, such as the prevalence of use-mention confusions, the dubiousness of quantified modal logic, and the non-logical character of higher-order logic. ''Mathematical Logic'' is based on Quine's graduate teaching during the 1930s and 1940s. It shows that much of what ''
Principia Mathematica The ''Principia Mathematica'' (often abbreviated ''PM'') is a three-volume work on the foundations of mathematics written by mathematician–philosophers Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and published in 1910, 1912, and 1913. ...
'' took more than 1000 pages to say can be said in 250 pages. The proofs are concise, even cryptic. The last chapter, on Gödel's incompleteness theorem and
Tarski's indefinability theorem Tarski's undefinability theorem, stated and proved by Alfred Tarski in 1933, is an important limitative result in mathematical logic, the foundations of mathematics, and in formal semantics. Informally, the theorem states that ''arithmetical truth ...
, along with the article Quine (1946), became a launching point for
Raymond Smullyan Raymond Merrill Smullyan (; May 25, 1919 – February 6, 2017) was an American mathematician, magician, concert pianist, logician, Taoist, and philosopher. Born in Far Rockaway, New York, his first career was stage magic. He earned a BSc from ...
's later lucid exposition of these and related results. Quine's work in logic gradually became dated in some respects. Techniques he did not teach and discuss include
analytic tableau In proof theory, the semantic tableau (; plural: tableaux, also called truth tree) is a decision procedure for sentential and related logics, and a proof procedure for formulae of first-order logic. An analytic tableau is a tree structure compu ...
x, recursive functions, and model theory. His treatment of
metalogic Metalogic is the study of the metatheory of logic. Whereas ''logic'' studies how logical systems can be used to construct valid and sound arguments, metalogic studies the properties of logical systems.Harry GenslerIntroduction to Logic Routledge, ...
left something to be desired. For example, ''Mathematical Logic'' does not include any proofs of
soundness In logic or, more precisely, deductive reasoning, an argument is sound if it is both valid in form and its premises are true. Soundness also has a related meaning in mathematical logic, wherein logical systems are sound if and only if every formu ...
and completeness. Early in his career, the notation of his writings on logic was often idiosyncratic. His later writings nearly always employed the now-dated notation of ''Principia Mathematica''. Set against all this are the simplicity of his preferred method (as exposited in his ''Methods of Logic'') for determining the satisfiability of quantified formulas, the richness of his philosophical and linguistic insights, and the fine prose in which he expressed them. Most of Quine's original work in formal logic from 1960 onwards was on variants of his
predicate functor logic In mathematical logic, predicate functor logic (PFL) is one of several ways to express first-order logic (also known as predicate logic) by purely algebraic means, i.e., without quantified variables. PFL employs a small number of algebraic device ...
, one of several ways that have been proposed for doing logic without quantifiers. For a comprehensive treatment of predicate functor logic and its history, see Quine (1976). For an introduction, see ch. 45 of his ''Methods of Logic''. Quine was very warm to the possibility that formal logic would eventually be applied outside of philosophy and mathematics. He wrote several papers on the sort of
Boolean algebra In mathematics and mathematical logic, Boolean algebra is a branch of algebra. It differs from elementary algebra in two ways. First, the values of the variables are the truth values ''true'' and ''false'', usually denoted 1 and 0, whereas i ...
employed in
electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...
, and with Edward J. McCluskey, devised the
Quine–McCluskey algorithm The Quine–McCluskey algorithm (QMC), also known as the method of prime implicants, is a method used for minimization of Boolean functions that was developed by Willard V. Quine in 1952 and extended by Edward J. McCluskey in 1956. As a gener ...
of reducing
Boolean equation In mathematics and mathematical logic, Boolean algebra is a branch of algebra. It differs from elementary algebra in two ways. First, the values of the variables are the truth values ''true'' and ''false'', usually denoted 1 and 0, whereas in ...
s to a minimum covering sum of
prime implicant In Boolean logic, the term implicant has either a generic or a particular meaning. In the generic use, it refers to the hypothesis of an implication (implicant). In the particular use, a product term (i.e., a conjunction of literals) ''P'' is an ...
s.


Set theory

While his contributions to logic include elegant expositions and a number of technical results, it is in
set theory Set theory is the branch of mathematical logic that studies sets, which can be informally described as collections of objects. Although objects of any kind can be collected into a set, set theory, as a branch of mathematics, is mostly conce ...
that Quine was most innovative. He always maintained that mathematics required set theory and that set theory was quite distinct from logic. He flirted with
Nelson Goodman Henry Nelson Goodman (7 August 1906 – 25 November 1998) was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism, and aesthetics. Life and career Goodman was born in Somerville, M ...
's
nominalism In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels. There are at least two main versions of nominalism. One version denies the existence of universalsthings ...
for a while but backed away when he failed to find a nominalist grounding of mathematics.Bueno, Otávio, 2013,
Nominalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics
at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Over the course of his career, Quine proposed three axiomatic set theories. * New Foundations, NF, creates and manipulates sets using a single axiom schema for set admissibility, namely an axiom schema of stratified comprehension, whereby all individuals satisfying a stratified formula compose a set. A stratified formula is one that
type theory In mathematics, logic, and computer science, a type theory is the formal presentation of a specific type system, and in general type theory is the academic study of type systems. Some type theories serve as alternatives to set theory as a fou ...
would allow, were the
ontology In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exis ...
to include types. However, Quine's set theory does not feature types. The metamathematics of NF are curious. NF allows many "large" sets the now-canonical ZFC set theory does not allow, even sets for which the
axiom of choice In mathematics, the axiom of choice, or AC, is an axiom of set theory equivalent to the statement that ''a Cartesian product of a collection of non-empty sets is non-empty''. Informally put, the axiom of choice says that given any collection ...
does not hold. Since the axiom of choice holds for all finite sets, the failure of this axiom in NF proves that NF includes infinite sets. The consistency of NF relative to other formal systems adequate for mathematics is an open question, albeit that a number of candidate proofs are current in the NF community suggesting that NF is equiconsistent with
Zermelo set theory Zermelo set theory (sometimes denoted by Z-), as set out in a seminal paper in 1908 by Ernst Zermelo, is the ancestor of modern Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory (ZF) and its extensions, such as von Neumann–Bernays–Gödel set theory (NBG). It be ...
without Choice. A modification of NF, NFU, due to R. B. Jensen and admitting
urelement In set theory, a branch of mathematics, an urelement or ur-element (from the German prefix ''ur-'', 'primordial') is an object that is not a set, but that may be an element of a set. It is also referred to as an atom or individual. Theory There ...
s (entities that can be members of sets but that lack elements), turns out to be consistent relative to Peano arithmetic, thus vindicating the intuition behind NF. NF and NFU are the only Quinean set theories with a following. For a derivation of foundational mathematics in NF, see Rosser (1952); * The set theory of ''Mathematical Logic'' is NF augmented by the proper classes of
von Neumann–Bernays–Gödel set theory In the foundations of mathematics, von Neumann–Bernays–Gödel set theory (NBG) is an axiomatic set theory that is a conservative extension of Zermelo–Fraenkel–choice set theory (ZFC). NBG introduces the notion of class, which is a colle ...
, except axiomatized in a much simpler way; * The set theory of ''Set Theory and Its Logic'' does away with stratification and is almost entirely derived from a single axiom schema. Quine derived the foundations of mathematics once again. This book includes the definitive exposition of Quine's theory of virtual sets and relations, and surveyed axiomatic set theory as it stood circa 1960. All three set theories admit a universal class, but since they are free of any
hierarchy A hierarchy (from Greek: , from , 'president of sacred rites') is an arrangement of items (objects, names, values, categories, etc.) that are represented as being "above", "below", or "at the same level as" one another. Hierarchy is an important ...
of
types Type may refer to: Science and technology Computing * Typing, producing text via a keyboard, typewriter, etc. * Data type In computer science and computer programming, a data type (or simply type) is a set of possible values and a set of allo ...
, they have no need for a distinct universal class at each type level. Quine's set theory and its background logic were driven by a desire to minimize posits; each innovation is pushed as far as it can be pushed before further innovations are introduced. For Quine, there is but one connective, the
Sheffer stroke In Boolean functions and propositional calculus, the Sheffer stroke denotes a logical operation that is equivalent to the negation of the conjunction operation, expressed in ordinary language as "not both". It is also called nand ("not and") ...
, and one quantifier, the universal quantifier. All polyadic
predicates Predicate or predication may refer to: * Predicate (grammar), in linguistics * Predication (philosophy) * several closely related uses in mathematics and formal logic: **Predicate (mathematical logic) **Propositional function **Finitary relation, ...
can be reduced to one dyadic predicate, interpretable as set membership. His rules of proof were limited to modus ponens and substitution. He preferred
conjunction Conjunction may refer to: * Conjunction (grammar), a part of speech * Logical conjunction, a mathematical operator ** Conjunction introduction, a rule of inference of propositional logic * Conjunction (astronomy), in which two astronomical bodies ...
to either
disjunction In logic, disjunction is a logical connective typically notated as \lor and read aloud as "or". For instance, the English language sentence "it is raining or it is snowing" can be represented in logic using the disjunctive formula R \lor S ...
or the conditional, because conjunction has the least semantic ambiguity. He was delighted to discover early in his career that all of first order logic and set theory could be grounded in a mere two primitive notions: abstraction and
inclusion Inclusion or Include may refer to: Sociology * Social inclusion, aims to create an environment that supports equal opportunity for individuals and groups that form a society. ** Inclusion (disability rights), promotion of people with disabiliti ...
. For an elegant introduction to the parsimony of Quine's approach to logic, see his "New Foundations for Mathematical Logic", ch. 5 in his ''From a Logical Point of View''.


Metaphysics

Quine has had numerous influences on contemporary metaphysics. He coined the term " abstract object". He also coined the term "
Plato's beard In metaphysics, Plato's beard is a paradoxical argument dubbed by Willard Van Orman Quine in his 1948 paper "On What There Is". The phrase came to be identified as the philosophy of understanding something based on what does not exist. Doctrine ...
" to refer to the problem of
empty name In metaphysics and the philosophy of language, an empty name is a proper name that has no referent. The problem of empty names is the idea that empty names have a meaning when it seems they should not have. The name " Pegasus" is empty; there is ...
s.


Rejection of the analytic–synthetic distinction

In the 1930s and 40s, discussions with Rudolf Carnap,
Nelson Goodman Henry Nelson Goodman (7 August 1906 – 25 November 1998) was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism, and aesthetics. Life and career Goodman was born in Somerville, M ...
and
Alfred Tarski Alfred Tarski (, born Alfred Teitelbaum;School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews ''School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews''. January 14, 1901 – October 26, 1983) was a Polish-American logician a ...
, among others, led Quine to doubt the tenability of the distinction between "analytic" statements—those true simply by the meanings of their words, such as "No bachelor is married"— and "synthetic" statements, those true or false by virtue of facts about the world, such as "There is a cat on the mat." This distinction was central to logical positivism. Although Quine is not normally associated with
verificationism Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is the philosophical doctrine which maintains that only statements that are empirically verifiable (i.e. verifiable through the senses) are cogniti ...
, some philosophers believe the tenet is not incompatible with his general philosophy of language, citing his Harvard colleague
B. F. Skinner Burrhus Frederic Skinner (March 20, 1904 – August 18, 1990) was an American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and Social philosophy, social philosopher. He was a professor of psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his ret ...
and his analysis of language in ''
Verbal Behavior ''Verbal Behavior'' is a 1957 book by psychologist B. F. Skinner, in which he describes what he calls verbal behavior, or what was traditionally called linguistics. Skinner's work describes the controlling elements of verbal behavior with termino ...
''. Like other analytic philosophers before him, Quine accepted the definition of "analytic" as "true in virtue of meaning alone". Unlike them, however, he concluded that ultimately the definition was
circular Circular may refer to: * The shape of a circle * ''Circular'' (album), a 2006 album by Spanish singer Vega * Circular letter (disambiguation) ** Flyer (pamphlet), a form of advertisement * Circular reasoning, a type of logical fallacy * Circular ...
. In other words, Quine accepted that analytic statements are those that are true by definition, then argued that the notion of truth by definition was unsatisfactory. Quine's chief objection to analyticity is with the notion of
cognitive synonymy Cognitive synonymy is a type of synonymy in which synonyms are so similar in meaning that they cannot be differentiated either denotatively or connotatively, that is, not even by mental associations, connotations, emotive responses, and poetic ...
(sameness of meaning). He argues that analytical sentences are typically divided into two kinds; sentences that are clearly logically true (e.g. "no unmarried man is married") and the more dubious ones; sentences like "no bachelor is married". Previously it was thought that if you can prove that there is synonymity between "unmarried man" and "bachelor", you have proved that both sentences are logically true and therefore self evident. Quine however gives several arguments for why this is not possible, for instance that "bachelor" in some contexts mean a bachelor of arts, not an unmarried man.


Confirmation holism and ontological relativity

Colleague Hilary Putnam called Quine's
indeterminacy of translation The indeterminacy of translation is a thesis propounded by 20th-century American analytic philosopher W. V. Quine. The classic statement of this thesis can be found in his 1960 book '' Word and Object'', which gathered together and refined much of ...
thesis "the most fascinating and the most discussed philosophical argument since
Kant Immanuel Kant (, , ; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aest ...
's Transcendental Deduction of the Categories". The central theses underlying it are
ontological relativity The inscrutability or indeterminacy of reference (also referential inscrutability) is a thesis by 20th century analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine in his book '' Word and Object''. The main claim of this theory is that any given sentence ...
and the related
doctrine Doctrine (from la, doctrina, meaning "teaching, instruction") is a codification of beliefs or a body of teachings or instructions, taught principles or positions, as the essence of teachings in a given branch of knowledge or in a belief syste ...
of confirmation holism. The premise of confirmation holism is that all theories (and the propositions derived from them) are under-determined by empirical data (data, sensory-data, evidence); although some theories are not justifiable, failing to fit with the data or being unworkably complex, there are many equally justifiable alternatives. While the Greeks' assumption that (unobservable) Homeric gods exist is false, and our supposition of (unobservable) electromagnetic waves is true, both are to be justified solely by their ability to explain our observations. The ''
gavagai The inscrutability or indeterminacy of reference (also referential inscrutability) is a thesis by 20th century analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine in his book ''Word and Object''. The main claim of this theory is that any given sentence ca ...
''
thought experiment A thought experiment is a hypothetical situation in which a hypothesis, theory, or principle is laid out for the purpose of thinking through its consequences. History The ancient Greek ''deiknymi'' (), or thought experiment, "was the most anc ...
tells about a linguist, who tries to find out, what the expression ''gavagai'' means, when uttered by a speaker of a yet unknown, native language upon seeing a rabbit. At first glance, it seems that ''gavagai'' simply translates with ''rabbit''. Now, Quine points out that the background language and its referring devices might fool the linguist here, because he is misled in a sense that he always makes direct comparisons between the foreign language and his own. However, when shouting ''gavagai'', and pointing at a rabbit, the natives could as well refer to something like ''undetached rabbit-parts'', or ''rabbit- tropes'' and it would not make any observable difference. The behavioural data the linguist could collect from the native speaker would be the same in every case, or to reword it, several translation hypotheses could be built on the same sensoric stimuli. Quine concluded his "
Two Dogmas of Empiricism "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" is a paper by analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine published in 1951. According to University of Sydney professor of philosophy Peter Godfrey-Smith, this "paper ssometimes regarded as the most important in all o ...
" as follows:
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 Homer (; grc, Ὅμηρος , ''Hómēros'') (born ) was a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'', two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of the ...
…. 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 Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that valuations in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed. Ther ...
(evident in the passage above) led him to agree with
Pierre Duhem Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem (; 9 June 1861 – 14 September 1916) was a French theoretical physicist who worked on thermodynamics, hydrodynamics, and the theory of elasticity. Duhem was also a historian of science, noted for his work on the Eu ...
that for any collection of
empirical evidence Empirical evidence for a proposition is evidence, i.e. what supports or counters this proposition, that is constituted by or accessible to sense experience or experimental procedure. Empirical evidence is of central importance to the sciences ...
, there would always be many theories able to account for it, known as the
Duhem–Quine thesis The Duhem–Quine thesis, also called the Duhem–Quine problem, after Pierre Duhem and Willard Van Orman Quine, is that in science it is impossible to experimentally test a scientific hypothesis in isolation, because an empirical test of the ...
. However, Duhem's holism is much more restricted and limited than Quine's. For Duhem,
underdetermination In the philosophy of science, underdetermination or the underdetermination of theory by data (sometimes abbreviated UTD) is the idea that evidence available to us at a given time may be insufficient to determine what beliefs we should hold in re ...
applies only to
physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...
or possibly to
natural science Natural science is one of the branches of science concerned with the description, understanding and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and repeatab ...
, while for Quine it applies to all of human knowledge. Thus, while it is possible to verify or
falsify Falsifiability is a standard of evaluation of scientific theories and hypotheses that was introduced by the philosopher of science Karl Popper in his book ''The Logic of Scientific Discovery'' (1934). He proposed it as the cornerstone of a so ...
whole theories, it is not possible to verify or falsify individual statements. Almost any particular statement can be saved, given sufficiently radical modifications of the containing theory. For Quine, scientific thought forms a
coherent Coherence, coherency, or coherent may refer to the following: Physics * Coherence (physics), an ideal property of waves that enables stationary (i.e. temporally and spatially constant) interference * Coherence (units of measurement), a deri ...
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 given part.


Existence and its contrary

The problem of non-referring names is an old puzzle in philosophy, which Quine captured when he wrote,
A curious thing about the ontological problem is its simplicity. It can be put into three Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: 'What is there?' It can be answered, moreover, in a word—'Everything'—and everyone will accept this answer as true.
More directly, the controversy goes:
How can we talk about Pegasus? To what does the word 'Pegasus' refer? If our answer is, 'Something', then we seem to believe in mystical entities; if our answer is, 'nothing', then we seem to talk about nothing and what sense can be made of this? Certainly when we said that Pegasus was a mythological winged horse we make sense, and moreover we speak the truth! If we speak the truth, this must be truth ''about something''. So we cannot be speaking of nothing.
Quine resists the temptation to say that non-referring terms are meaningless for reasons made clear above. Instead he tells us that we must first determine whether our terms refer or not before we know the proper way to understand them. However, Czesław Lejewski criticizes this belief for reducing the matter to empirical discovery when it seems we should have a formal distinction between referring and non-referring terms or elements of our domain. Lejewski writes further:
This state of affairs does not seem to be very satisfactory. The idea that some of our rules of inference should depend on empirical information, which may not be forthcoming, is so foreign to the character of logical inquiry that a thorough re-examination of the two inferences xistential generalization and universal instantiationmay prove worth our while.
Lejewski then goes on to offer a description of free logic, which he claims accommodates an answer to the problem. Lejewski also points out that free logic additionally can handle the problem of the empty set for statements like \forall x\,Fx \rightarrow \exists x\,Fx. Quine had considered the problem of the empty set unrealistic, which left Lejewski unsatisfied.


Ontological commitment

The notion of
ontological commitment An ontological commitment of a language is one or more objects postulated to exist by that language. The 'existence' referred to need not be 'real', but exist only in a universe of discourse. As an example, legal systems use vocabulary referring t ...
plays a central role in Quine's contributions to ontology. A theory is ontologically committed to an entity if that entity must exist in order for the theory to be true. Quine proposed that the best way to determine this is by translating the theory in question into
first-order predicate logic First-order logic—also known as predicate logic, quantificational logic, and first-order predicate calculus—is a collection of formal systems used in mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. First-order logic uses quantifie ...
. Of special interest in this translation are the logical constants known as existential quantifiers (''), whose meaning corresponds to expressions like "there exists..." or "for some...". They are used to bind the variables in the expression following the quantifier. The ontological commitments of the theory then correspond to the variables bound by existential quantifiers. For example, the sentence "There are electrons" could be translated as "", in which the bound variable ''x'' ranges over electrons, resulting in an ontological commitment to electrons. This approach is summed up by Quine's famous dictum that " be is to be the value of a variable". Quine applied this method to various traditional disputes in ontology. For example, he reasoned from the sentence "There are prime numbers between 1000 and 1010" to an ontological commitment to the existence of numbers, i.e.
realism Realism, Realistic, or Realists may refer to: In the arts *Realism (arts), the general attempt to depict subjects truthfully in different forms of the arts Arts movements related to realism include: *Classical Realism *Literary realism, a move ...
about numbers. This method by itself is not sufficient for ontology since it depends on a theory in order to result in ontological commitments. Quine proposed that we should base our ontology on our best scientific theory. Various followers of Quine's method chose to apply it to different fields, for example to "everyday conceptions expressed in natural language".


Indispensability argument for mathematical realism

In
philosophy of mathematics The philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics. It aims to understand the nature and methods of mathematics, and find out the place of mathematics in peop ...
, he and his Harvard colleague Hilary Putnam developed the Quine–Putnam indispensability thesis, an argument for the reality of mathematical entities. The form of the argument is as follows. #One must have
ontological In metaphysics, ontology is the philosophical study of being, as well as related concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Ontology addresses questions like how entities are grouped into categories and which of these entities exi ...
commitments to ''all'' entities that are indispensable to the best scientific theories, and to those entities ''only'' (commonly referred to as "all and only"). #Mathematical entities are indispensable to the best scientific theories. Therefore, #One must have ontological commitments to mathematical entities.Putnam, H. ''Mathematics, Matter and Method. Philosophical Papers'', vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. 2nd. ed., 1985. The justification for the first premise is the most controversial. Both Putnam and Quine invoke naturalism to justify the exclusion of all non-scientific entities, and hence to defend the "only" part of "all and only". The assertion that "all" entities postulated in scientific theories, including numbers, should be accepted as real is justified by confirmation holism. Since theories are not confirmed in a piecemeal fashion, but as a whole, there is no justification for excluding any of the entities referred to in well-confirmed theories. This puts the
nominalist In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels. There are at least two main versions of nominalism. One version denies the existence of universalsthings th ...
who wishes to exclude the existence of sets and
non-Euclidean geometry In mathematics, non-Euclidean geometry consists of two geometries based on axioms closely related to those that specify Euclidean geometry. As Euclidean geometry lies at the intersection of metric geometry and affine geometry, non-Euclidean g ...
, but to include the existence of quarks and other undetectable entities of physics, for example, in a difficult position.


Epistemology

Just as he challenged the dominant analytic–synthetic distinction, Quine also took aim at traditional
normative Normative generally means relating to an evaluative standard. Normativity is the phenomenon in human societies of designating some actions or outcomes as good, desirable, or permissible, and others as bad, undesirable, or impermissible. A norm in ...
epistemology Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics. Episte ...
. According to Quine, traditional epistemology tried to justify the sciences, but this effort (as exemplified by Rudolf Carnap) failed, and so we should replace traditional epistemology with an empirical study of what sensory inputs produce what theoretical outputs: "Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science. It studies a natural phenomenon, viz., a physical human subject. This human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled input—certain patterns of irradiation in assorted frequencies, for instance—and in the fullness of time the subject delivers as output a description of the three-dimensional external world and its history. The relation between the meager input and the torrential output is a relation that we are prompted to study for somewhat the same reasons that always prompted epistemology: namely, in order to see how evidence relates to theory, and in what ways one's theory of nature transcends any available evidence... But a conspicuous difference between old epistemology and the epistemological enterprise in this new psychological setting is that we can now make free use of empirical psychology." (Quine, 1969: 82–83) Quine's proposal is controversial among contemporary philosophers and has several critics, with
Jaegwon Kim Jaegwon Kim (September 12, 1934 – November 27, 2019) was a Korean-American philosopher. At the time of his death, Kim was an emeritus professor of philosophy at Brown University. He also taught at several other leading American universities d ...
the most prominent among them.


In popular culture

* A
computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute. Computer programs are one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components. A computer program ...
whose output is its own source code is called a " quine" after Quine. This usage was introduced by Douglas Hofstadter in his 1979 book, '' Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid''. * Quine is a recurring character in the webcomic "
Existential Comics Existential Comics is a webcomic about philosophy created by Corey Mohler, a software engineer in Portland, Oregon. Mohler, who has an amateur interest in the subject rather than an academic background, created the comic in December 2013 in an att ...
". * Quine was selected for inclusion in the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry's "Pantheon of Skeptics", which celebrates contributors to the cause of
scientific skepticism Scientific skepticism or rational skepticism (also spelled scepticism), sometimes referred to as skeptical inquiry, is a position in which one questions the veracity of claims lacking empirical evidence. In practice, the term most commonly refe ...
. * Quine was mentioned in the Peacock series A.P. Bio.


Bibliography


Selected books

* 1934 ''A System of Logistic''. Harvard Univ. Press. * 1951 (1940). ''Mathematical Logic''. Harvard Univ. Press. . * 1980 (1941). ''Elementary Logic''. Harvard Univ. Press. . * * 1960 ''
Word and Object ''Word and Object'' is a 1960 work by the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, in which the author expands upon the line of thought of his earlier writings in ''From a Logical Point of View'' (1953), and reformulates some of his earlier arguments ...
''. MIT Press; . The closest thing Quine wrote to a philosophical treatise. Ch. 2 sets out the
indeterminacy of translation The indeterminacy of translation is a thesis propounded by 20th-century American analytic philosopher W. V. Quine. The classic statement of this thesis can be found in his 1960 book '' Word and Object'', which gathered together and refined much of ...
thesis. * 1969 (1963). ''Set Theory and Its Logic''. Harvard Univ. Press. * 1966. ''Selected Logic Papers''. New York: Random House. * 1976 (1966). ''The Ways of Paradox''. Harvard Univ. Press. * 1969 ''Ontological Relativity and Other Essays''. Columbia Univ. Press. . Contains chapters on
ontological relativity The inscrutability or indeterminacy of reference (also referential inscrutability) is a thesis by 20th century analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine in his book '' Word and Object''. The main claim of this theory is that any given sentence ...
,
naturalized epistemology Naturalized epistemology (a term coined by W. V. O. Quine) is a collection of philosophic views concerned with the theory of knowledge that emphasize the role of natural scientific methods. This shared emphasis on scientific methods of studying k ...
, and
natural kind "Natural kind" is an intellectual grouping, or categorizing of things, in a manner that is reflective of the actual world and not just human interests. Some treat it as a classification identifying some structure of truth and reality that exists wh ...
s. * 1970 (2nd ed., 1978). With J. S. Ullian. ''The Web of Belief''. New York: Random House. * 1986 (1970). ''The Philosophy of Logic''. Harvard Univ. Press. * 1974 (1971). '' The Roots of Reference''. Open Court Publishing Company (developed from Quine's Carus Lectures). * 1981. ''Theories and Things''. Harvard Univ. Press. * 1985. ''The Time of My Life: An Autobiography''. Cambridge, The MIT Press. . * 1987. ''Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary''. Harvard Univ. Press. . A work of essays, many subtly humorous, for lay readers, very revealing of the breadth of his interests. * 1992 (1990). ''Pursuit of Truth''. Harvard Univ. Press. A short, lively synthesis of his thought for advanced students and general readers not fooled by its simplicity. . * 1995. ''From Stimulus to Science''. Harvard Univ. Press. .


Important articles

* 1946, "Concatenation as a basis for arithmetic". Reprinted in his ''Selected Logic Papers''. Harvard Univ. Press. * 1948, " On What There Is", ''Review of Metaphysics'' 2(5)
JSTOR
. Reprinted in his 1953 ''From a Logical Point of View''. Harvard University Press.In this paper, Quine explicitly connected each of the three main medieval ontological positions, namely
realism Realism, Realistic, or Realists may refer to: In the arts *Realism (arts), the general attempt to depict subjects truthfully in different forms of the arts Arts movements related to realism include: *Classical Realism *Literary realism, a move ...
/
conceptualism In metaphysics, conceptualism is a theory that explains universality of particulars as conceptualized frameworks situated within the thinking mind. Intermediate between nominalism and realism, the conceptualist view approaches the metaphysical co ...
/
nominalism In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels. There are at least two main versions of nominalism. One version denies the existence of universalsthings ...
, with one of three dominant schools in modern philosophy of mathematics:
logicism In the philosophy of mathematics, logicism is a programme comprising one or more of the theses that — for some coherent meaning of 'logic' — mathematics is an extension of logic, some or all of mathematics is reducible to logic, or some or all ...
/
intuitionism In the philosophy of mathematics, intuitionism, or neointuitionism (opposed to preintuitionism), is an approach where mathematics is considered to be purely the result of the constructive mental activity of humans rather than the discovery of f ...
/
formalism Formalism may refer to: * Form (disambiguation) * Formal (disambiguation) * Legal formalism, legal positivist view that the substantive justice of a law is a question for the legislature rather than the judiciary * Formalism (linguistics) * Scie ...
respectively.
* 1951, "
Two Dogmas of Empiricism "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" is a paper by analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine published in 1951. According to University of Sydney professor of philosophy Peter Godfrey-Smith, this "paper ssometimes regarded as the most important in all o ...
", ''The Philosophical Review'' 60: 20–43. Reprinted in his 1953 ''From a Logical Point of View''. Harvard University Press. * 1956, "Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes", ''Journal of Philosophy'' 53. Reprinted in his 1976 ''Ways of Paradox''. Harvard Univ. Press: 185–196. * 1969, "Epistemology Naturalized" in ''Ontological Relativity and Other Essays''. New York: Columbia University Press: 69–90. * "Truth by Convention", first published in 1936. Reprinted in the book, ''Readings in Philosophical Analysis'', edited by Herbert Feigl and Wilfrid Sellars, pp. 250–273, ''
Appleton-Century-Crofts Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc. was a division of the Meredith Publishing Company. It is a result of the merger of Appleton-Century Company with F.S. Crofts Co. in 1948. Prior to that The Century Company had merged with D. Appleton & Company in ...
'', 1949.


Filmography

*
Bryan Magee Bryan Edgar Magee (; 12 April 1930 – 26 July 2019) was a British philosopher, broadcaster, politician and author, best known for bringing philosophy to a popular audience. Early life Born of working-class parents in Hoxton, London, in 1930, w ...
(host), '' Men of Ideas'': "The Ideas of Quine", BBC, 1978. * Rudolf Fara (host), ''In conversation: W.V. Quine'' (7 videocassettes), Philosophy International, Centre for Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences, London School of Economics, 1994.


See also

*
Definitions of philosophy Definitions of philosophy aim at determining what all forms of philosophy have in common and how to distinguish philosophy from other disciplines. Many different definitions have been proposed but there is very little agreement on which is the rig ...
*
List of American philosophers This is a list of American philosophers; of philosophers who are either from, or spent many productive years of their lives in the United States. {, border="0" style="margin:auto;" class="toccolours" , - ! {{MediaWiki:Toc , - , style="text-al ...


Notes


Further reading

* * * * * * Gochet, Paul, 1978. ''Quine en perspective'', Paris, Flammarion. * Godfrey-Smith, Peter, 2003. ''Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science''. * Grattan-Guinness, Ivor, 2000. ''The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870–1940''. Princeton University Press. * Grice, Paul and
Peter Strawson Peter Frederick Strawson (; 23 November 1919 – 13 February 2006) was an English philosopher. He was the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford (Magdalen College) from 1968 to 1987. Before that, he ...
. "In Defense of a Dogma". ''The Philosophical Review 65'' (1965). * Hahn, L. E., and Schilpp, P. A., eds., 1986. ''The Philosophy of W. V. O. Quine'' (The Library of Living Philosophers). Open Court. * Köhler, Dieter, 1999/2003.
Sinnesreize, Sprache und Erfahrung: eine Studie zur Quineschen Erkenntnistheorie
'. Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of Heidelberg. * * Murray Murphey, ''The Development of Quine's Philosophy'' (Heidelberg, Springer, 2012) (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 291). * * Putnam, Hilary. "The Greatest Logical Positivist". Reprinted in ''Realism with a Human Face'', ed. James Conant. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. * Rosser, John Barkley, "The axiom of infinity in Quine's new foundations", ''Journal of Symbolic Logic'' 17 (4):238–242, 1952. * Valore, Paolo, 2001. ''Questioni di ontologia quineana'', Milano: Cusi. *


External links


WVQuine.org

Willard Van Orman Quine
at the '' Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' * *
Quine's Philosophy of Science
at the ''
Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy The ''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (''IEP'') is a scholarly online encyclopedia, dealing with philosophy, philosophical topics, and philosophers. The IEP combines open access publication with peer reviewed publication of original pape ...
''
Quine's New Foundations
at the '' Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' *
Obituary from ''The Guardian''

Summary and Explanation of "On What There Is"



"On Simple Theories Of A Complex World"
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