Everything about Willard Van Orman Quine totally explained
Willard Van Orman Quine (
June 25,
1908 Akron,
Ohio –
December 25,
2000) (known to intimates as "Van"), was an
American analytic philosopher and
logician. From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was affiliated in some way with
Harvard University, first as a student, then as a professor of philosophy and a teacher of mathematics, and finally as an emeritus elder statesman who published or revised seven books in retirement. He filled the
Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard, 1956-78. Quine falls squarely into the
analytic philosophy tradition while also being the main proponent of the view that philosophy isn't
conceptual analysis. His major writings include "
Two Dogmas of Empiricism", which attacked the distinction between
analytic and
synthetic propositions and advocated a form of
semantic holism, and
Word and Object which further developed these positions and introduced the notorious
indeterminacy of translation thesis.
Biography
The Time of My Life (1986) is his autobiography. Quine grew up in
Akron,
Ohio. His father was a manufacturing entrepreneur and his mother was a schoolteacher. He received his B.A. in mathematics and philosophy from
Oberlin College in 1930 and his Ph.D. in philosophy from
Harvard University in 1932. His thesis supervisor was
Alfred North Whitehead. He was then appointed a
Harvard Junior Fellow, which excused him from having to teach for four years. During the academic year 1932-33, he travelled in Europe thanks to a fellowship, meeting Polish logicians (including
Alfred Tarski) and members of the
Vienna Circle (including
Rudolf Carnap).
It was through Quine's good offices that
Alfred Tarski was invited to attend the September 1939
Unity of Science Congress in Cambridge. To attend that Congress, Tarski sailed for the USA on the last ship to leave
Gdańsk before the
Third Reich invaded
Poland. Tarski survived the war and worked another 44 years in the USA.
During WWII, Quine lectured on logic in Brazil, in Portuguese, and served in the United States Navy in a
military intelligence role, reaching the rank of Lieutenant Commander.
At Harvard, Quine helped supervise the Harvard theses of, among others,
Donald Davidson,
David Lewis,
Daniel Dennett,
Gilbert Harman,
Dagfinn Føllesdal,
Hao Wang,
Hugues LeBlanc and
Henry Hiz.
Quine had four children by two marriages.
Work
Quine's Ph.D. thesis and early publications were on
formal logic and
set theory. Only after WWII did he, by virtue of seminal papers on
ontology,
epistemology and language, emerge as a major philosopher. By the 1960s, he'd worked out his "naturalized epistemology" 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.
Quine often wrote superbly crafted and witty English prose. He had a gift for languages and could lecture in French, Spanish, Portuguese and German. But like the logical positivists, he evinced little interest in the philosophical canon: only once did he teach a course in the history of philosophy, on Hume.
Rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction
In the 1930s and 40s, discussions with Carnap,
Nelson Goodman and
Alfred Tarski, 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 "All bachelors are unmarried" — 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's criticisms played a major role in the decline of logical positivism, he remained a
verificationist, to the point of invoking verificationism to undermine the analytic-synthetic distinction. As a verificationist, he drew on several sources including his Harvard colleague
B.F. Skinner, and particularly on his analysis of language in
Verbal Behavior. Quine was a major editor of the journal
Behaviorism.
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. 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
synonymy (sameness of meaning), a sentence being analytic just in case it's synonymous with "All black things are black" (or any other
logical truth). The objection to synonymy hinges upon the problem of collateral information. We intuitively feel that there's a distinction between "All unmarried men are bachelors" and "There have been black dogs", but a competent English speaker will assent to both sentences under all conditions since such speakers also have access to
collateral information bearing on the historical existence of black dogs. Quine maintains that there's no distinction between universally known collateral information and conceptual or analytic truths. However, Quine's philosophy doesn't provide another plausible explanation of why some sentences spark the intuition of "analyticity" and not others.
Another approach to Quine's objection to analyticity and synonymy emerges from the modal notion of
logical possibility. A traditional
Wittgensteinian view of meaning held that each meaningful sentence was associated with a region in the space of possible worlds. Quine finds the notion of such a space problematic, arguing that there's no distinction between those truths which are universally and confidently believed and those which are necessarily true.
Confirmation holism and ontological relativity
The central theses underlying the
indeterminacy of translation and other extensions of Quine's work are
ontological relativity and the related
doctrine 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.
Quine concluded his "
Two Dogmas of Empiricism" 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 . . . 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 (evident in the passage above) led him to agree with
Pierre Duhem that for any collection of empirical evidence, there would always be many theories able to account for it. However, Duhem's
holism is much more restricted and limited than Quine's. For Duhem, underdetermination applies only to
physics or possibly to
natural science, while for Quine it applies to all of human knowledge. Thus, while it's possible to verify or
falsify whole theories, it isn't possible to verify or falsify individual statements. Almost any particular statements can be saved, given sufficiently radical modifications of the containing theory. For Quine, scientific thought forms 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 given part.
Quine's writings have led to the wide acceptance of
instrumentalism in the
philosophy of science.
Naturalism
Logic
Over the course of his career, Quine published a number of technical and expository papers on formal logic, a number of which are reprinted in his
Selected Logic Papers and in
The Ways of Paradox.
Quine confined logic to classic bivalent
first-order logic, hence to truth and falsity under any (nonempty)
universe of discourse. Hence the following were not logic for Quine:
Quine wrote three undergraduate texts on logic:
Elementary Logic. While teaching an introductory course in 1940, Quine discovered that extant texts for philosophy students didn't do justice to quantification theory or first-order predicate logic. Quine wrote this book in 6 weeks as an ad hoc 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 WWII 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 40s. It shows that much of what Principia Mathematica took more than 1000 pages to say can be said in 250 pages. The proofs are concise, even cryptic. The last chapter, on Godel's incompleteness theorem of and Tarski's indefinability theorem, along with the article Quine (1946), became a launching point for Raymond Smullyan's later lucid exposition of these and related results.
Quine's work in logic gradually became dated in some respects. Techniques he didn't teach and discuss include analytic tableaux, recursive functions, and model theory. His treatment of metalogic left something to be desired. For example, Mathematical Logic doesn't include any proofs of soundness 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, 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 chpt. 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 employed in electrical engineering, and with Edward J. McCluskey, devised the Quine-McCluskey algorithm of reducing Boolean equations to a minimum covering sum of prime implicants.
Set theory
While his contributions to logic include elegant expositions and a number of technical results, it's in set theory 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's nominalism for a while, but backed away when he failed to find a nominalist grounding of mathematics.
Over the course of his career, Quine proposed three variants of axiomatic set theory, each including the axiom of extensionality:
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 allowed by type theory would allow, were the ontology to include types. However, Quine's set theory don't feature types. The metamathematics of NF are curious. NF allows many "large" sets the now-canonical ZFC set theory doesn't allow, even sets for which the axiom of choice doesn't 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 (relative) consistency of NF is an open question. A modification of NF, NFU, due to R. B. Jensen and admitting urelements (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 Quinian set theories with a following. For a derivation of foundational mathematics in NF, see Rosser (1953);
The set theory of Mathematical Logic is NF augmented by the proper classes of Von Neumann-Godel-Bernays set theory, 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. However, Fraenkel, Bar-Hillel and Levy (1973) do a better job of surveying set theory as it stood at mid-century.
All three set theories admit a universal class, but since they're free of any hierarchy of types, they've 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's but one connective, the Sheffer stroke, and one quantifier, the universal quantifier. All polyadic predicates can be reduced to one dyadic predicate, interpretable as set membership. His rules of proof were limited to modus ponens and substitution. His preferred conjunction to either disjunction 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: set abstraction and inclusion. For an elegant introduction to the parsimony of Quine's approach to logic, see his "New Foundations for Mathematical Logic," chpt. 5 in his From a Logical Point of View.
In popular culture
A computer program whose output is its source code is named a "quine" after W.V. Quine.
The rock and roll guitarist Robert Quine was his nephew.
The book Armadillo by William Boyd contains a quote from W.V. Quine.
Writings by Quine
Selected books
1951 (1940). Mathematical Logic. Harvard Univ. Press. ISBN 0-674-55451-5.
1966. Selected Logic Papers. New York: Random House.
1970. The Web of Belief. New York: Random House.
1980 (1941). Elementary Logic. Harvard Univ. Press. ISBN 0-674-24451-6.
1982 (1950). Methods of Logic. Harvard Univ. Press.
1980 (1953). From a Logical Point of View. Harvard Univ. Press. ISBN 0-674-32351-3. Contains "Two dogmas of Empiricism.
"
1960 Word and Object. MIT Press; ISBN 0-262-67001-1. The closest thing Quine wrote to a philosophical treatise. Chpt. 2 sets out the indeterminacy of translation thesis.
1976 (1966). The Ways of Paradox. Harvard Univ. Press.
1969 Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. Columbia Univ. Press. ISBN 0-231-08357-2. Contains chapters on ontological relativity, naturalized epistemology and natural kinds.
1969 (1963). Set Theory and Its Logic. Harvard Univ. Press.
1985 The Time of My Life - An Autobiography. Cambridge, The MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-17003-5. 1986: Harvard Univ. Press.
1986 (1970). The Philosophy of Logic. Harvard Univ. Press.
1987 Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary. Harvard Univ. Press. ISBN 0-14-012522-1. 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. ISBN 0-674-73951-5.
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. Reprinted in his 1953 From a Logical Point of View. Harvard University Press.
1951, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," 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: 185-96.
1969, "Epistemology Naturalized" in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press: 69-90.
About Quine
Gibson, Roger F., 1982/86. The Philosophy of W.V. Quine: An Expository Essay. Tampa: University of South Florida.
, 1988. Enlightened Empiricism: An Examination of W. V. Quine's Theory of Knowledge (Tampa: University of South Florida.
, ed., 2004. The Cambridge Companion to Quine. Cambridge University Press.
, 2004. Quintessence: Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W. V. Quine. Harvard Univ. Press.
and Barrett, R., eds., 1990. Perspectives on Quine. Oxford: Blackwell.
Paul Gochet, 1978. Quine en perspective, Paris, Flammarion.
Ivor Grattan-Guinness, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870-1940. Princeton University Press.
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.
John Barkley Rosser, 1953.
Valore, Paolo, 2001. Questioni di ontologia quineana, Milano: Cusi.Further Information
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