Willard Van Orman Quine
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| Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy |
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 W.V. Quine
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| Name: | Willard Van Orman Quine |
| Birth: | June 25, 1908 |
| Death: | December 25, 2000 |
| School/tradition: | Analytic |
| Main interests: | Logic, Ontology, Epistemology, Set Theory |
| Notable ideas: | Indeterminacy of translation, inscrutability of reference, ontological relativity, radical translation, Confirmation holism, Philosophical naturalism, language |
| Influences: | Rudolf Carnap, Alfred Tarski, Vienna Circle, C.I. Lewis, A. N. Whitehead |
| Influenced: | Donald Davidson, Daniel Dennett, David Lewis, Dagfinn Føllesdal, David Kaplan |
Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000), usually cited as W.V. Quine or W.V.O. Quine but known to his friends as Van, was one of the most influential American philosophers and logicians of the 20th century.
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[edit] Overview
Quine falls squarely into the analytic philosophy tradition while also being the main proponent of the view that philosophy is not conceptual analysis. Quine spent his entire career teaching philosophy and mathematics at Harvard University, his alma mater, where he held the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy from 1956 to 1978. 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.
[edit] Life
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 notional thesis supervisor was Alfred North Whitehead. Upon completing his Ph.D., Quine was 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.
[edit] 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 had 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.
[edit] 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" sentences — those true simply by virtue of 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, the "empiricism" of his famous paper, Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Quine's criticisms played a major role in the decline of logical positivism although he remained a verificationist, to the point of invoking verificationism to undermine the analytic-synthetic distinction.
Like other analytic philosophers before him, Quine accepted the definition of "analytic" as "true in virtue of meaning alone". Unlike them, however, he did not find the definition to be coherent. In colloquial terms, Quine accepted that analytic statements are those that are true by definition, then argued that the notion of truth by definition was incoherent.
Quine is often misrepresented as believing that all statements are contingent. For instance, it is claimed that Quine held the truth of "All unmarried men are bachelors" to depend on a contingent fact. In truth, he was as skeptical of the necessary/contingent distinction as of the analytic-synthetic distinction (and, for that matter, of reified facts). Hence, to claim that Quine thought all statements were contingent is a mistake, albeit a common one.
Quine's chief objection to analyticity is with the notion of synonymy (sameness of meaning), a sentence being analytic just in case it is 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 is 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 (excepting extraneous factors such as bribery or threats) since such speakers also have access to collateral information bearing on the historical existence of black dogs. Quine maintains that there is no distinction between universally known collateral information and conceptual or analytic truths. However, Quine's philosophy does not 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 is no distinction between those truths which are universally and confidently believed and those which are necessarily true.
[edit] 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 is possible to verify or falsify whole theories, it is not 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.
A reaction to Quine's writings, although not necessarily one of which he would approve, has been the wide acceptance of instrumentalism in the philosophy of science.
[edit] Quine's Naturalism
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Upon recognizing that natural knowledge couldn’t be justified in the traditional epistemological sense, Quine sought to renovate the old approach to epistemology in his 1969 essay, “Epistemology Naturalized.” In the essay, he proposes we acknowledge epistemology’s application to psychology and linguistics (and vice versa) so that we may enjoy the advantage of their resources. The role of justification is noticeably absent from Quine’s new epistemology, a fundamental part (if not the fundamental part) of the old epistemology. So why has it been eliminated? And why the need for a new epistemology in the first place?
Quine demonstrates the inadequacy of the traditional epistemological paradigm by drawing parallels between mathematical epistemology and general epistemology, which have both attempted studies in doctrine and concept. The conceptual side attends to meaning and clarification by definition (of how the terms relate to each other); the doctrinal is concerned with truth and instituting laws by verifying them. In regards to the mathematical studies, the more complicated concepts would be spoken of in terms of the simpler ones, and elementary laws would explain non-elementary laws. Ideally, the clarification of obscure concepts would help to justify the relationship between mathematical theorems and self-evident truths. The concepts of mathematics, however, cannot be reduced to logic alone. They rest also on the axioms of set theory, which are even more enigmatic than the theories they have delivered.
A similar problem arises when we consider natural knowledge: Though Hume was able to procure some singular statements about bodies from sensory terms, he proved unsuccessful in trying to construct general statements or singular statements about the future, and so epistemologists began resorting to set theory and contextual definition. German philosopher Carnap tried to pick up where Hume left off; namely, to translate sentences about the world into the language of logic, set theory, and sense experience. Though these rational reconstructions, as Carnap called them, would fail to actually justify science, they would at least have the potential to legitimize its concepts by translating them into the terms of logic and set theory. But, according to Quine, this translation failed. Carnap’s translation failed, says Quine, because of the translational indeterminacy of theoretical sentences. Individual statements cannot be suitably translated because they have fixed meaning only in the context of the theories they belong to. If I said, for example, that the Prime Mover was above the Crystalline Sphere, this would probably have no particular significance to you unless we were speaking in context of the Ptolemic paradigm of the universe.
Thus, the quest to justify natural knowledge by reducing bodies to sensory terms was abandoned. If, then, we cannot justify knowledge on these terms, the best we can do is to explore how knowledge originated and evolved, in the ontological (and phylogenic, if I may take it a step further) sense, and how evidence relates to theory. In favoring psychology over rational reductionism, Quine says, “Better to discover how science in fact developed and learned [sic] than to fabricate a fictitious structure to a similar effect.” Quine marks the new epistemology as a chapter of psychology, but it seems that, rather than epistemology being subordinate to psychology, they could be mutually supportive of each other. Quine recognizes some may object to this idea, claiming it to be circular, and points out that we are not trying to justify psychology using epistemology, we are trying to understand knowledge. “We are after an understanding of science as an institution or process in the world,” he says, “and we do not intend that understanding to be any better than the science which is its object.”
The new epistemology, Quine says, is also becoming a matter of semantics. A fundamental part of knowledge relies on observation sentences. He defines an observation sentence as a sentence that everyone in a language-speaking community agrees upon. But what is an observation? When I look at the sky, am I observing the photons that hit my color receptors, or am I observing the blueness that results? Quine contends that an observation is whatever is closest to the sensory receptors, notwithstanding consciousness on our part. Observation sentences then, are about bodies rather than impressions, because observations are what we agree on. It doesn’t necessarily matter then, that when we look at the sky I may perceive one version of “blue” and you may perceive another. We both agree that the sky is “blue,” because we are referring to a physical phenomenon outside of ourselves that gives us both some sort of impression, congruent or not.
This account, it seems, is a total naturalization of knowledge. Quine rejects the idea that we have knowledge prior to experience. On the contrary, our observations (and not even ones we are necessarily conscious of) determine our “abstract” knowledge. According to Quine, all of our knowledge comes ultimately from the external world. Of course, naturalism may imply that our knowledge isn’t the cause of some divine, mysterious force—knowledge is subject to the mechanical inner workings of the brain, which was sculpted unconsciously by evolution, which in essence follows the paths paved by physical law. This naturalization, then, may steer the foundations of knowledge in the direction of a survival mechanism that evolved due to certain environmental factors—a series of fortuitous genetic mutations that thrived and continued to evolve into what we consider knowledge today—and this seems to relegate us to little more than physical systems reacting to our environment. I would disagree with this cynical look at naturalism and say that knowledge, with all its burdens, is a liberating phenomenon that gives us the reigns to our own lives and a consciousness to human fate. By bearing this phenomenon, we have an obligation to explore, perpetuate, and adapt it, using any means that hint at an epistemological cohesive whole.
[edit] Set theory
Quine confined logic to classic bivalent first-order logic, hence to truth and falsity under any (nonempty) universe of discourse. Quine also carefully distinguished first-order logic from set theory, as the former requires no more than predicates and an unspecified universe of discourse. Thus much that Principia Mathematica included in logic was not logic for Quine.
While his contributions to logic include elegant expositions and a number of technical results, it is in set theory that Quine was most innovative. His set theory, (New Foundations) (NF) and that of Set Theory and Its Logic, admit a universal class, but since they are free of any hierarchy of types, they have no need for a distinct universal class at each type level. Without going into technical detail, these theories are driven by a desire to minimize posits; each innovation is pushed as far as it can be pushed before further innovations are introduced. Quine 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.
New Foundations features a simple and economical criterion for set admissibility, which allows many "large" sets not allowed in the standard ZFC set theory. The (relative) consistency of New Foundations 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 Quine's intuition.
[edit] The logic and mathematics teacher
Quine wrote three classic undergraduate texts on 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. 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 the advanced undergraduate course in logic Quine taught from the end of WWII until his retirement in 1978. Technically rather dated (e.g., analytic tableaux are absent and the treatment of metalogic leaves something to be desired), it still contains much philosophical and linguistic insight.
- 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 modality, and of the non-logical character of higher-order logics.
Quine also wrote two advanced texts on logic, set theory and the foundations of mathematics. They employ the notation of Principia Mathematica which makes for hard reading:
- Mathematical Logic. 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, and the overall approach is dated. The set theory is New Foundations, augmented with proper classes. The last chapter, on the classic incompleteness theorems of Gödel and Tarski, became the launching point for Raymond Smullyan's later and more lucid exposition of these and related results.
- Set Theory and Its Logic. Quine proposes yet another flavor of axiomatic set theory, then derives the foundations of mathematics therefrom; includes the definitive treatment of Quine's theory of virtual sets and relations. Fraenkel, Bar-Hillel and Levy (1973) do a better job of surveying set theory as it stood in the 1950s.
All five texts remain in print. Curiously, advocates of Quinian set theory are not warm to the axiomatic set theory Quine advocated in his two advanced texts, and invariably confine their enthusiasm to NF and offshoots thereof proposed by others.
| Academic Genealogy | |
|---|---|
| Notable teachers | Notable students |
| Rudolf Carnap Clarence Irving Lewis Alfred North Whitehead |
Donald Davidson Daniel Dennett Dagfinn Føllesdal Gilbert Harman David Lewis Hao Wang |
[edit] Quotations
- "No entity without identity".
- "Ontology recapitulates philology". (Attributed to James Grier Miller in the epigraph of Word and Object)
- "Philosophy of science is philosophy enough".
- "To be is to be the value of a bound variable". (From "On What There Is")
- "The Humean predicament is the human predicament".
- "We cannot stem linguistic change, but we can drag our feet. If each of us were to defy Alexander Pope and be the last to lay the old aside, it might not be a better world, but it would be a lovelier language" (Quiddities is chock-full of similar sentiments).
- When asked what the correct collective noun for logicians was, he replied "It is a sequitur of logicians".
- "Life is algid, life is fulgid. Life is what the least of us make most of us feel the least of us make the most of. Life is a burgeoning, a quickening of the dim primordial urge in the murky wastes of time" (interview in Harvard Magazine, quoted in Hersh, R., 1997, What Is Mathematics, Really?).
- "'What is there?' It can be answered, moreover, in a word--'Everything'--and everyone will accept this answer as true." (From "On What There Is".)
- "...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 conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience." (From "Two Dogmas of Empiricism".)
for the advanced student and the general reader not seduced by its simplicity.
[edit] Notable books by Quine
- 1951 (1940). Mathematical Logic. Harvard Univ. Press. ISBN 0-674-55451-5.
- 1966. Selected Logic Papers. 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.
- 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.
- 1986 (1970). The Philosophy of Logic. Harvard Univ. Press.
- 1986. The Time of My Life. Harvard Univ. Press. His autobiography.
- 1987. Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary. Harvard Univ. Press. ISBN 0-14-012522-1. A work of humor 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.
[edit] Important Articles
- Two Dogmas of Empiricism - The Philosophical Review 60 (1951): 20-43. Reprinted in W.V.O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Harvard University Press, 1953;
[edit] Literature about Quine
- Gibson, Roger F.
The Philosophy of W.V. Quine: An Expository Essay (Tampa: University of South Florida, 1982/86);
Enlightened Empiricism: An Examination of W. V. Quine's Theory of Knowledge (Tampa: University of South Florida, 1988);
Perspectives on Quine, R. Barrett and R. Gibson , eds.; (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990);
The Cambridge Companion to Quine, R. Gibson, ed., (Cambridge: University Press. 2004);
Quintessence: Basic Readings from the Philosophy of W. V. Quine, R. Gibson, ed., (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Unsity Press, 2004).
- 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.
- Orenstein, Alex (2002). W.V. Quine. Princeton University Press.
- Valore, Paolo, 2001. Questioni di ontologia quineana, Milano: Cusi.
[edit] Quine in popular culture
- A computer program whose output is its source code is called a "quine," named after him.
- The rock and roll guitarist Robert Quine was his nephew.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Willard Van Orman Quine—Philosopher and Mathematician. By his son; includes complete bibliography of Quine's writings
- Obituary from The Guardian: "Philosopher whose revolutionary ideas challenged the accepted way we look at ourselves and our universe "
- Text of "Two Dogmas of Empiricism"
- Text of "On Simple Theories Of A Complex World"
| Preceded by — |
Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy 1993 |
Succeeded by Michael Dummett |
Categories: Articles lacking sources from October 2006 | All articles lacking sources | Cleanup from January 2007 | All pages needing cleanup | American philosophers | American military personnel of World War II | Analytic philosophers | Empiricists | Harvard University alumni | Harvard University faculty | Logicians | Materialists | 1908 births | Oberlin College alumni | People from Akron, Ohio | Philosophers of language | Philosophers of metaphysics | Pragmatists | 20th century philosophers | 2000 deaths
