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Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25, 1908 - December 25, 2000) was one of the most influential American philosophers and logicians of the 20th century. Sometimes referred to as the "philosopher's philosopher", Quine is the quintessential model of an analytic philosopher. He served as the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1956 to 2000. His major writings include Two Dogmas of Empiricism, which influentially attacked the logical positivists' conception of analytic and synthetic propositions, and Word and Object.
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At Harvard his own students included many now-famed philosophers, including Donald Davidson, David Lewis, and Daniel Dennett.
Quine's now-legendary example is of the word "gavagai" uttered by a native in the presence of a rabbit. The linguist could translate this as "rabbit," or "Lo, a rabbit," or "rabbit-fly" (the name, perhaps, of a kind of insect that always accompanies rabbits), or "food" or "Let's go hunting," or "There will be a storm tonight" (if these natives are superstitious), or even "momentary rabbit-stage," "temporal cross-section of a four-dimensional space-time extension of a rabbit," "mass of rabbithood," or "undetached rabbit-part." Some of these might become less likely -- that is, become more unwieldy hypotheses--in the light of subsequent observation. Others can only be ruled out by asking the natives questions: An affirmative answer to "Is this the same gavagai as that earlier one?" will rule out "momentary rabbit stage," and so forth. But these questions can only be asked once the linguist has mastered a great amount of the natives' grammar and abstract vocabulary; that in turn can only be done on the basis of hypotheses derived from simpler, observation-connected bits of language; and those sentences, on their own, allow for multiple interpretations, as we have seen.
There is no way to escape this circle. In fact, it holds just as well in interpreting speakers of one's own language, and even one's own past utterances. This does not, contrary to a widely-disseminated caricature of Quine, lead to skepticism about meaning -- either that meaning is hidden and unknowable, or that words are meaningless. The conclusion is that there is and can be no more to "meaning" than could be learned from a speaker's behaviour. There is, indeed, no need to countenance such entities as "meanings" at all, since the notion of sameness of meaning cannot be given any workable explanation, but saying there are not "meanings" is not to say that words don't mean. Consequently there is no question of "right" or "wrong" to be raised in translating one language into another. There are only questions of "better" and "worse." These too are not questions of "accuracy" as that would ordinarily be construed: theories of translation are better or worse as they more or less successfully predict future utterances, and translate according to a more or less simple scheme of rules.
As to his personal beliefs, Quine clarifies at the end of "Two Dogmas of Empiricism": "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 led him to agree with Pierre Duhem that for any collection of empirical evidence there would always be many theories able account for it. Thus it is not possible to verify or falsify a theory simply by comparing it to the empirical evidence; the theory can always be saved by some modification. For Quine, scientific thought formed 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 part.
Quine's work has helped drive the wide acceptance of instrumentalism in the philosophy of science.
| This article is part of the Influential Western Philosophers series |
| Socrates | Plato | Aristotle | Thomas Aquinas | Thomas Hobbes | René Descartes | Baruch Spinoza | Gottfried Leibniz | John Locke | George Berkeley | David Hume | Jean Jacques Rousseau | Immanuel Kant | Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | Karl Marx | Søren Kierkegaard |John Stuart Mill | Friedrich Nietzsche | Gottlob Frege | Ludwig Wittgenstein | Bertrand Russell | Alfred North Whitehead | Karl Popper | W. V. O. Quine |
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