Willard Van Orman Quine
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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.
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Overview
Sometimes referred to as the "philosopher's philosopher", Quine falls squarely into the analytic philosophy tradition, though he is also the main proponent of the view that philosophy is not conceptual analysis. 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 conception of a distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions, and Word and Object in which the arguments for this attack are more fully developed.
Life
Quine grew up in Akron, Ohio. He received his B.A. from Oberlin College and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1932. At Harvard he studied logic with Alfred North Whitehead. For the next couple of years he travelled Europe on a generous research fellowship, coming under the influence of the Polish Logicians, the Vienna Circle, and especially Rudolf Carnap.
From 1942 to 1946, he worked in United States Navy Intelligence, reaching the rank of Lieutenant Commander.
At Harvard his own students included many now-famed philosophers, including Donald Davidson, David Lewis, and Daniel Dennett.
His nephew was rock and roll guitarist Robert Quine.
Work
Most of Quine's early publications were in the field of formal logic. He gradually began to work on questions of ontology, epistemology, and language, and by the sixties he had substantially developed his project of "naturalized epistemology," the aim of which 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 and capable of justifying science. Both these standpoints are part of Quine's naturalism.
Rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction
In the thirties and forties discussions with Carnap, Nelson Goodman, and Alfred Tarski, among others, led Quine to doubt the tenability of logical positivism's fundamental distinction between "analytic" sentences--those true in virtue simply of the meanings of their words, such as "All bachelors are unmarried"--and "synthetic" statements, those true or false in virtue of facts in the world such as "There is a cat on the mat".
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, but went on to claim that the notion of truth by definition was incoherent.
Quine is often misrepresented as believing all statements to be contingent. For instance one finds people claiming that Quine held the truth of "All unmarried men are bachelors" to be dependent upon a contingent fact, whereas Quine was in fact as skeptical of the necessary/contingent distinction as of the analytic/synthetic distinction (and, for that matter of reified facts). It is thus a serious, though common, misrepresentation to claim that Quine thought all statements were contingent.
Quine's chief objection to analyticity is of a piece with his criticism of 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 such obviously extraneous factors as bribery/threats), since competent English speakers also have access to the collateral information of the past existence of black dogs. Quine maintains that there is no distinction to be drawn between universally known collateral information and conceptual or analytic truths; however it is a defect of Quine's philosophy that it provides no plausible alternative explanation of why the intuition of "analyticity" is excited by some sentences and not others.
Another approach to Quine's objection to analyticity and synonymy comes through the notion of 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 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.
The indeterminacy of translation
Word and Object (1960) synthesized much of Quine's previous work outside of formal logic. The indeterminacy of translation is also discussed at length in Ontological Relativism (1977). Quine considers the methods that would be available to a "field linguist" attempting to translate a hitherto unknown language. He notes that there are always different ways one might break a sentence into words, and different ways to distribute functions among words. Any hypothesis of translation could be defended only by appeal to context: to seeing what other sentences a native would utter. But the same indeterminacy will appear there: any hypothesis can be defended if one adopts enough compensatory hypotheses regarding other parts of language.
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.
Indeterminacy of translation also applies to the interpretation of 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. In combination with a (more or less behaviouristic) premise that everything that can be learnt about the meaning of a speaker's utterances can be learnt from the behaviour of that speaker, however, the indeterminacy of translation does imply that there are no such entities as "meanings". (Since the notion of synonymy cannot be given any workable explanation.) But saying there are not "meanings" is not to say that words are not meaningful (or significant).
It would be a mistake to conclude that Quine denies an absolute standard of right and wrong in translating one language into another. A translation can fit or fail to fit with the behavioural evidence. And while Quine does admit the existence of standards of better and worse translation such standards are peripheral to his philosophical concern with translation, hinging upon such pragmatic issues as speed of translation, and the lucidity and concision of the results. The key point is that more than one translation meets these criteria, and hence that no unique meaning can be assigned to words and sentences.
Confirmation holism and ontological relativity
The central thesis underlying the indeterminacy of translation and other extensions of Quine's work is 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); though some theories are not justifiable, failing to fit with the data, or being unworkably complex, there are many alternatives which are equally justifiable. While, the Greek's supposition that (unobservable) Homeric gods exist is false while our supposition of (unobservable) electromagnetic waves is true, both are to be justified solely by their capacity to explain our observations.
At the end of "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" Quine says:
- 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 to account for it. Thus it is while it is possible to verify or falsify whole theories it is not possible to verify or falsify individual statements. Nearly any particular statement can be saved if one is prepared to make serious enough modifications elsewhere in the containing theory. 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 particular part.
Though it is not a result of which Quine would approve, his work has helped drive the wide acceptance of instrumentalism in the philosophy of science.
Set Theory (Mathematical Logic)
Quine drew the distinction between logic and set theory more sternly than Russell and Whitehead, and while his contributions to the former include elegant expositions and sundry technical proofs it is in set theory that Quine made the most novel contributions.
His systems of set theory (NF and that of Set Theory and Its Logic) are free of any hierachy of types, and hence do not recognise a distinct universal class for each level. While the technical changes are too many and difficult to explore here they are nearly all driven by the motive of minimising posits, hence a common theme is that pushing each innovation as far as it can be pushed before further additions must be made. For instance Quine distinguishes boolean logic from set theory, since the former can be handled merely in terms of predicates, without the need to assume sets, and then again where Zermelo-Frankel's set theory admits as sets all collections excepting only those that are too large, Quine's set theory (in particular his principle of comprehension) admits sets comparatively grudgingly, only where their absence would upset some other cherished intuition or principle.
The teaching of formal logic
While Quine made well-known contributions towards complex issues in both philosophy and logic, he was also instrumental in standardizing the teaching of formal logic at lower levels of education (i.e., introductory level logic courses taught to undergraduates).
His most enduring contribution to the field of logical education was his simply-titled Elementary Logic, originally published in 1941, and subsequently revised and edited throughout his entire lifetime. Quine wrote the book originally as an ad hoc solution to his teaching schedule. In 1940, when teaching an introductory course, he discovered that many of the existing textbooks ignored modern developments in logic, such as quantification theory or first-order predicate logic. He wrote the first edition of Elementary Logic within the space of six weeks.
Since its initial publication, Elementary Logic has been translated into Italian, French, Spanish, and Japanese.
Quotations
- "No entity without identity."
- "To be is to be the value of a bound variable"
- "Philosophy of science is philosophy enough."
- "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."
- Quine was asked what was the correct collective noun for logicians. He replied "It is a sequitur of logicians."
Notable books by Quine
- Mathematical Logic;Harvard University Press, 1951; ISBN 0674554515
- From a Logical Point of View; Harvard Univ Pr; ISBN 0674323513 (Softcover, December 1980). See the article on chapter 2 of this book, Two Dogmas of Empiricism
- Word and Object; MIT Press; ISBN 0262670011 (Softcover, March 1964). See the article regarding chapter 2 of this book, indeterminacy of translation
- Ontological Relativity and Other Essays; Columbia University Press; ISBN 0231083572 (Softcover, April 1977). See the articles ontological relativity, naturalized epistemology and natural kinds.
- Elementary Logic; Harvard University Press; ISBN 0674244516. 1941 (orig. publisher Harper and Row); revised in 1964 and 1980. Quine's textbook for introductory logic.
- Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary; Penguin, 1990 (orig. Harvard University Press 1987); ISBN 0140125221. His most accessible and amusing book.
Literature about Quine
- Dieter Köhler: Sinnesreize, Sprache und Erfahrung: eine Studie zur Quineschen Erkenntnistheorie, Diss., Heidelberg 1999/2003, http://www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/archiv/3548.
- Paolo Valore: Questioni di ontologia quineana, Milano, Cusl 2001.
Quine in Popular Media
- Within the field of computer programming, a program that gives as output its source code is called a "quine," named after him.
- Cyberpunk author William Ford Gibson included in his short stories a computer hacker named "Quine" (this character is mentioned, but does not appear, in his first novel, Neuromancer).
See also
- Quine
- Quine's paradox
- Quine-McCluskey algorithm
- Donald Davidson (philosopher)
- Douglas Hofstadter
- Schock Prize
- Hold come what may / Hold more stubbornly at least