Willard Van Orman Quine Philosophy
American Philosopher Famous for Two Dogmas of Empiricism
Oct 3, 2009
Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000), was one of America's greatest philosophers in his day. He was an American analytic philosopher and logician who claimed that philosophy is not conceptual analysis and that science is the final arbiter of truth. His major writings include Two Dogmas of Empiricism, along with Word and Object, and The Pursuit of Truth.
Brief Biography of Willard Van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine was born on June 25, 1908 in Akron, Ohio. His work was influential in mathematical logic. He studied at Harvard University, later became a professor there. During World War II, he worked in the naval intelligence, however, resumed his career in philosophy back at Harvard. Aside from being a professor of philosophy and mathematics, he published books in retirement, as Harvard's emeritus elder statesman.
He came to prominent through an article published in 1951, Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Now regarded as a 20th-century classic, the article attacked the prevailing assumptions of empiricist metaphysics, then widely promoted by his mentor and friend, Rudolph Carnap. In more than twenty books and many articles, Quine developed and expounded his systematic philosophical paradigm. He died at the age of 92 on Christmas Day – December 25, 2000.
Quine's Philosophy
His philosophical thought is that science is the final arbiter of truth – that only science can tell people about the world, and that people's knowledge is constrained by and limited to sensory stimulation. He rejects Kant's synthesis of empiricism and rationalism.
Quine's metaphysical ideas are found in his books, Two Dogmas of Empirism (1951), and throughout his later works, Word and Object (1960) and The Pursuit of Truth (1990.)
Two Dogmas of Empiricism
Quine attacked two unempirical assumptions of the positivist program in his Two Dogmas of Empiricism.
- First, the idea originating from Kant that there are two different kinds of propositions, analytic ones (known to be true in virtue of their meaning alone) and synthetic ones (propositions known to be true or false according to how things stand in the world (that it is raining, or the coffee is hot.)
- Second, he rejects the positivist assumption that the meaning of a proposition can be reduced to just a talk about sensory stimulation. He shows that no proposition can be true that is independent of experience, but also that the meaning of proposition cannot be ascertained in isolation from the "web of beliefs" of which it forms apart.
Quine expands on his earlier themes in Word and Object. He developed his concept of philosophy and epistemology as scientific theory building.
He envisages a scenario of radical translation in which a field linguist, faced with a completely unknown native language, has to import his own conceptual scheme as a hypothesis to make sense of the natives' behaviour, since behaviour alone does not determine possible meanings of the natives' utterances.
The Pursuit of Truth (1990)
In this work, The Pursuit of Truth, Quine updates, summarizes and clarifies his thinking on the philosophical issues that have preoccupied him throughout his career.
His idea does not shy away from the conclusion that ontology, the study of what there is, is relative to background theory. He argues that physical objects are "posits" of our current best theory, whose existence we could conceivably deny given suitable revisions due to experiences.
An Insight to Quine's Philosophy
Rather than subscribing to the gods of Homer and other great ancient thinkers' mythical gods, Quine considers it a scientific error not to believe in physical objects. He claims that theory and experience go together, that what there is, what exists, is what humankind's best theory of the world says there is.
Sources:
- Bullock, Alan and R.B. Woodings, Ed. Dictionary of Modern Thinkers. London: Fontana, 1983.
- Stokes, Philip. Philosophy, the Great Thinkers. London: Capella, 2007.
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