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W. V. 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. 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[?] statements and Word and Object.

Life

Quine grew up in Akron, Ohio. He received his B.A. from Oberlin College and his Ph.D. from Harvard 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.

At Harvard his own students included many now-famed philosophers, including Donald Davidson, Hilary Putnam (check that?) and David Lewis.

Work

Most of Quine's early publications were in formal logic. He gradually came to work on questions of ontology, epistemology, and language; by the sixties he had substantially developed his project of "naturalized epistemology," whose aim was to answer all substantive questions of knowledge and meaning using the methods and tools of the natural science: Quine roundly rejected the notion that there should be a "first philosophy," a theoretical standpoint somehow prior to and capable of justifying science.

In the thirties and forties discussions with Carnap, Goodman, and 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."

Word and Object(1960) synthesized much of Quine's previous work outside of formal logic. It is most noted for Chapter II: Translation and Meaning. Here Quine considers the methods that would be available to a "field linguist" attempting to translate a hitherto unknown language. He notes, among other things, 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 one likes can be defended if one adopts enough conpensatory 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.

There is no way to escape this circle. In fact, it holds just as well in interpreting speaker's 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 sucessfully predict future utterances, and translate according to a more or less simple scheme of rules.