Home > Positioning > Persons > Quine

Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000)

Quine dismantled two pillars of the empiricist tradition and rebuilt epistemology on what survived. “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) attacked the analytic-synthetic distinction (truths of meaning versus truths of fact) and the reductionist programme (each meaningful statement has its own empirical content). Without these, knowledge is not a hierarchy of sentences resting on experience but a web of belief — a fabric that touches experience at its edges and is revised as a whole when experience forces change. No statement is immune to revision (even logic), and no statement faces experience alone. This holism about meaning and confirmation reshaped analytic philosophy and opened the path that Rorty would later take toward the abandonment of epistemology as a foundational enterprise.

Life

Born in Akron, Ohio, in 1908. He studied mathematics and philosophy at Oberlin College and completed his doctorate at Harvard under Alfred North Whitehead in 1932, writing on the foundations of Principia Mathematica. A travelling fellowship took him to Vienna (where he attended meetings of the Vienna Circle, though briefly) and to Prague, where he worked intensively with Rudolf Carnap — the single most important intellectual relationship of his career, and the one he spent decades working against.

He spent his entire academic career at Harvard (1936–2000), becoming Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy. He was the dominant figure in American analytic philosophy from the 1950s through the 1980s — the philosopher other philosophers had to address. His writing is compressed, precise, and occasionally witty; his personal style was austere and systematic. He died in Boston in 2000.

Two Dogmas of Empiricism

“Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951) is Quine’s most influential paper. The two dogmas are:

The analytic-synthetic distinction. Analytic truths are true by virtue of meaning (“All bachelors are unmarried”); synthetic truths are true by virtue of fact (“There is a cat on the mat”). Quine argues that no satisfactory account of “true by virtue of meaning” can be given without circularity. Attempts to define analyticity through synonymy, through definition, through semantic rules — all presuppose what they are trying to explain. The distinction is not so much refuted as shown to lack a clear foundation.

Reductionism. Each meaningful statement can be translated into statements about immediate experience. Quine argues this fails: statements do not have their own individual empirical content. They face experience only as parts of larger theories. A failed prediction can be accommodated by revising any of several statements in the web — the logic, the auxiliary hypotheses, the observation reports, or the theory itself.

The positive alternative is holism: the unit of empirical significance is not the individual statement but the whole of science. Beliefs form an interconnected web; experience impinges at the edges; revisions propagate inward. Statements near the centre (logic, mathematics) are more resistant to revision than those at the periphery (particular empirical claims), but none is in principle unrevisable.

Ontological relativity

Word and Object (1960) develops the indeterminacy of translation: given all possible evidence (the totality of speech dispositions of a linguistic community), there is no fact of the matter about which translation of a foreign language is the correct one. Multiple incompatible translation manuals can fit all the evidence equally well. This is not a practical limitation (translation is hard) but a principled indeterminacy (there is no fact to be right about).

The consequence is ontological relativity — what there is (the ontology of a theory) is relative to a background language. “To be is to be the value of a variable,” Quine’s famous slogan, means that ontological commitments are read off from the variables a theory quantifies over. But since translation between theories is indeterminate, ontology is not absolute but always relative to a choice of interpretive framework.

Naturalised epistemology

“Epistemology Naturalized” (1969) proposes replacing traditional epistemology (the philosophical justification of knowledge from first principles) with the empirical study of how human beings actually acquire beliefs from sensory input. If the foundationalist programme has failed — if there is no Archimedean point from which to justify science — then the right response is not scepticism but the recognition that epistemology is itself a branch of natural science: psychology, cognitive science, the study of the causal relation between sensory stimulation and theoretical output.

This was controversial: critics (notably Putnam and Kim) argued it confuses the question of how we do form beliefs with the question of how we should — it eliminates the normative dimension of epistemology. Quine’s response was that the normative survives within science: we evaluate beliefs by their predictive success, coherence, and simplicity, but we do so from within the web, not from outside it.

Where Quine stops

The web of belief is holistic — no statement is immune to revision, no statement faces experience alone. But Quine’s holism is scientistic: the web is the web of science, and the tribunal of experience is sensory experience. The question of whether there are other webs — moral, aesthetic, practical — and whether they have their own modes of confronting experience is one Quine set aside. Rorty took the holism and dropped the scientism: if no statement is immune to revision and the web is revised by pragmatic criteria (what works, what helps us cope), then there is no principled distinction between science and other forms of inquiry. Quine would not have followed — he maintained that natural science is the final arbiter of ontology.

The indeterminacy of translation raises the question of how communication succeeds at all. If there is no fact of the matter about correct translation, then mutual understanding is underdetermined by all possible evidence. Davidson took the problem in a different direction — radical interpretation rather than radical translation — and arrived at a more charitable account of how understanding is possible. Quine’s own account stays at the level of behavioural dispositions, and the gap between dispositions and understanding is one his framework acknowledges but does not close.

Key works

See also: Carnap · Rorty · Putnam · Sellars · Russell