W.V.O. Quine

1908-2000 · American · Analytic Philosophy, Logic, Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Science, Metaphysics

To be is to be the value of a variable.

When W.V.O. Quine sailed to Vienna in 1932 to meet Carnap, Schlick, Gödel, and Tarski, he was absorbing the most rigorous philosophy of his era. Within two decades he would dismantle its foundations. His 1951 paper "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" attacked the idea that any statement is true purely by the meaning of its words, and the companion idea that each claim faces experience independently. What we have instead is a web of belief — knowledge as a fabric touched by experience only at its periphery, where any thread is revisable, even the laws of logic.

Topics W.V.O. Quine addresses

• the two dogmas of empiricism
• rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction
• confirmation holism
• the Duhem-Quine thesis
• the web of belief
• naturalized epistemology
• ontological commitment
• to be is to be the value of a variable
• the indeterminacy of translation
• radical translation
• gavagai
• the inscrutability of reference
• ontological relativity
• naturalism
• philosophy continuous with science
• extensionality
• nominalism
• stimulus meaning
• observation sentences
• occasion sentences
• standing sentences
• regimentation
• canonical notation
• the tribunal of sense experience

Converse with W.V.O. Quine on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in W.V.O. Quine's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.