W. V. O. Quine 1908 – 2000
Willard Van Orman Quine was a 20th-century American philosopher and logician, one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the post-war era. His landmark 1951 essay Two Dogmas of Empiricism rejected the analytic-synthetic distinction and the doctrine of reductionism, both central to logical positivism, and argued for a holistic conception of knowledge in which our beliefs face experience only as a corporate body. His Word and Object developed the indeterminacy of translation thesis and a behaviourist account of meaning. His ontological motto, that to be is to be the value of a variable, framed decades of subsequent debate over what exists. He spent his entire career at Harvard University, where he held the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy.
Key facts
- Nationality
- American
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic
Selected quotes
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Attributed to W. V. O. Quine:
“To be is to be the value of a variable.”
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Attributed to W. V. O. Quine:
“Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body.”
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Attributed to W. V. O. Quine:
“Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system.”
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Attributed to W. V. O. Quine:
“The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience.”
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Attributed to W. V. O. Quine:
“No entity without identity.”