Willard Van Orman Quine

Willard Van Orman Quine (Akron, Ohio, 1908 – Boston, Massachusetts, 2000) was an American logician and philosopher in the analytic tradition, widely regarded as one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. He held the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1956 to 1978. His work spans mathematical logic, the philosophy of science and epistemology, and he is best known for arguing that philosophy should continue the work of science rather than stand apart from it and ground it.

He grew up in Akron, the son of a manufacturing entrepreneur and a schoolteacher. He became an atheist at around the age of nine and remained one for life. He studied mathematics at Oberlin College and earned his doctorate in philosophy at Harvard in 1932, under Alfred North Whitehead. A travelling fellowship then took him to Vienna, Warsaw and Prague, where he met Polish logicians such as Tarski and Łukasiewicz and members of the Vienna Circle. It was in Prague, under the influence of Rudolf Carnap, that his commitment to philosophy took shape. During the Second World War he served in the United States Navy in an intelligence role.

His early work concerned formal logic and set theory. He held that first-order logic is the only logic deserving the name, and he built his own foundation for mathematics, known as New Foundations. After the war he gained philosophical prominence with two landmark papers. In "On What There Is" (1948) he formulated his criterion of ontological commitment: a theory is committed to whatever must exist for it to be true, and to be is to be the value of a variable. In "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) he attacked the traditional distinction between analytic and synthetic statements and the reductionism of the logical positivists, proposing in their place a holism in which beliefs face experience collectively rather than one by one. This also gave rise to the Duhem–Quine thesis about science.

Later he developed a naturalized epistemology, which studies knowledge with the methods of the empirical sciences and does not appeal to a first philosophy standing outside them. In Word and Object (1960) he introduced the indeterminacy of translation, the claim that rival translation manuals can fit all observable linguistic behaviour and yet contradict one another. In The Web of Belief (1970) he set out a coherentist picture of knowledge. With Hilary Putnam he developed the indispensability argument, which holds that mathematical entities should be accepted because scientific theories depend on them.

His influence reaches later analytic philosophy, the philosophy of language, where Donald Davidson built on his ideas, and linguistics, where his formal methods inspired his student Noam Chomsky. His remark that "philosophy of science is philosophy enough" sums up a position that still divides philosophers between those who accept it and those who regard it as giving up on first philosophy.