Philosopher who changed the way we think about
language and its relation to the world| A powerful critic of much
that other philosophers held
dear, W. V. Quine had a
career as teacher, author
and thinker spanning seven
decades. In the course of it
he became the most famous
and probably the most
influential analytic
philosopher of his time. |
|
Willard Van Orman Quine was born in Akron, Ohio, where
he spent the first 18 years of his life, and years later showed
his affection for the city and the state by delighting in the
song (from Leonard Bernstein’s Wonderful Town) , “Why,
oh why, oh why-oh, Did I ever leave Ohio?” His
undergraduate years were spent at Oberlin, but for his
graduate study (with A. N. Whitehead) he migrated to
Harvard, which was his academic anchor ever after. Quine
paid two visits to Oxford: in 1953-54 as Eastman Visiting
Professor, and in 1973-74 as Savile Fellow of Merton
College and Wolfson Lecturer. The first of these visits had
a tremendous impact. At that time Oxford philosophers
knew very little logic and were unaware of the subtlety of
much contemporary American philosophy.
By the time of the second visit, Quine’s work was widely
known in Oxford.
Quine’s career was initially as a mathematical logician. His
first five books were all devoted to logic. But he had no
great pretensions about his achievements in this field; on his
first visit to Oxford, he described himself as a member of
the Second XI of logicians. He proved some interesting
minor theorems, but no important ones. His principal
contribution was the invention of the heterodox system of
set theory known as NF, after the article of 1936, New
Foundations for Mathematical Logic, in which he originally
expounded it.
The system teased the logical community by the difficulty of
finding a model for it, or of proving it consistent in any other
way. It reflected an important facet of Quine’s intellectual
character, for it is an example of a mathematical theory
conceived, most unusually, in a purely formalist spirit. Quine
proposed it without even the vaguest conception of a model
for it, that is, of the sort of mathematical structure in which
its axioms would hold good. Rather, he simply had a hunch
that a certain formal restriction on the assumptions
embodied in it about which sets existed would suffice to
guard against contradiction.
Quine never abandoned mathematical logic, but from 1953
onwards, with his collection of previously published essays
From a Logical Point of View, he acquired a wide
reputation as a leading philosopher of language in the
analytic tradition. His initial motivation was a reaction
against the doctrines of Rudolf Carnap, the influential
former member of the Vienna Circle who had settled in the
United States. Quine engaged in powerful criticism of basic
doctrines of analytic philosophy, as it had developed out of
logical positivism.
In particular, he attacked a Kantian dichotomy which had
become a basic tool of analytic philosophy, the distinction
between analytic and synthetic statements: those whose
truth rested solely on the linguistic conventions determining
the meanings of the words used to express them, as against
those conveying genuine information about the world. His
attack was supported by other American analytic
philosophers such as Morton White and Donald Davidson,
but strongly resisted by the philosophical school then
dominant in England and particularly at Oxford.
The rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction posed
far-reaching threats to other cherished notions. If any pair
of expressions had the same meaning, say “paternal
grandfather” and “father’s father”, then a statement such
as “Anyone’s paternal grandfather is that person’s father’s
father”, asserting their equivalence, must be analytic. So,
conversely, if no statement is unambiguously analytic, it can
never be determinate that any two expressions have the
same meaning. If, thus, the notion of synonymy crumbles,
that of meaning itself is in jeopardy.
With the assault upon the notion of meaning went an attack
upon modality. Not only did Quine suspect modal logic,
which deals with the operators “Possibly” and
“Necessarily”, of being pseudo-logic; he dismissed as
incapable of clear explanation sentences of natural language
containing modal verbs such as “can”, “may” and “must”.
Not only was the necessity supposedly deriving wholly from
the meanings of words to be repudiated: necessity of any
kind was to be repudiated also.
Quine’s status as the most respected philosopher in the
United States was confirmed with the publication in 1960 of
his magnum opus, Word and Object. The most celebrated
thesis advanced in this book was the indeterminacy of
translation. Two schemes for translating from one language
to another might both satisfy all the constraints imposed by
the empirically observable behaviour of the speakers of
both languages upon an adequate translation scheme; and
yet some sentence of the first language might translate
under the first scheme into the contradictory of the sentence
into which it translated under the second scheme.
This of course could not happen if the sentences of the two
languages had determinate meanings and it were a
requirement upon an adequate scheme for translating
between them that it take a sentence of the one language
into a sentence of the other with the same meaning; but
Quine contended that no empirically observable facts about
the speakers’ linguistic and other behaviour determined any
such meanings.
Contentions such as these might suggest to those unfamiliar
with his writings that Quine was some species of
Post-Modernist. Nothing could be further from the truth.
His writing was always crystal sharp; he never had the
slightest doubt about the value of philosophy, nor did he call
the concept of truth in question. Sir Michael Dummet vividly
remembers Quine’s disgust as they both listened to a talk in
which Donald Davidson’s philosophy was compared to that
of Jacques Derrida.
Quine criticised ideas dear to earlier philosophers and
apparently obvious to common sense, not in the interests of
cultural relativism or any of the other fashionable varieties
of relativism, but in the service of what he saw as a strictly
scientific methodology, in fact of a behaviouristic
methodology. Where Wittgenstein saw philosophy as an
activity wholly unlike scientific enquiry, Quine saw it as
ancillary to it and governed by the same canons: it was to
his mind just a branch of science.
He professed more than once a liking for desert landscapes,
and his intellectual landscape was bare indeed: more
accurately, bleak.
A commonsense diagnosis is that two factors combine to
dispose us to accept as true any statement we do so accept:
our grasp of its meaning, and our experience of the world.
Quine maintained that these two factors can never be
disentangled: we cannot distil out separately the
contributions made to our judgments of truth by our
knowledge of the language and by our experience of reality.
This doctrine of inextricability was extended to a broader
holism about language: we do not give to our sentences
meanings which allow us to judge them individually as in
accord with our experience or otherwise; we can judge as
being or not being in accord with experience only the totality
of all that we hold to be true. If we judge it not to accord with
our experience, we need to revise our total set of beliefs one
way or another; but it may be that there is more than one
way in which to revise it so as to bring it into harmony with
experience once more, where those two or more possible
revisions are not equivalent by any standards.
With speculations of this kind, Quine crossed from the
philosophy of language into the realm of epistemology, with
which he came to occupy himself greatly. Epistemology, he
claimed, should be naturalised; and, with this claim, Quine
became responsible for a new fashion in philosophy, the
so-called naturalisation of its theories. Though naturalised
theories treat of certain questions traditionally posed by
philosophers, the answers they give may invoke scientific
facts and replace a priori speculation with empirical
explanation.
Quine retired in 1978 from a teaching career in which his
pupils had included not only influential philosophers but also
the satirical songwriter Tom Lehrer and Theodore J.
Kaczynski, the so-called “Unabomber”. He continued for
two decades to do active work in philosophy, attending
conferences and publishing papers.
He must have collected far more prizes and honorary
degrees than any other contemporary philosopher or than
almost any other academic; but what he most rejoiced in
collecting were the countries that he had visited. He was
immensely vain about their number, and vain, too, about his
ability to speak a number of languages. He liked etymology
and unusual facts about words. His writing was distinguished
by a feeling for words and an often witty use of them. His
political opinions were on the Right, but he was tactful in not
voicing them in the presence of people he knew to be of a
different inclination.
Quine was an important philosopher, though posterity may
not class him as a great one. He was important because he
advanced bold theses for which he never produced proofs
but only highly suggestive considerations: but they were
theses which it was very difficult to refute, and he therefore
stimulated a great deal of fruitful philosophical inquiry.
Analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century
would have been greatly the poorer without him.
In 1930, just on arrival at Harvard, Willard Quine married
Naomi Clayton, whom he had met at Oberlin. They had two
daughters, in 1935 and 1937, but the marriage came to an
end in 1945, when they separated. They divorced two years
later. Then, in 1948, Quine married Marjorie Boynton,
whom he had first known as a woman volunteer during his
time as a Navy lieutenant in Washington during the war.
She predeceased him in 1998. He is survived by two
daughters from his first marriage and a son and daughter
from his second. | 
