Held at Philadelphia for Promoting Useful Knowledge volume 156 number 1 march 2012 THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY independence square: philadelphia 2012
W. V. QUINE IN HIS HARVARD UNIVERSITY OFFICE, SEPTEMBER 1988, USED WITH THE PERMISSION OF DOUGLAS B. QUINE W I L L A R D VA N O R M A N Q U I N E 25 june 1908. 25 december 2000 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY VOL. 156, NO. 1, MARCH 2012
biographical memoirs WILLARD VAN ORMAN QUINE played a crucial role in shaping philosophy during the twentieth century. Early encyclopedias classified him as a logician, but he soon came to be regarded as a general philosopher, to begin with a philosopher of logic and language, but eventually as a metaphysician, whose radical thoughts about ontology, epistemology, and communication have repercussions within all major areas of philosophy. Quine was born in Akron, Ohio, on 25 June 1908, the son of Cloyd Robert Quine, an engineer and manufacturing entrepreneur, and Harriet Ellis Van Orman, a teacher. Quine s happy and active boyhood in Akron is engagingly described in his autobiography, The Time of My Life (1985). Quine received a B.A. from Oberlin College in 1930, majoring in mathematics. His diverse talents and interests, in mathematics, science, and psychology but also in language, literature, and poetry, attracted him to philosophy. At the end of his junior year at Oberlin his mother bought him Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead s three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910 13), and he applied for a scholarship to Harvard to work with Whitehead for a Ph.D. This started his seventy-year association with that institution. Quine was only twenty-three when he received his Ph.D. in the spring of 1932, after just two years at Harvard. His dissertation simplified and clarified various aspects of Russell and Whitehead s work. It exemplifies many of Quine s characteristic features as a philosopher: his acute awareness of obscurity and confusions, his constructive ability to find new viewpoints that make things fall into place, and his concern with ontological issues. Quine was awarded Harvard s Sheldon Traveling Fellowship for 1932 33, which brought him to Vienna, Prague, and Warsaw and put him in contact with Moritz Schlick, Kurt Gödel, and other members of the Vienna Circle: Rudolf Carnap in Prague, and Alfred Tarski, Jan Łukasiewicz, and Stanisław Leśniewski in Warsaw. Quine s year in Europe was followed by three years in Harvard s first group of six junior fellows. He thereafter taught philosophy at Harvard. In 1956 he succeeded C. I. Lewis as Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy, a position he held until his retirement in 1978. In 1936, his last year as a junior fellow, Quine participated in the founding of the Journal of Symbolic Logic. His Toward a Calculus of Concepts fills the first half of the first issue and his Set-theoretic Foundations for Logic fills the second issue. This latter paper springs from Quine s teaching. He wanted to present to his students a sanest comprehensive system of logic or, as I would now say, logic and set theory. Almost all of Quine s writings on logic sprang from Quine s interest in teaching. The pedagogical motive has dominated my work in [ 100 ]
willard van orman quine 101 logic, Quine wrote in 1986. His works in logic, like his works in other parts of philosophy, are works of art, not only in their style of writing, but also in the structure they give their subject matter. They give unity to what was previously dispersed. Quine s Set-theoretic Foundations for Logic was followed in December that same year by New Foundations. Here Quine introduces an intriguing new idea of stratification, inspired by Russell s theory of types, but much simpler. Several top logicians have been challenged by the extreme simplicity of New Foundations to find out whether the system is inconsistent or can be shown to be consistent relative to standard systems. However, from the very beginning Quine s work in logic was philosophically motivated, and gradually he focused more and more on philosophical issues. Questions of ontology were the first to make their appearance, in Ontological Remarks on the Propositional Calculus (Mind 1934), and ontology always remained one of Quine s key philosophical concerns. He sharpened the ontological issues ( To be is to be the value of a variable ) and discussed ontological commitment. Together with Nelson Goodman he wrote an article, Steps toward a Constructive Nominalism ( Journal of Symbolic Logic 1947), in which they with great ingenuity explored how far one can develop mathematics without assuming abstract entities. They found that one cannot get very far. From this they eventually drew opposite conclusions. Goodman decided, So much the worse for mathematics, while Quine gave up nominalism and settled for a Platonic realism. Quine always had a Spartan bent. His book Set Theory and Its Logic (1963) is basically concerned with keeping the ontology as minimal as possible. He starts with axioms that imply the existence of none but finite classes and explores, step by step, how far one can get before one is forced to make stronger assumptions. In Quine s later work his realism took an intriguing new turn, not yet fully explored in the secondary literature, toward indeterminacy of reference. Another main theme that came up early in Quine s work and grew to become his main contribution to philosophy, started as a skepticism toward meaning and other related notions, such as analyticity and modality. This skepticism grew into a major revamping of previous philosophical views on communication and the relation of language to the world. The first glimmer of this appeared in Truth by Convention (1936). From 1943 it found expression in a number of articles directed against modal notions, such as necessity and possibility. In 1951 Quine sketched an alternative view on meaning in Two Dogmas of Empiricism. This view was worked out in Word and Object (1960), where Quine also clinched his criticism of the modalities by arguing
102 biographical memoirs that quantification into modal contexts leads to a collapse of modal distinctions. Quine s argument for the collapse applied, however, equally to the notions of knowledge, belief, moral obligation, probability, and causality. These are notions that we certainly will not renounce. In order to block Quine s argument one had to give up one of its central premisses, the traditional view on reference, developed by Frege and many others. It was replaced by the so-called new theory of reference, which owes much to Quine s acute analysis of the underlying problems. Quine s main concern, his criticism of the notions of logical necessity and possibility, analyticity and traditional views on meaning, remained vibrant. In a number of books and articles Quine developed further the view on meaning that he set forth in Word and Object. The central idea is one that he shared with most other philosophers and linguists, viz., the public nature of language: Language is established and learned through interaction between people who observe one another and the world around them. It is thereby based on publicly accessible evidence and does not express inborn shared meanings, as is explicitly assumed by Frege and implicitly assumed by many other philosophers of language. Quine did not reject innate capabilities; we have lots of them. For example, we share a tendency to agree on what things are similar, both among verbal sounds and in the world around us. Learning and use of language are made possible by these capabilities. However, these capabilities, together with all publicly available evidence, do not suffice to uniquely determine how to translate what the other person says into our own idiom. Here, as in science, the evidence under-determines our hypotheses. However, while in science there is something to be right or wrong about, namely, the world that we are exploring, in translation there is nothing further to be right or wrong about, given the public nature of language. Translation is therefore indeterminate. If Frege were right about there being a third world of inborn shared meanings, translation would be on a par with scientific theory: one of the many translations that are compatible with the publicly available evidence would translate expressions into expressions with the same meaning and would thereby be the correct one. Translation would then be underd etermined, not indeterminate. However, if there is no such privileged meaning-correlation between languages that goes beyond the publicly accessible evidence, then every translation that is compatible with all this evidence is correct. There is not some unique translation that is the correct one. Quine s major contribution to the philosophy of language is that he has taken the public nature of meaning seriously and followed it out
willard van orman quine 103 with great persistence, to consequences that many philosophers find difficult to accept. The indeterminacy of translation is the most widely discussed of all of Quine s many ground-breaking ideas. From the very first pages of Word and Object, Quine stressed that what we perceive and what we take others to perceive plays a crucial role in language learning and language use. This is a key point in Quine: semantics and epistemology are intimately intertwined. His epistemology is naturalistic: it is contained in natural science, as a chapter of empirical psychology, and yet it is epistemology that provides an account of the evidential bases of natural science, including empirical psychology itself. In the study of meaning and communication a key problem is to get insight into what others perceive without imputing to them our own view of the world and our own ontology. In Word and Object, Quine endeavored to do this in terms of stimulus and response. However, although stimuli and responses are empirically accessible, they are not publicly accessible. The evidence we build on in language learning and language use must be accessible to the members of the community in their daily lives. During the thirty-five years that separate Word and Object from Quine s last book, From Stimulus to Science (1995), Quine again and again sought to find a way of dealing with what others perceive without begging the questions of meaning and translation. This enterprise involves the whole range of Quine s philosophical insights: his views on epistemology and ontology and on causality, natural kinds, time, space, and individuation. Quine has created a new way of looking at these eternal questions of philosophy and their interconnections. He leaves a transformed philosophical landscape for new generations of philosophers to explore. Quine was elected to the American Philosophical Society (1957), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1949), the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, D.C. (1977), and several academies abroad. He had honorary doctorates from eighteen universities and received many prizes, including the first Rolf Schock Prize in Stockholm in 1993 and the Kyoto Prize in Tokyo in 1996. In 1930 Quine married his college sweetheart, Naomi Clayton. The war brought the marriage to an end, and they filed for divorce in 1944. In 1948 he married Marjorie Boynton; their union lasted until Mar jorie s death in 1998. He had four children, two from each marriage: Elizabeth (1935 2010), Norma (1937 ), Douglas (1950 ), and Margaret (1954 ). Much of Quine s personality is expressed in Neurath s ship simile, which Quine made the motto of Word and Object: We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismantle it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from its best components.
104 biographical memoirs Quine was always concerned with improving the ship. The Pursuit of Truth was the title of his second-last book, and throughout his life he was striving for truth with great energy and seriousness. He was aware that even our most fundamental beliefs may be mistaken. He was therefore always interested in objections, always willing to listen, and ready to change his views if the criticism was good. His students understood quickly that he did not want to form any philosophical school; he preferred well-argued objections to admiring emulation. Quine never reacted negatively to criticism, but was on the contrary encouraging and more interested in finding out what was right than in being right. He was always welcoming and positive, full of care for his students, friendly to his colleagues, and warm toward his friends and his family. Elected 1957; Councillor 1965 68, 1982 85; Committees: Advisory on Election of Members 1983 91; Membership IV 1963 73, 1977 83; Nomination of Officers 1967 68, 1984 85 Dagfinn Føllesdal Professor Emeritus University of Oslo Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy Stanford University Bibliography Quine s writing style is lively, often playful, and always sparklingly clear. More than sixty years separate his first book, A System of Logistic (1934), from his twenty-first, From Stimulus to Science (1995). Many of his books were published in several editions and they have appeared in more than fifty translations, ranging over sixteen languages. Quine s articles have been even more widely translated and reprinted. His Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951) has been included in more than twenty anthologies, and several others are almost equally popular. With Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and John Rawls, Quine is among the most often quoted philosophers of the twentieth century. Numerous books and more than three thousand articles, many of which appear in volumes devoted to his work, have been written on Quine. The main biographical source is Quine s autobiography, The Time of My Life (1985), which was mentioned above. Lewis Hahn and Paul Schlipp, The Philosophy of W. V. Quine (Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 18) (1986; 2nd expanded ed., 1998) contains a complete bibliography of his work. Links to bibliographies and other material on Quine can be found on the Quine web site, http://www.wvquine.org/. I am grateful to Dr. Douglas Quine for his valuable help.