Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine
In 1951 Quine published a short paper that set out to kill two dogmas of empiricism, and in killing them he ended the program that had ruled philosophy for a generation and redrew the map of human knowledge. The first dogma was the belief in a clean line between truths that hold by meaning alone, the analytic ("all bachelors are unmarried"), and truths that hold by fact, the synthetic ("some bachelors are bald"). The second was reductionism, the belief that every meaningful statement can be cashed out in terms of immediate experience. Quine argued that neither line can actually be drawn, and out of the rubble he built a new picture of knowledge: not a building on foundations but a single seamless web that touches experience only at its edges.
The web of belief. Our beliefs, Quine holds, do not face the test of experience one at a time. They face it together, as a connected fabric, so that when observation clashes with the system we always have a choice about where to make the repair. Near the center of the web sit logic and mathematics, so deeply woven in that we revise them only under enormous pressure; out at the edges sit the reports of the senses, directly answerable to what we see. But the whole thing is one piece, and, Quine insists, any statement can be held true come what may if we are willing to make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere, while by the same token no statement, not even a law of logic, is in principle immune from revision. Knowledge is a man-made fabric that impinges on experience only along its boundary.
The fall of analytic and synthetic. The reason the first dogma fails is that every attempt to say clearly what "analytic" means travels in a circle through notions just as obscure as the one it set out to explain, synonymy, definition, necessity, each defined in terms of the others. There is no non-circular criterion. And once beliefs are seen to face experience as a whole, the so-called analytic truths turn out to be simply the ones we are least willing to give up, a difference of degree rather than of kind. This quietly demolished the foundation of logical positivism, which had housed logic and mathematics in the analytic, empirical science in the synthetic, and left philosophy the supposedly separate business of analyzing meanings.
Naturalized epistemology. If there is no first philosophy standing outside science to certify it from a higher ground, then the theory of knowledge must take its place inside science. Epistemology becomes, in Quine's phrase, a chapter of psychology: the empirical study of how human beings, fed only the meager input of sensory stimulation, manage to produce the torrential output of their theory of the world. Philosophy is continuous with science, a part of the same inquiry rather than a tribunal above it, and there is no firmer place to stand from which to judge science than science itself.
The indeterminacy of translation. Quine's most unsettling thesis concerns meaning. Picture a linguist translating an unknown language from scratch, with nothing to go on but observable behavior. A rabbit darts past and the native says "Gavagai." Does the word mean rabbit, or undetached rabbit-part, or a passing temporal stage of a rabbit? No amount of watching and questioning can decide, because rival manuals of translation, incompatible with one another, can each be made to fit all the behavior there is. From this Quine concludes that there is no fact of the matter about meaning beyond dispositions to behave: meaning is indeterminate, and reference itself is inscrutable. It is a deflation of the very idea that words have determinate meanings hidden behind their use.
Ontological commitment. What, then, exists? For Quine the question becomes precise once we ask what our best scientific theory cannot do without. To be, he says, is to be the value of a bound variable: we are committed to exactly those entities our theory must quantify over, so that if physics cannot be stated without numbers, we are committed to numbers. And what a theory is about is itself relative to a background language, a doctrine he called ontological relativity. Quine's own taste ran to desert landscapes, the leanest ontology a working science can be made to require.
What this room reads. Quine's writings, from Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951) through Word and Object (1960) and Ontological Relativity, are all under copyright, so this room carries no primary-text corpus: the chat answers from training knowledge, says so plainly, and cites his essays and books by title rather than by a retrieved passage. Readers should know that the room next door on Donald Davidson takes up a "third dogma" that presupposes Quine's two, and the two rooms are best read together.
Quine remade analytic philosophy in his own image. By dissolving the line between the analytic and the synthetic he ended logical positivism's dream of certifying science from outside it; by naturalizing epistemology he folded the theory of knowledge into science itself; and by pressing the indeterminacy of meaning he forced everyone who came after to argue about whether meaning is even a determinate thing. Read now, he is the great holist and naturalist of modern thought, who taught that there is no first philosophy and no belief beyond revision, only the one web of our convictions swaying under the steady pressure of experience. He inherited the logic of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell and the empiricism that descends from David Hume; he turned Immanuel Kant's foundational distinction between the analytic and the synthetic into a dogma to be discarded; he made common cause with John Dewey's naturalism, citing him for the view that meaning is a property of behavior; and his student Donald Davidson would tug the web one dogma further. Pull any thread, Quine showed, and the whole fabric trembles.