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The most influential philosopher in the analytic tradition of his time, Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) changed the way we think about language and its relation to the world. His rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction, his scepticism about modal logic and essentialism, his celebrated theme of the indeterminacy of translation, and his advocacy of naturalism have challenged key assumptions of the prevailing orthodoxy and helped shape the development of much of recent philosophy. This introduction to Quine's philosophical ideas provides philosophers, students, and generalists with an authoritative analysis of Quine's lasting contributions to philosophy. The major themes covered include the adaptation of the language of modern logic to formulate a criterion of ontological commitment; Quine's own ontological commitments; Duhemian-Holistic empiricism and the attendant rejection of a priori knowledge; the nature and grounds of logical truth; Quine's criticisms of such notions as meaning, synonymy, analyticity, and necessity; the conjecture of the indeterminacy of translation; modal logic; propositional attitudes; and Quine's work on naturalized epistemology.
Quine's ideas throughout are contrasted with more traditional views, as well as with contemporaries such as Frege, Russell, Carnap, Davidson, Field, Kripke, and Chomsky, enabling the reader to grasp a clear sense of the place of Quine's views in twentieth-century philosophy and the important criticisms of them.
Contents
Preface ix 1 Introduction 1 2. Expressing an ontology 11 The new way of construing existence claims 11 The new logic: a canonical notation 15 The semantic side of ontological commitment 24 Challenging Quine on expressing existence 34 3. Deciding on an ontology 39 Some rival twentieth-century ontologies 39 Opting for an ontology: indispensability arguments 46 Quine's ontology 52 Conflict with Carnap over ontology 61 Inscrutability of reference 67 Challenging Quine: indispensability arguments 71 4. The spectre of a priori knowledge 75 The problem of a priori knowledge 75 Duhemian-Holistic empiricism and the dogma of reductionism 79 The effects of dispensing with the a priori 87 Challenging Quine: naturalism and the a priori 88 5. The nature of logic 95 Analyticity as logical truth 95 Expressing the principles of logic and set theory 100 Are logic and mathematics true by convention? 107 Challenging Quine: a broader conception of logic 114 6. Analyticity and indeterminacy 119 Dispensing with meanings 121 Other attempts to explicate analyticity 127 The indeterminacy conjecture 133 Contrasting indeterminacy and underdetermination 139 Contrasting inscrutability of reference and indeterminacy of meaning 142 Challenging Quine: analyticity and indeterminacy 147 7. Intensional contexts 149 Modal logic 151 The quotation paradigm 152 De dicto and de re modality: quotation and essentialism 155 Challenginq Quine: possible world semantics and the new theory of reference 159 Propositional attitudes 165 Challenging Quine: attitudes without objects 169 8. Nature, know thyself 173 Epistemology naturalized 173 A natural history of reference 178 Challenging Quine on epistemology 185 Bibliography 201 Index 207
