Quine, W V O

Quine, W(illard) V(an) O(rman)

(born June 25, 1908, Akron, Ohio, U.S.—died Dec. 25, 2000, Boston, Mass.) U.S. logician and philosopher. He completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1932 and joined the faculty there in 1936. From 1942 to 1945 he served as a naval intelligence officer in Washington, D.C. Promoted to full professor at Harvard in 1948, he remained there until 1978, when he retired. He produced highly original and important work in several areas of philosophy, including epistemology, logic, ontology, and the philosophy of language. He was known for rejecting epistemological foundationalism in favour of what he called “naturalized epistemology,” whose modest task is merely to give a psychological account of how scientific knowledge is obtained. Though influenced by the logical positivism of Rudolf Carnap and other members of the Vienna Circle, he famously rejected one of their cardinal doctrines, the analytic-synthetic distinction. In ontology he rejected the existence of properties, propositions, and meanings as ill-defined or scientifically useless. He was also known for his behaviourist account of language learning and for his thesis of the “indeterminacy of translation,” according to which there can be no “fact of the matter” about which of indefinitely many possible translations of one language into another is correct. His many books include Word and Object (1960), The Roots of Reference (1974), and an autobiography, The Time of My Life (1985).