The New York Times
December 29, 2000, Arts
W. V. Quine, Philosopher Who Analyzed
Language and Reality, Dies at 92
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
W. V. Quine, a logician and Harvard philosophy professor
whose
analysis of language and its relation to reality made him
one of
the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, died on
Monday at
a hospital in Boston, where he lived. He was 92.
As a mathematical logician who wrote and published prolifically,
Mr.
Quine was often perceived as a philosopher who focused his
analytic
talents on many apparently disparate doctrines and theses. Yet
those
who understood him best insisted on his status as a system
builder, or a
thinker who addressed and attempted to answer the larger
questions of
philosophy.
Stuart Hampshire, a fellow philosopher, called him in 1971 "our
most
distinguished living systematic philosopher."
Like most philosophers, Mr. Quine set out to define the reality
of the
world and how humans fit into that reality. He concluded that a
person
can only understand the world empirically, or through direct
experience
of it. In "The Philosophy of W. V. Quine: An Expository Essay,"
a study
that the subject endorsed, Roger F. Gibson Jr. wrote that if Mr.
Quine's
project could be summed up in a single sentence, that sentence
would
read, "Quine's philosophy is a systematic attempt to answer,
from a
uniquely empiricistic point of view, what he takes to be the
central
question of epistemology, namely, `How do we acquire our theory
of the
world?' "
Mr. Quine's answer, in a nutshell, began by rephrasing the
question to
read, "How do we acquire our talk about the world?" In his
radically
empiricist view, nothing that humans know about the world lies
outside
the realm of language, and so he insisted that any theory of
knowledge
depended on a theory of language, which he duly set about
developing
and which became the framework of his philosophy.
In pursuing this objective Mr. Quine found himself in a distinct
position
among his contemporaries. Among 20th-century philosophers were
the
so-called historicists those willing to speculate about and
proclaim
metaphysical truths independent of empirical evidence and the
formalists those mathematical logicians who considered
philosophy an
autonomous, ahistorical discipline that replaced metaphysical
speculation
with scientific thinking. In the battle between followers of
those views,
Mr. Quine was a standard-bearer in the latter camp, a hero of
empiricism
who once declared that "philosophy of science is philosophy
enough."
Changing Direction
In a Scholarly Battle
This led him to fight in the ranks of the so- called logical
positivists, or
those like his European friends A. J. Ayer and Rudolf Carnap,
who
asserted that all statements of truth must be based on
observable data.
He even helped to shift the main ground of their battle from
Europe to the
United States. Yet Mr. Quine later challenged them in what is
arguably
the best known of his many published essays, "Two Dogmas of
Empiricism." It first appeared in the Philosophical Review in
January
1951 and was reprinted in 1953 in a collection of his essays
titled "From
a Logical Point of View."
The essay set out to undermine the two main points of
positivism. First,
Mr. Quine rejected the fundamental distinction between what Kant
had
called analytic and synthetic propositions, or the distinction
between
statements that seem true no matter what (like "all bachelors
are
unmarried") and those that are true because of the way things
happen to
be (like "Mr. X is a bachelor"). (This position, incidentally,
earned him a
place in Dan Dennett's "Philosophers' Lexicon," in which names
of
philosophers are construed as verbs or common nouns: to "quine"
is to
repudiate a clear distinction.)
To deny the distinction between analytic and synthetic
statements meant
that nothing could be known independent of experience.
Second, the essay argued against what he called the dogma of
reductionism, or "the belief," as he put it, "that each
meaningful statement
is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer
to
immediate experience." In other words, nothing in a person's
experience
lies beyond meaningful statement about it.
Although this seemed to amount to a rejection of all knowledge
of a
reality beyond our senses, Mr. Quine did not completely shut the
door to
a world out there. The alternative that he preferred was this
explanation:
"The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the
most casual
matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of
atomic
physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made
fabric
which impinges on experience only along the edges."
This position led him to two more conclusions about the nature
of
meaning and what humans can know about objective reality. One,
enunciated in his 1960 book, "Word and Object," was that when
translating from one language to another, or even from one
sentence to
another within the same language, there were bound to be many
contradictory ways to understand the meaning and that there was
no
sense in asking which of them was right.
This works, in his view, with what he called ontological
relativity, which
holds that because our theories of what exists are not
sufficiently
determined by the experiences that give rise to them, quite
different
accounts of what there is, each with its own interpretation of
the
evidence, may be equally in accord with that evidence.
To the objection that surely at least physical objects must
figure in all
theories of what is out there, Mr. Quine responded, yes, in
practice,
although he said he considered physical objects a matter of
convenience.
Tools for Determining
The Real World
"As an empiricist," he wrote toward the end of "Two Dogmas of
Empiricism," "I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of
science as a
tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light
of past
experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the
situation
as convenient intermediaries not by definition in terms of
experience, but
simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to
the gods of
Homer."
He concluded: "For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in
physical
objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific
error to
believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing, the
physical
objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both
sorts of
entities enter our conceptions only as cultural posits."
Willard Van Orman Quine, or Van to his friends, was born on June
25,
1908, in Akron, Ohio, the second son of Cloyd Robert Quine, a
machinist and successful businessman, and Harriet (Van Orman)
Quine.
The surname is from the Celtic language Manx, Mr. Quine's
paternal
grandfather having emigrated from the Isle of Man to Akron. Mr.
Quine
was named Willard after his mother's brother, a mathematician.
The nominal connection seemed to work. He took a liking to
mathematics in high school and majored in it at Oberlin,
although
philology and philosophy also interested him early. (During his
junior year
at college his mother presented him with Whitehead and Russell's
"Principia Mathematica" and Skeat's Etymological Dictionary, the
latter
of which, he said, "I persistently consulted and explored over
the
succeeding half century," a fact attested to by the liveliness
and clarity of
his writing.)
About his subsequent teaching career he said: "What I enjoyed
most was
more the mathematical end than the philosophical, because of it
being less
a matter of opinion. Clarifying, not defending. Resting on
proof."
His honors thesis at Oberlin used the system of "Principia
Mathematica"
to prove with 18 pages of symbols a law having to do with ways
of
combining logical classes. (He later edited the 18 pages down to
three
for the Journal of the London Mathematical Society.) His thesis
landed
him at Harvard University, where he switched to philosophy to
study with
Alfred North Whitehead. ("He radiated greatness and seemed old
as the
hills," Mr. Quine wrote in his autobiography, "The Time of My
Life." "I
retained a vivid sense of being in the presence of the great.")
Trying to Grasp
The Nature of Science
Only two years later, in 1932, he had earned his Ph.D., his
dissertation
being an attempt, in his words, "like `Principia,' to comprehend
the
foundations of logic and mathematics and hence of the abstract
nature of
all science." (It was published in revised form by the Harvard
University
Press with the title "A System of Logistic.")
He then went to Europe on a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship and
spent the
next year in Vienna, Prague and Warsaw, where he studied,
lectured and
met various members of the Vienna Circle of logical positivists,
among
them Philip Frank, Moritz Schlick, Alfred Tarski, A. J. Ayer,
their
English spokesman, Kurt Gvdel (who preferred not to be called a
logical
positivist), and Rudolf Carnap, from whom, Mr. Quine said, "I
gained
more . . . than from any other philosopher." (In Vienna he
dropped a
note to Wittgenstein, who never responded.)
The European interlude allowed him to indulge his lifelong
passion for
crossing borders (perhaps related to his penchant for denying
distinctions, or, more likely, inspired by a youthful ardor for
philately),
which, according to a count he made late in his life, was to
take him into
118 countries, over another 19, and within sight of 8 more,
among the
last being China, Oman and Bangladesh. His autobiography
describes
many of these visits somewhat matter-of-factly. His early love
of
geography was also reflected in a gift for drawing maps, which
later
extended to sketching portraits, several of which appear in his
autobiography.
In 1933 he returned to Harvard as a junior fellow in the newly
formed
Society of Fellows, which meant three years of unfettered
research.
Another junior fellow that year was the psychologist B. F.
Skinner, with
whom Mr. Quine came to share, as he put it, "the fundamental
position
that an explanation not the deepest one, but one of a
shallower kind
is possible at the purest behavioral level."
In 1936 Mr. Quine became an instructor in philosophy at Harvard,
where he taught, off and on, for the rest of his life,
interrupted only by
service in the Navy during World War II, when he did
cryptanalytic
work translating the German submarine cypher in Washington, as
well as
by his globe-girdling travels, the bestowal of medals, prizes
and some
dozen-and-a-half honorary degrees, and by lectures and classes
delivered all over the world.
A Harvard Professor
To Notable Students
His students at Harvard included Donald Davidson and Burton
Dreben,
the philosophers; Tom Lehrer, the mathematician and songwriter;
and
Theodore J. Kaczynski, the Unabomber ("although I don't remember
him," Mr. Quine told an interviewer, "he tied for top, 98.9
percent").
In the Navy he met Marjorie Boynton, a Wave in his office who
became
his second wife in 1948. His first marriage to Naomi Clayton in
1930
ended in divorce in 1947. His second wife died in 1998. He is
survived
by two daughters from his first marriage, Elizabeth Quine
Roberts and
Norma Quine; a son and daughter from his second, Douglas Boynton
Quine and Margaret Quine McGovern; five grandchildren; and a
great-grandson.
A Positive View
Of State Lotteries
Mr. Quine published about 20 books, some reprinted in multiple
editions
and several translated into as many as eight languages. One of
the more
accessible works, "Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical
Dictionary"
(1987), was praised in The New York Times by John Gross in
general
for "a deadpan humor that can light up even the most austere
subjects"
and in particular for commending the state lottery as " `a
public subsidy of
intelligence,' on the grounds that `it yields public income that
is calculated
to lighten the tax burden of us prudent abstainers at the
expense of the
benighted masses of wishful thinkers.' "
At the end of "The Time of My Life," Mr. Quine wrote: "I am
orderly and
I am frugal. For the most part my only emotion is impatience,"
he
continued. "I am deeply moved by occasional passages of poetry,
and
so, characteristically, I read little of it."
Although a "Quine" is defined in the New Hackers Dictionary as
"a
program that generates a copy of its own source text as its
complete
output," Mr. Quine never wrote on a computer, always preferring
the
1927 Remington typewriter that he first used for his doctoral
thesis.
Because that project contained so many special symbols, he had
to have
the machine adjusted by removing the second period, the second
comma
and the question mark.
"You don't miss the question mark?" a reporter once asked him.
"Well, you see," he replied, "I deal in certainties."
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Dec 29 2000 - 15:28:14 GMT