Decock, Lieven. "Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000)." Handbook of Whiteheadian Process Thought Vol. II. Edited by Michel Weber and Will Desmond. Heusenstamm, Germany: Ontos Verlag, 2008). 498-504.

Abstract

Willard Van Orman Quine was born on June 25th, 1908 in Akron, Ohio. He majored in mathematics with honors reading in mathematical philosophy at Oberlin College (BA), and later in philosophy in Harvard. (M.A. and Ph.D.). He worked under the supervision of Whitehead on a generalization of Principia Mathematica. After his Ph.D. thesis, he was awarded a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship. This trip to Europe in 1933 would have a profound influence on his further intellectual development. In Harvard, the prominent logicians, such as Whitehead, C.I. Lewis and Sheffer, were unaware of recent advances in Europe. In Vienna, he attended some of the Vienna Circle lectures. In Prague, he had long discussions with Carnap on the drafts of Der Logische Syntax der Sprache, which would result in a lifelong friendship and later in one of the central debates in American philosophy. In Warsaw, Quine was able to become aquainted with the work of, among others, Tarski, Lukasiewicz and Lesniewski. A few years later, in the advent of World War II, he helped to solve immigration problems for many of the philosophers and scientists he met in Europe. Back in Harvard, Quine was elected to the newly established Society of Fellows; the behaviorist B.F. Skinner was another Junior Fellow. He was appointed faculty instructor in 1936, and stayed in Harvard for the rest of his career, with the exception of three years on Navy service (1943-1946) a few sabbaticals (e.g. Oxford and Princeton) and innumerable travels all over the world. Before his Navy service, he had worked mainly on problems in logic. Soon after his return, he published some of his most influential philosophical papers, namely "On what there is" (1948), in which he formulated the criterion of ontological commitment "to be is to be the valuable of a variable"; and "Two dogmas of empiricism," in which he attacked Carnap's distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. He continued work in logic, and wrote a few critical articles in the new field of modal logic. Since the beginning of the fifties, Quine became gradually more interested in the philosophy of lanaguage, which would result in his major work Word and Object (1960). In this book, he argued that meaning and synonymy cannot be part of austere (logically regimented) science. In order to illustrate this "indeterminacy of translation" he discussed the case of radical translation, i.e. a field linguist trying to trnaslate a completely unknown language. He claimed that several translation manuals are possible, without there being a single "right" one. Quine's philosophy of language was strongly influenced by the behaviorist tradition, and was soon strongly criticized by Chomsky at the dawn of the cognitivist era in linguistics and psychology. In 1968, Quine published "Epistemology naturalized." Though the ideas in the paper were not radically new, and in fact more clearly expressed in later works such as The Roots of Reference (1974) or his latest work From Stimulus to Science (1995), nevertheless the paper revitalized the naturalistic tradition in epistemology. The foundational program was abandoned, and epistemology was studied as a chapter of psychology. Thus the idea of an external point of epistemic evaluation was given up, and the traditional distinction between science and philosophy was blurred. Over the decades, Quine has contributed to many other fields in philosophy. In philosophy of science, the Quine-Duhem thesis, formulated in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" is still well known, as well as the thesis of the underdetermination of theories by facts (1975). In philosophy of mathematics, the contemporary positions of naturalism, structuralism, and nominalism owe much to Quine's work. Over the years, he became aware of the problems of his earlier ontological views in "Ontological relativity" (1968) and most forcefully in "Whither physical objects?" (1976). In 1978 he retired from Harvard. He continued to work and published a few more books. He received the first Rolf Schock prize (1993), the Kyoto prize (1996), and in 1997 his 18th honorary degree. Quine died in Boston on December 25, 2000.