Questions tagged [quine]
W.V.O. Quine (1908-2000) was a prominent 20th century analytic philosopher.
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Do we live in a post-Meinong-versus-Russell/Quine world?
From a 2022 review of the collection Non-Being: New Essays on the Metaphysics of Non-existence:
This book argues, by omission, that we are in a post-Meinong-versus-Russell/Quine world. This is a ...
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Michael Dummett on the indeterminacy thesis
In his work "The Significance of Quine's Indeterminacy Thesis," Michael Dummett explores Quine's philosophy. In the beginning of section 3, he states: "Indeterminacy of translation ...
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Do contradictions rule out holism and vice versa, and pluralism?
Quine has a holism (based in radical empiricism) that is very appealing. It's a significant part of his Two Dogmas of Empiricism, which many say is the most significant philosophical work in the 20th ...
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Relative to Quine's indeterminacy of translation thesis, was it ever resolved for a person to deduce what a scientific theory states?
In science, if I want to falsify someone's theory, then before embarking on a venture to do such, I need to be able to correctly interpret what the theory states. From what I have read about Quine's ...
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Can physical universes nontrivially embed themselves into themselves?
Sometimes our world is said to be a "Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact" or that other possible worlds are "recombinations" of available propositions for some actual world. So model-...
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Quine-Putnam indispensability argument
If Quine-Putnam's argument is (following the SEP):
(P1) We ought to have ontological commitment to all and only the
entities that are indispensable to our best scientific theories.
(P2) Mathematical ...
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Is this a more unequivocal way to make an analytic v synthetic distinction?
Is this an unequivocal way to make an analytic v synthetic distinction, that would address Quine's objections?
“Analytic” sentences, such as “Pediatricians are doctors,” have
historically been ...
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Quine on philosophy and science
In this interview with Bryan Magee in 1978, W. V. O. Quine mentions that some philosophers believed that (1) philosophy is separate from science (2) philosophy provided a basis on which to build ...
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Quine's quasi quotation
I would like to know what's the point of Quine's quasi-quotation, that is the use of angle brackets. How does they differ from ordinary commas quotation?
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Seeking a quote of Russell on what he could conceive or discuss
At some point someone asked Bertrand Russell about formal logical language without distinctions of type. (I think it might have been Quine, who was developing for example kinds of algebraic logic ...
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What type of subjective probability is adopted by Quine?
I am wondering what type of subjective probability is adopted by Quine. Is Quine sympathetic towards de Finetti's probability or Bayes'ones?
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The problem of induction and coherentism
My understanding of the problem of induction is this. You want to hypothesise that the future is like the past (let us call this hypothesis H), and so justify the scientific practice of making ...
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Quine's naturalism and the interpretations of Quantum Mechanics
I am wondering what does Quine's naturalism amount to. Specifically, Quine believes that our best scientific theories tell us what exist. This means that science determines our ontology.
In the case ...
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What does Quine's ontological method of paraphrasing achieve?
W. V. O. Quine in "On What There Is?" denies the existence of universals. There are red things, like a fire truck (f), a tomato (t), a red umbrella (u). But the phrase "They have ...
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Quine and the Myth of the Given
To give you some background details about myself: I have a deep interest in Quine's work and Naturalism in Philosophy; I have been independently studying and reading Quine's work and his relation to ...
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Are holist underdetermination and contrastive underdetermination mutually exclusive in any ways?
My understanding of Quine's view of holist underdetermination and how it connects to his holist view of science is summarized well by this quote:
The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, ...
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Quine said that even logic could be revised on empirical grounds. Did he later reverse that position? Where?
Quine said that even logic could be revised on empirical grounds. Did he later reverse that position? If so, in which of his writings?
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Can the analytic/synthetic distinction be accounted for as an erotetic difference?
Although Kant was the first to refer to the distinction as such, his belief that there is a form of truth based on predicates-contained-in-subjects actually goes back at least to one definition from ...
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Did Quine ever respond to the major criticisms of Two Dogmas?
I'm specifically thinking about Grice and Strawson's paper "In Defense of a Dogma" and Putnam's paper "Two Dogmas Revisited". Both raise major issues with the content of Quine's "Two Dogmas of ...
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Two dogmas of empiricism - logical vs analytic truths... is there really a distinction?
A link to the paper is here:
https://www.theologie.uzh.ch/dam/jcr:ffffffff-fbd6-1538-0000-000070cf64bc/Quine51.pdf
So in the paper Quine gives two types of analytic statements:
No unmarried man is ...
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Does this reformulation of the the analytic / synthetic distinction overcome Quine's objections?
He seemed to be asserting that synonymity cannot possibly be defined in a non-circular way. We attempt to show this is false on the basis of defining the Quine/Carnap example in a non-circular way.
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Did Quine change of opinion towards quantified modal logic?
Willard Van Orman Quine was a strong opponent to quantified modal logic calling it unreasonable and useless. But, did he always think like that? Or did he relax his attitude towards it with time? Did ...
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How has Analytic Philosophy Survivied Quine's Criticism?
Analytic philosophy and techniques, in which philosophy is approached as a primarily linguistic and logic exercise, has been the dominant mode of philosophy in the Anglo-American world for most of the ...
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In Quine's ontology, why does a 'recognition' of something lead to ontological commitment while a 'feeling' does not?
We are discussing Quine's On What There Is in a metaphysics class I am in. I felt like I understood what he meant, that if something has to be predicated for in a sentence, we are ontologically ...
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What is Quine’s Confirmation theory?
I have just read that Quine relies on his confirmation theory to establish if a scientific theory is “valid” or not. But I am not sure to have understood what is Quine’s confirmation theory and why ...
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The synthetic apriority of the categorical imperative
Weirdness I noticed about Kant's theory of the categorical imperative: he says that the CI is "synthetic," in the second Critique using the very imposing phrase "sic volo, sic jubeo" to characterize ...
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Humean supervenience and Quine
I am wondering if Quine would adopt the Lewis' Humean supervenience theory to make sense of probability. Quine is a subjectivist about probability (even though regarding probability in QM he thinks ...
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What are good sources on vivid designators?
Wikipedia lists a vivid designator as the following:
Vivid designator:
In modal logic and the philosophy of language, a vivid designator is a
term which is believed to designate the same ...
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How and why Aristotelian essentialism is a problem for Quine?
I cannot understand how and why the Aristotelian essentialism is problematic for Quine. I have tried to read articles on the theme but probably I am not smart enough to understand them. Could you ...
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What is Quine’s reductionism?
I am especially interested in how reductionism is related to the fact that even though science broadly comprehends a number of subjects, physics is paradigmatic.
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Why are non-logical predicates of 0-arity treated as logical variables?
In the "Non-logical symbols" section of Wikipedia, it states:
A predicate symbol (or relation symbol) with some valence (or arity,
number of arguments) greater than or equal to 0. These are ...
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Is there any correlation between Quine’s underdetermination and bayesian issues of old evidence and new theories?
Bayesianism has some faults some of which involve the problem of old evidence and the issue of new theories. Are these two problems linked to Quine’s underdetermination? Or are they contrasting it? ...
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What is Quine's perspective on probability?
I am curious about what Quine's perspective on probability may be and if we can say that the quinean viewpoint on modality can be considered similar to his viewpoint on probability.
Is probability ...
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Differences and similarities between Kuhn and Quine about the indeterminacy of translation
About Thomas Kuhn's semantic incommensurability:
Early on Kuhn drew a parallel with Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of translation (1970a, 202; 1970c, 268). According to the latter, if we are ...
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Why can we not reduce necessity to analyticity?
Why can’t we eliminate talk of necessity and possible worlds, for talk of analyticity and (non-modal) logical consistency? Has there been any attempt in recent times to do this? I'm not 100% sure, but ...
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In which sense Quine denies that the translated expressions do have a meaning?
Early on Kuhn drew a parallel with Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of translation (1970a, 202; 1970c, 268). According to the latter, if we are translating one language into another, there are ...
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Is Kuhn referring to Quine's holism while developing his later Semantic Incommensurability Thesis?
Kuhn's view as expressed in the passage quoted above depends upon meaning holism—the claim that the meanings of terms are interrelated in such a way that changing the meaning of one term results in ...
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What did Kuhn exactly say about the inscrutability of reference?
Early on Kuhn drew a parallel with Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of translation (1970a, 202; 1970c, 268). According to the latter, if we are translating one language into another, there are ...
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Quine "Ontological Relativity"
I am completely new to Quine's theories and thank you for your patience in answering my novice questions.
In his paper "Ontological Relativity", Quine says:
Consider the case of a thoughtful ...
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why Bertrand Russell's paradox had such a high impact and relevance?
The paradox of Bertrand Russell he formulated in 1918, I believe, has undermined the attempt to found mathematics on a strictly logical basis. I remember that an intuitive way of putting the paradox ...
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is the world a set of everything that exists? Any quotation?
The way I understood first-order-logic with quinean metaontology is, that a world is the set of everything that exists. Now I'm searching for a quote. I looked at some texts from Russell and at On ...
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Could someone help me out with Quine's theory of ontological commitment?
I'm kind of struggling with this. My prof gave an example of the problem of whether or not holes exist.
In the case of a colander, a realist about holes could say that a colander is metal that has ...
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Quine on Necessity
Lately, I have been reading some of Quine's works on modality. I can't help but feel that many of his pronouncements on modality are wrong/misguided, although pinpointing exactly where is goes wrong ...
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Quine - Two dogmas of empiricism - status of mathematics [duplicate]
If we do away with the analytic-synthetic distinction as per Quine, does that mean that mathematics is no more certain than empirical science?
And how does mathematical proof proceed if we don't use ...
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Difference between Carnap and Quine's views
Could someone explain to me, in easy language, what the main differences are between Carnap and Quine's views regarding internal / external questions and realism? Quine called Carnap a Platoist, yet I ...
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Are there serious challenges to the 'principle of charity' as presented by Donald Davidson?
Donald Davidson's formulation of the "principle of charity" is based on Quine's "radical interpretation" (I believe from the book Word & Object), and he formulates it in a way that considers its ...
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If one agrees with Quine's dissolution of the Analytic/Synthetic distinction, what is left of Kant's epistemology?
One of Kant's most important (if not the most important) result is his argument (proof?) that synthetic a priori knowledge is possible.
If one agrees with Quine's argument against Analyticity as being ...
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Two questions on Quine's philosophy of science
These are fairly straight forward question to which I have found no answers. Years ago, when I was taking a seminar on Quine, the professor explained Quine's philosophy of science. According to Quine, ...
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Quine on higher set theory
In The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic, Stewart Shapiro states in his introductory section:
Quine himself accepts mathematics (as true) only to the extent that it is applied ...
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How important are Quine and Feyerabend to the philosophy of science and the demarcation problem?
I've listened to two sets of lectures on the philosophy of science that treat Quine's results on underdetermination, the dissolution of the analytic/synthetic distinction, and confirmation holism as ...
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