Willard Van Orman Quine

Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician who held the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University for over two decades and is regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. In his 1951 essay Two Dogmas of Empiricism, Quine attacked the sharp distinction between analytic truths, true by meaning alone, and synthetic truths, true by empirical fact, arguing instead for a holistic view in which whole systems of belief face empirical evidence together rather than sentence by sentence. Quine championed first-order logic as the proper canonical framework for regimenting scientific and philosophical claims, and in his 1948 essay On What There Is he introduced the influential criterion that to exist is to be the value of a bound variable in a theory's canonical formulation. His 1960 book Word and Object developed the indeterminacy of translation thesis, arguing that multiple incompatible translation schemes between languages could each fit all available behavioral evidence equally well. Quine also advocated naturalized epistemology, the view that the theory of knowledge should be pursued as a branch of empirical psychology and natural science rather than as independent first philosophy.