W. V. Quine

Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism

M ODERN empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truth which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism.

Philosophy of Logic.

Philosophy of logic , Philosophy of logic , کتابخانه دیجیتال و فن آوری اطلاعات دانشگاه امام صادق(ع)

The Problem of Simplifying Truth Functions

(1952). The Problem of Simplifying Truth Functions. The American Mathematical Monthly: Vol. 59, No. 8, pp. 521-531.

Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes

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Carnap and Logical Truth

Kant’s question ‘How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?’ precipitated the Critique of Pure Reason. Question and answer notwithstanding, Mill and others persisted in doubting that such judgments were possible at all. At length some of Kant’s own clearest purported instances, drawn from arithmetic, were sweepingly disqualified (or so it seemed; but see § II) by Frege’s reduction of arithmetic to logic. Attention was thus forced upon the less tendentious and indeed logically prior question, ‘How is logical certainty possible?’ It was largely this latter question that precipitated the form of empiricism which we associate with between-war Vienna — a movement which began with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and reached its maturity in the work of Carnap.

New Foundations for Mathematical Logic

(1937). New Foundations for Mathematical Logic. The American Mathematical Monthly: Vol. 44, No. 2, pp. 70-80.

Steps Toward a Constructive Nominalism

We do not believe in abstract entities. No one supposes that abstract entities—classes, relations, properties, etc.— exist in space-time; but we mean more than this. We renounce them altogether. We shall not forego all use of predicates and other words that are often taken to name abstract objects. We may still write ‘ x is a dog,’ or ‘ x is between y and z ’; for here ‘is a dog’ and ‘is between … and’ can be construed as syncate-gorematic: significant in context but naming nothing. But we cannot use variables that call for abstract objects as values. In ‘ x is a dog,’ only concrete objects are appropriate values of the variable. In contrast, the variable in ‘ x is a zoological species’ calls for abstract objects as values (unless, of course, we can somehow identify the various zoological species with certain concrete objects). Any system that countenances abstract entities we deem unsatisfactory as a final philosophy.

Concatenation as a Basis for Arithmetic

General syntax, the formal part of the general theory of signs, has as its basic operation the operation of concatenation , expressed by the connective ‘⌢’ and understood as follows : where x and y are any expressions, x ⌢ y is the expression formed by writing the expression x immediately followed by the expression y. E.g., where ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’ are understood as names of the respective signs ‘α’ and ‘β’, the syntactical expression ‘alpha⌢beta’ is a name of the expression ‘ αβ ’. Tarski and Hermes have presented axioms for concatenation, and definitions of derivative syntactical concepts. Hermes has also related concatenation theory to the arithmetic of natural numbers, constructing a model of the latter within the former. Conversely, Godels proof of the impossibility of a complete consistent systematization of arithmetic depended on constructing a model of concatenation theory within arithmetic.

The Problem of Interpreting Modal Logic

There are logicians, myself among them, to whom the ideas of modal logic (e. g. Lewiss) are not intuitively clear until explained in non-modal terms. But so long as modal logic stops short of quantification theory, it is possible (as I shall indicate in §2) to provide somewhat the type of explanation desired. When modal logic is extended (as by Miss Barcan 1 ) to include quantification theory, on the other hand, serious obstarles to interpretation are encountered—particularly if one cares to avoid a curiously idealistic ontology which repudiates material objects. Such are the matters which it is the purpose of the present paper to set forth.

THE SCOPE AND LANGUAGE OF SCIENCE

I AM a physical object sitting in a physical world. Some of the forces of this physical world impinge on my surface. Light rays strike my retinas ; molecules bombard my eardrums and fingertips. I strike back, emanating concentric air-waves. These waves take the form of a torrent of discourse about tables, people, molecules, light rays, retinas, air-waves, prime numbers, infinite classes, joy and sorrow, good and evil. My ability to strike back in this elaborate way consists in my having assimilated a good part of the culture of my community, and perhaps modified and elaborated it a bit on my own account. All this training consisted in turn of an impinging of physical forces, largely other peoples utterances, upon my surface, and of gradual changes in my own constitution consequent upon these physical forces. All I am or ever hope to be is due to irritations of my surface, together with such latent tendencies to response as may have been present in my original germ plasm. And all the lore of the ages is due to irritation of the surfaces of a succession of persons, together, again, widi the internal initial conditions of the several individuals. Now how is it that we know that our knowledge must depend thus solely on surface irritation and internal conditions ? Only because we know in a general way what the world is like, with its