39 Facts About WVO Quine

Willard Van Orman WVO Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century".

From 1930 until his death 70 years later, WVO Quine was continually affiliated with Harvard University in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor.

WVO Quine filled the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to 1978.

WVO Quine was famous for his position that first order logic is the only kind worthy of the name, and developed his own system of mathematics and set theory, known as New Foundations.

WVO Quine led a "systematic attempt to understand science from within the resources of science itself" and developed an influential naturalized epistemology that tried to provide "an improved scientific explanation of how we have developed elaborate scientific theories on the basis of meager sensory input".

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WVO Quine advocated ontological relativity in science, known as the Duhem–Quine thesis.

WVO Quine won the first Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy in 1993 for "his systematical and penetrating discussions of how learning of language and communication are based on socially available evidence and of the consequences of this for theories on knowledge and linguistic meaning".

WVO Quine grew up in Akron, Ohio, where he lived with his parents and older brother Robert Cloyd.

WVO Quine's father, Cloyd Robert, was a manufacturing entrepreneur and his mother, Harriett E, was a schoolteacher and later a housewife.

WVO Quine was then appointed a Harvard Junior Fellow, which excused him from having to teach for four years.

WVO Quine arranged for Tarski to be invited to the September 1939 Unity of Science Congress in Cambridge, for which the Jewish Tarski sailed on the last ship to leave Danzig before Nazi Germany invaded Poland and triggered World War II.

WVO Quine was politically conservative, but the bulk of his writing was in technical areas of philosophy removed from direct political issues.

WVO Quine did write in defense of several conservative positions: for example, he wrote in defense of moral censorship; while, in his autobiography, he made some criticisms of American postwar academics.

At Harvard, WVO Quine helped supervise the Harvard graduate theses of, among others, David Lewis, Gilbert Harman, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Hao Wang, Hugues LeBlanc, Henry Hiz and George Myro.

In 1980WVO Quine received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Humanities at Uppsala University, Sweden.

WVO Quine had considerable difficulty in his project to make the desired revisions to Word and Object.

WVO Quine roundly rejected the notion that there should be a "first philosophy", a theoretical standpoint somehow prior to natural science and capable of justifying it.

WVO Quine confined logic to classical bivalent first-order logic, hence to truth and falsity under any universe of discourse.

The last chapter, on Godel's incompleteness theorem and Tarski's indefinability theorem, along with the article WVO Quine, became a launching point for Raymond Smullyan's later lucid exposition of these and related results.

WVO Quine was very warm to the possibility that formal logic would eventually be applied outside of philosophy and mathematics.

WVO Quine wrote several papers on the sort of Boolean algebra employed in electrical engineering, and with Edward J McCluskey, devised the Quine–McCluskey algorithm of reducing Boolean equations to a minimum covering sum of prime implicants.

WVO Quine always maintained that mathematics required set theory and that set theory was quite distinct from logic.

WVO Quine flirted with Nelson Goodman's nominalism for a while but backed away when he failed to find a nominalist grounding of mathematics.

WVO Quine's set theory and its background logic were driven by a desire to minimize posits; each innovation is pushed as far as it can be pushed before further innovations are introduced.

For WVO Quine, there is but one connective, the Sheffer stroke, and one quantifier, the universal quantifier.

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WVO Quine preferred conjunction to either disjunction or the conditional, because conjunction has the least semantic ambiguity.

WVO Quine was delighted to discover early in his career that all of first order logic and set theory could be grounded in a mere two primitive notions: abstraction and inclusion.

WVO Quine coined the term "Plato's beard" to refer to the problem of empty names.

In other words, WVO Quine accepted that analytic statements are those that are true by definition, then argued that the notion of truth by definition was unsatisfactory.

WVO Quine however gives several arguments for why this is not possible, for instance that "bachelor" in some contexts mean a bachelor of arts, not an unmarried man.

For WVO Quine, scientific thought forms a coherent web in which any part could be altered in the light of empirical evidence, and in which no empirical evidence could force the revision of a given part.

WVO Quine resists the temptation to say that non-referring terms are meaningless for reasons made clear above.

WVO Quine had considered the problem of the empty set unrealistic, which left Lejewski unsatisfied.

WVO Quine proposed that the best way to determine this is by translating the theory in question into first-order predicate logic.

WVO Quine applied this method to various traditional disputes in ontology.

WVO Quine proposed that we should base our ontology on our best scientific theory.

Various followers of WVO Quine's method chose to apply it to different fields, for example to "everyday conceptions expressed in natural language".

In philosophy of mathematics, he and his Harvard colleague Hilary Putnam developed the WVO Quine–Putnam indispensability thesis, an argument for the reality of mathematical entities.

WVO Quine's proposal is controversial among contemporary philosophers and has several critics, with Jaegwon Kim the most prominent among them.