Questions tagged [quine]
W.V.O. Quine (1908-2000) was a prominent 20th century analytic philosopher.
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Have there been computer searches for Quine's permutations?
In "Word and Object", Quine describes what are effectively automorphisms of languages:
"The infinite totality of sentences of any given speaker's language can be so permuted, or mapped ...
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Is my understanding of Quine's Bizet-Verdi counterfactuals correct?
I'm currently reading Methods of Logic (Fourth Edition) by W. V. Quine. On p. 23 of Chapter 3 on The Conditional, he says
Whatever the proper analysis of the contrafactual conditional may be, we may ...
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What is Carnap’s “Principle of Tolerance”, and how did Quine reject it?
Carnap’s Principle of Tolerance and Quine’s Objections
Carnap holds that the role of philosophy is to analyze and clarify the language of
science, and to formulate and recommend alternative languages. ...
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Is the failure of substitutivity in an intensional context simply due to a lack of clarity in terms of the identity operator?
The oft-given example to demonstrate the failure of substitutivity in an intensional context goes as follows:
(P1) Lois Lane believes Superman can fly
(P2) Superman is Clark Kent
(C) Lois Lane ...
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What is the underlying critique Quine is making with his underdetermination thesis?
Quine considered his position to be a naturalistic one, and so not opposed to science as at least a good pragmatic form of knowledge. But I am unclear on the premise of his thesis of ...
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Quinean ontological commitment and properties
Take the following sentence: Some students are brilliant.
According to Quine, is this sentence ontologically committed to things students and to the property brilliance or being brilliant? From what I ...
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Are transcendental and indispensability arguments reciprocally structured?
This question occurred to me in the course of addressing a recent question about what counts as evidence in philosophy. There, I offered that transcendental arguments are structurally akin to ...
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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?
NEW UPDATE: An analytic expression x is redefined as any expression of language verified as completely true (or false) entirely on the basis that x (or ~x) is derived by applying truth preserving ...
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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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