Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000)
- Paper: On What There Is
- Paper: Two Dogmas of Empiricsm 1951
- Book: The Web of Belief
- Book: Word and Object 1960
his paper basically killed logical positivism.
However, he was the main proponent of the view that philosophy is not conceptual analysis, but continuous with science; the abstract branch of the empirical sciences. This led to his famous quip that "philosophy of science is philosophy enough." [12] He 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."[13] He also advocated ontological relativity in science, known as the Duhem–Quine thesis (also called confirmation holism, that no individual statement can be confirmed or disconfirmed by a test, only a set of statements can).
Quine has remarked that one may or may not choose to be a behaviorist in psychology, but one has no choice but to be a behaviorist in linguistics.
In chapter 2 a linguist has to translate a native's unknown language into English. What is so specifically behavioristic there is that the linguist has nothing to go on but verbal behavior from the native and the visible environment the native interacts with. The same view is displayed in chapter 3 where Quine describes how a baby learns its first words. In this chapter Quine also mentions B.F. Skinner, a well known behaviorist, as one of his influences. The opposite view to Quine's and Skinner's in philosophy of language is represented by Noam Chomsky's linguistic nativism.
"Radical translation" is a thought experiment about translating a completely unknown language from scratch. Proves/disproves what?
Indeterminacy of translation Three aspects of indeterminacy arise, of which two relate to indeterminacy of translation.[5] The three indeterminacies are (i) inscrutability of reference, and (ii) holophrastic indeterminacy, and (iii) the underdetermination of scientific theory. The last of these, not discussed here, refers to Quine's assessment that evidence alone does not dictate the choice of a scientific theory, as different theories - observationally equivalent - may be able to explain the same facts. The first refers to indeterminacy in interpreting individual words or sub-sentences. The second refers to indeterminacy in entire sentences or more extensive portions of discourse.
– en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indeterminacy_of_translation
Dissolve the analytic-synthetic distinction