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[Henk Elegeert]

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"
December 29, 2000

W. V. Quine, Philosopher Who Analyzed Language and
Reality, Dies at 92

By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT

      W. V. Quine, a logician and Harvard philosophy professor whose
analysis of language and its
      relation to reality made him one of the most influential
philosophers of the 20th century, died
on Monday at a hospital in Boston, where he lived. He was 92.

As a mathematical logician who wrote and published prolifically, Mr.
Quine was often perceived as a
philosopher who focused his analytic talents on many apparently
disparate doctrines and theses. Yet
those who understood him best insisted on his status as a system
builder, or a thinker who addressed
and attempted to answer the larger questions of philosophy.

Stuart Hampshire, a fellow philosopher, called him in 1971 "our most
distinguished living systematic
philosopher."

Like most philosophers, Mr. Quine set out to define the reality of the
world and how humans fit into
that reality. He concluded that a person can only understand the world
empirically, or through direct
experience of it. In "The Philosophy of W. V. Quine: An Expository
Essay," a study that the subject
endorsed, Roger F. Gibson Jr. wrote that if Mr. Quine's project could be
summed up in a single
sentence, that sentence would read, "Quine's philosophy is a systematic
attempt to answer, from a
uniquely empiricistic point of view, what he takes to be the central
question of epistemology, namely,
`How do we acquire our theory of the world?' "

Mr. Quine's answer, in a nutshell, began by rephrasing the question to
read, "How do we acquire our
talk about the world?" In his radically empiricist view, nothing that
humans know about the world lies
outside the realm of language, and so he insisted that any theory of
knowledge depended on a theory
of language, which he duly set about developing and which became the
framework of his philosophy.

In pursuing this objective Mr. Quine found himself in a distinct
position among his contemporaries.
Among 20th-century philosophers were the so-called historicists — those
willing to speculate about
and proclaim metaphysical truths independent of empirical evidence — and
the formalists — those
mathematical logicians who considered philosophy an autonomous,
ahistorical discipline that replaced
metaphysical speculation with scientific thinking. In the battle between
followers of those views, Mr.
Quine was a standard-bearer in the latter camp, a hero of empiricism who
once declared that
"philosophy of science is philosophy enough."

Changing Direction

In a Scholarly Battle

This led him to fight in the ranks of the so- called logical
positivists, or those like his European friends
A. J. Ayer and Rudolf Carnap, who asserted that all statements of truth
must be based on observable
data. He even helped to shift the main ground of their battle from
Europe to the United States. Yet Mr.
Quine later challenged them in what is arguably the best known of his
many published essays, "Two
Dogmas of Empiricism." It first appeared in the Philosophical Review in
January 1951 and was
reprinted in 1953 in a collection of his essays titled "From a Logical
Point of View."

The essay set out to undermine the two main points of positivism. First,
Mr. Quine rejected the
fundamental distinction between what Kant had called analytic and
synthetic propositions, or the
distinction between statements that seem true no matter what (like "all
bachelors are unmarried") and
those that are true because of the way things happen to be (like "Mr. X
is a bachelor"). (This position,
incidentally, earned him a place in Dan Dennett's "Philosophers'
Lexicon," in which names of
philosophers are construed as verbs or common nouns: to "quine" is to
repudiate a clear distinction.)

To deny the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements meant
that nothing could be known
independent of experience.

Second, the essay argued against what he called the dogma of
reductionism, or "the belief," as he put it,
"that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct
upon terms which refer to
immediate experience." In other words, nothing in a person's experience
lies beyond meaningful
statement about it.

Although this seemed to amount to a rejection of all knowledge of a
reality beyond our senses, Mr.
Quine did not completely shut the door to a world out there. The
alternative that he preferred was this
explanation: "The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from
the most casual matters of
geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even
of pure mathematics and
logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the
edges."

This position led him to two more conclusions about the nature of
meaning and what humans can know
about objective reality. One, enunciated in his 1960 book, "Word and
Object," was that when
translating from one language to another, or even from one sentence to
another within the same
language, there were bound to be many contradictory ways to understand
the meaning and that there
was no sense in asking which of them was right.

This works, in his view, with what he called ontological relativity,
which holds that because our theories
of what exists are not sufficiently determined by the experiences that
give rise to them, quite different
accounts of what there is, each with its own interpretation of the
evidence, may be equally in accord
with that evidence.

To the objection that surely at least physical objects must figure in
all theories of what is out there, Mr.
Quine responded, yes, in practice, although he said he considered
physical objects a matter of
convenience.

Tools for Determining

The Real World

"As an empiricist," he wrote toward the end of "Two Dogmas of
Empiricism," "I continue to think of
the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting
future experience in the light of
past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the
situation as convenient
intermediaries not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as
irreducible posits comparable,
epistemologically, to the gods of Homer."

He concluded: "For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical
objects and not in Homer's
gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in
point of epistemological footing, the
physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind.
Both sorts of entities enter our
conceptions only as cultural posits."

Willard Van Orman Quine, or Van to his friends, was born on June 25,
1908, in Akron, Ohio, the
second son of Cloyd Robert Quine, a machinist and successful
businessman, and Harriet (Van Orman)
Quine. The surname is from the Celtic language Manx, Mr. Quine's
paternal grandfather having
emigrated from the Isle of Man to Akron. Mr. Quine was named Willard
after his mother's brother, a
mathematician.

The nominal connection seemed to work. He took a liking to mathematics
in high school and majored
in it at Oberlin, although philology and philosophy also interested him
early. (During his junior year at
college his mother presented him with Whitehead and Russell's "Principia
Mathematica" and Skeat's
Etymological Dictionary, the latter of which, he said, "I persistently
consulted and explored over the
succeeding half century," a fact attested to by the liveliness and
clarity of his writing.)

About his subsequent teaching career he said: "What I enjoyed most was
more the mathematical end
than the philosophical, because of it being less a matter of opinion.
Clarifying, not defending. Resting on
proof."

His honors thesis at Oberlin used the system of "Principia Mathematica"
to prove with 18 pages of
symbols a law having to do with ways of combining logical classes. (He
later edited the 18 pages down
to three for the Journal of the London Mathematical Society.) His thesis
landed him at Harvard
University, where he switched to philosophy to study with Alfred North
Whitehead. ("He radiated
greatness and seemed old as the hills," Mr. Quine wrote in his
autobiography, "The Time of My Life."
"I retained a vivid sense of being in the presence of the great.")

Trying to Grasp

The Nature of Science

Only two years later, in 1932, he had earned his Ph.D., his dissertation
being an attempt, in his words,
"like `Principia,' to comprehend the foundations of logic and
mathematics and hence of the abstract
nature of all science." (It was published in revised form by the Harvard
University Press with the title
"A System of Logistic.")

He then went to Europe on a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship and spent the
next year in Vienna, Prague
and Warsaw, where he studied, lectured and met various members of the
Vienna Circle of logical
positivists, among them Philip Frank, Moritz Schlick, Alfred Tarski, A.
J. Ayer, their English
spokesman, Kurt Gödel (who preferred not to be called a logical
positivist), and Rudolf Carnap, from
whom, Mr. Quine said, "I gained more . . . than from any other
philosopher." (In Vienna he dropped a
note to Wittgenstein, who never responded.)

The European interlude allowed him to indulge his lifelong passion for
crossing borders (perhaps
related to his penchant for denying distinctions, or, more likely,
inspired by a youthful ardor for
philately), which, according to a count he made late in his life, was to
take him into 118 countries, over
another 19, and within sight of 8 more, among the last being China, Oman
and Bangladesh. His
autobiography describes many of these visits somewhat matter-of-factly.
His early love of geography
was also reflected in a gift for drawing maps, which later extended to
sketching portraits, several of
which appear in his autobiography.

In 1933 he returned to Harvard as a junior fellow in the newly formed
Society of Fellows, which meant
three years of unfettered research. Another junior fellow that year was
the psychologist B. F. Skinner,
with whom Mr. Quine came to share, as he put it, "the fundamental
position that an explanation — not
the deepest one, but one of a shallower kind — is possible at the purest
behavioral level."

In 1936 Mr. Quine became an instructor in philosophy at Harvard, where
he taught, off and on, for the
rest of his life, interrupted only by service in the Navy during World
War II, when he did cryptanalytic
work translating the German submarine cypher in Washington, as well as
by his globe-girdling travels,
the bestowal of medals, prizes and some dozen-and-a-half honorary
degrees, and by lectures and
classes delivered all over the world.

A Harvard Professor

To Notable Students

His students at Harvard included Donald Davidson and Burton Dreben, the
philosophers; Tom Lehrer,
the mathematician and songwriter; and Theodore J. Kaczynski, the
Unabomber ("although I don't
remember him," Mr. Quine told an interviewer, "he tied for top, 98.9
percent").

In the Navy he met Marjorie Boynton, a Wave in his office who became his
second wife in 1948. His
first marriage to Naomi Clayton in 1930 ended in divorce in 1947. His
second wife died in 1998. He is
survived by two daughters from his first marriage, Elizabeth Quine
Roberts and Norma Quine; a son
and daughter from his second, Douglas Boynton Quine and Margaret Quine
McGovern; five
grandchildren; and a great-grandson.

A Positive View

Of State Lotteries

Mr. Quine published about 20 books, some reprinted in multiple editions
and several translated into as
many as eight languages. One of the more accessible works, "Quiddities:
An Intermittently
Philosophical Dictionary" (1987), was praised in The New York Times by
John Gross in general for "a
deadpan humor that can light up even the most austere subjects" and in
particular for commending the
state lottery as " `a public subsidy of intelligence,' on the grounds
that `it yields public income that is
calculated to lighten the tax burden of us prudent abstainers at the
expense of the benighted masses of
wishful thinkers.' "

At the end of "The Time of My Life," Mr. Quine wrote: "I am orderly and
I am frugal. For the most
part my only emotion is impatience," he continued. "I am deeply moved by
occasional passages of
poetry, and so, characteristically, I read little of it."

Although a "Quine" is defined in the New Hackers Dictionary as "a
program that generates a copy of
its own source text as its complete output," Mr. Quine never wrote on a
computer, always preferring
the 1927 Remington typewriter that he first used for his doctoral
thesis. Because that project contained
so many special symbols, he had to have the machine adjusted by removing
the second period, the
second comma and the question mark.

"You don't miss the question mark?" a reporter once asked him.

"Well, you see," he replied, "I deal in certainties."
"

Henk Elegeert

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