# W.V.O. Quine Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) was an American logician and philosopher, for most of his career the Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy at Harvard, and by common consent the most influential analytic philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. He was a thoroughgoing naturalist and an atheist, and his work bears on Christian apologetics in three quite different directions at once. Two of them cut against theistic argument. **The third, which is rarely noticed, did more than almost anything else in the twentieth century to dismantle the philosophical weapon that had been aimed at religious language.** ## Biographical sketch - **Born** June 25, 1908, Akron, Ohio. - **Oberlin College**, then **Harvard** for the PhD (1932) under Alfred North Whitehead. - **Travelled to Europe on a fellowship** in 1932 and 1933, meeting the Vienna Circle, Rudolf Carnap in Prague, and the Polish logicians in Warsaw. Carnap became his most important interlocutor and eventually his most important target. - **Harvard faculty** from 1936, with wartime service decrypting Axis naval signals for the US Navy, and Edgar Pierce Professor from 1956 until retirement in 1978. - **Died** December 25, 2000, Boston. ## The four ideas that matter ### 1. The attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (*Philosophical Review*, 1951) is the single most cited paper in twentieth-century analytic philosophy. It attacks two commitments of logical positivism: that there is a clean division between **analytic** truths (true by meaning alone, "all bachelors are unmarried") and **synthetic** truths (true by the way the world is), and that every meaningful statement is reducible to a construction from immediate experience. Quine argued that every attempt to define analyticity ends up circling through synonymy, definition, or necessity, none of which can be explained without invoking analyticity again. The distinction, he concluded, is an unempirical dogma. ### 2. Confirmation holism The positive doctrine that replaces the dogmas, often called the **Duhem-Quine thesis**. Statements do not face experience one at a time. Our beliefs form a web or field of force whose edges touch experience, and a recalcitrant observation can always be accommodated by revising somewhere in the interior instead. **No hypothesis is ever tested in isolation**, because any test deploys a great mass of auxiliary assumptions along with the hypothesis. ### 3. Indeterminacy of translation *Word and Object* (MIT, 1960). Quine's thought experiment of radical translation imagines a field linguist confronting an unknown language. A native says *gavagai* when a rabbit runs past. Nothing in the totality of behavioural evidence settles whether the term means *rabbit*, *undetached rabbit part*, or *temporal stage of a rabbit*, because every experiment the linguist can run is compatible with each. Quine concluded that translation is indeterminate and reference inscrutable, which is a hard doctrine and remains contested. ### 4. Ontological commitment and naturalized epistemology "On What There Is" (1948) gives the famous criterion: **to be is to be the value of a bound variable.** A theory is committed to whatever must exist for its quantified statements to be true, and Quine used this to prosecute a preference for "desert landscapes," ontologies as sparse as the science will bear. "Epistemology Naturalized" (1969) then applies the naturalism to knowledge itself, proposing that epistemology give up validating science from outside and become the empirical study of how sensory input yields theory. See [Naturalized Epistemology](/codex/naturalized-epistemology/). ## Where he cuts against theistic argument **The rejection of modal logic and essentialism.** Across "Reference and Modality" (in *From a Logical Point of View*, 1953), "Three Grades of Modal Involvement" (1953), and *Word and Object*, Quine argued that quantified modal logic commits one to an unintelligible Aristotelian essentialism, and that possible-world talk is at best a set of consistent sentence-descriptions. If that were right, the [Modal Ontological Argument](/codex/modal-ontological-argument/) and much of contemporary philosophy of religion would lose their apparatus. It is not right, or at least it is a minority revisionary position: Saul Kripke's *Naming and Necessity* and the completeness results, Ruth Barcan Marcus's defence of quantified modal logic, and [Alvin Plantinga](/codex/alvin-plantinga/)'s *The Nature of Necessity* (1974) rehabilitated de re modality, and the post-Kripke mainstream treats it as standard. The codex answers the objection in full at [Quinean Rejection of Modal Logic Objection Defeater](/codex/quinean-rejection-of-modal-logic-objection-defeater/). **Naturalized epistemology.** By reassigning epistemology to empirical psychology, Quine's program abandons the normative project, which is exactly the horn of the dilemma treated at [Argument from Epistemic Normativity](/codex/argument-from-epistemic-normativity/). His defenders can preserve norms as hypothetical imperatives conditional on the goal of truth, but that concession costs the accusatory force the evidentialist objection to religious belief depends on. See [Evidentialism](/codex/evidentialism/). ## Where his work helps, and this is the part usually missed **Quine is a principal author of the collapse of logical positivism**, and logical positivism was the most serious philosophical assault on religious language in the twentieth century. Its verification principle held that a statement is meaningful only if analytic or empirically verifiable, from which A.J. Ayer concluded in *Language, Truth and Logic* (1936) that theological statements are not false but literally meaningless. That was a far more dangerous claim than any ordinary atheist argument, because it denied there was anything to argue about. "Two Dogmas" removed one of its two load-bearing pillars by dissolving the analytic-synthetic distinction, and the verification principle also failed on its own terms, being neither analytic nor empirically verifiable. Positivism was dead as a research program by the 1960s, and the revival of serious philosophy of religion from the 1960s onward, Plantinga, Swinburne, and the analytic theology that followed, happened in the space its collapse opened. **Confirmation holism blunts naive falsificationism.** The demand that the believer name a single crucial experiment that would refute Christianity, on pain of being unfalsifiable and therefore empty, assumes the isolated testing of hypotheses that the Duhem-Quine thesis denies. That standard is not met by physics either, where auxiliary assumptions absorb anomalies routinely. The point does not excuse Christianity from evidential accountability, and it should not be used that way, but it does defeat the version of the demand that treats religious belief as uniquely delinquent. See [Scientism](/codex/scientism/) and [Faith is Belief Without Evidence Objection Defeater](/codex/faith-is-belief-without-evidence-objection-defeater/). **A caution worth stating plainly.** Quine would have rejected every apologetic use above. He was an atheist and a naturalist, and citing him for these purposes is citing a hostile witness on a technical point, not enlisting an ally. That is legitimate and it is stronger than citing a friendly source, but it should be described accurately when deployed. ## See also - [Naturalized Epistemology](/codex/naturalized-epistemology/), his 1969 program - [Argument from Epistemic Normativity](/codex/argument-from-epistemic-normativity/), the dilemma his descriptive turn occupies one horn of - [Evidentialism](/codex/evidentialism/), the normative position his program retreats from - [Quinean Rejection of Modal Logic Objection Defeater](/codex/quinean-rejection-of-modal-logic-objection-defeater/), the codex's answer to his anti-modalism - [Modal Logic](/codex/modal-logic/), [Modal Ontological Argument](/codex/modal-ontological-argument/), the apparatus he attacked - [Alvin Plantinga](/codex/alvin-plantinga/), principal opponent on modality and on warrant - [Bertrand Russell](/codex/bertrand-russell/), the earlier analytic tradition he inherited and revised - [Empiricism](/codex/empiricism/), [Coherentism](/codex/coherentism/), the traditions his web-of-belief picture sits between - [Scientism](/codex/scientism/), where confirmation holism limits the demand for a crucial experiment - [Cartesian Skepticism](/codex/cartesian-skepticism/), the validating project he judged a failure - [Epistemology](/codex/epistemology/), domain hub