Much of Quine’s influence is a matter of provoking responses, but many of his would-be critics have filtered his views through assump-tions he would not have endorsed and do not engage fully with his views or his naturalism. Hilary Putnam and David Lewis have been influ-enced more directly, though still they emerge with very different points of view.
Donald Davidson has been the most explicitly close to Quine, serving both as champion and critic. As champion he endorses Quine’s emphasis on a careful accounting of the facts relevant to translation, though his use of the apparatus for handling truth invented by Alfred Tarski in the interpretation of speakers’ linguistic behaviour is a novel element which introduces significant changes in outlook.8 As critic, Davidson finds fault with Quine’s views on both reference and truth (Davidson, 2005, pp.
47–62, and pp. 63–80). Rather than worry over how two people can learn the same observation sentence when their sensory constitutions differ, Davidson identifies the salient cause of the two responses as the object of reference. And Davidson urges that the concept of truth is transcendental, not immanent: according to his approach to interpret-ation, we must ascribe truth to utterances in advance of interpretinterpret-ation, which strictly speaking is not possible if truth is immanent as Quine claims. So although Davidson’s view is promising even from Quine’s point of view, it is debatable with how much of Quine’s naturalism the view is consistent.
Further Reading
The best and most comprehensive introduction to Quine is Hylton’s book, listed below. Also recommended is The Philosophy of W. V. Quine: An Expository Essay, by
Roger Gibson (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1982), which has a slightly different emphasis; and the relatively short Quine: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Gary Kemp (London: Continuum, 2006). Of the many volumes of essays devoted to Quine, two of the best, not least because they contain Quine’s responses, are Words and Objections: Essays on the Work of W. V. Quine, ed. D. Davidson and J. Hintikka (Dor-drecht: Reidel, 1969) and The Philosophy of W. V. Quine, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn and Paul Arthur Schilpp (Carbondale, IL: Open Court, 1986); also good and pitched at a more introductory level is The Cambridge Companion to Quine, ed. Roger F. Gibson, Jr (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Notes
1 The first is at present the most cited article in the philosophy of language; it registers over 2,500 citations in Google Scholar; the second is presently the most cited book, registering over 4,700, just ahead of Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity.
2 See the chapter in this volume on Carnap.
3 Frege’s Begriffsschrift appeared in 1879 but to almost no notice; the first volume of Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica appeared in 1910. See the entries on Frege and Russell in this volume.
4 Quine’s most considered treatment of the issue is in ‘Two Dogmas in Retrospect’
(CE, pp. 390–400). See also Hylton, 2007, pp. 65–8.
5 See the entry on the later Wittgenstein in this volume.
6 One characterization of indeterminacy is as follows. Suppose that you and I, in carrying out our respective translations of Language X, differed so radically that you translate a certain sentence as S and I translate the same sentence as not-S.
Suppose further that the sentence of Language X were neither affirmed nor denied by the natives, and likewise we agree that ‘S if and only if not-S’ is a logical falsehood. That would amount to indeterminacy, expressible without using terms such as ‘meaning’. But merely to describe it gives no reason to think it actually obtains.
7 Contrast FLPV, pp. 1–19, with CE, pp. 404–6, 458, and 469–71. Quine writes:
In my youth I thought of the question of existence, or what there is, as perhaps the most basic question of philosophy and science. In the fullness of time the scales fell from my eyes. Any two ontologies are equally supported by all possible data if we can express a one-to-one correlation, what I call a proxy-function, between them. (Quine, CE, p. 189)
8 See the chapter on Davidson in this volume.
Bibliography
Works by W. V. Quine
Quine, W. V. (1960), Word and Object (noted in text as WO). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
—(1961 [1953]), From a Logical Point of View, 2nd edn (noted in text as FLPV). Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
—(1969), Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (noted in text as OR). New York:
Columbia University Press.
—(1974), The Roots of Reference (noted in text as RR). La Salle, IL: Open Court.
—(1976), Ways of Paradox, revised edn (noted in text as WP). Cambridge, MA: Har-vard University Press.
—(1981), Theories and Things (noted in text as TT). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-sity Press.
—(1992), Pursuit of Truth (noted in text as PT), 2nd edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
—(1995), From Stimulus to Science (noted in text as SS). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
—(2008a), Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist and Other Essays (noted in text as CE), ed. D. Føllesdal and D. B. Quine. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
—(2008b), Quine in Dialogue (noted in text as QD), ed. D. Føllesdal and D. B. Quine.
Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press.
Works by others
Carnap, R. (1937 [1934]), The Logical Syntax of Language, trans. Amethe Smeaton.
London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
—(1967 [1928]), The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudoproblems in Philoso-phy, trans. R. George. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Davidson, D. (2005), Truth, Language, and History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frege, G. (1953 [1884]), The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. Austin. London: Basil Blackwell.
—(1967 [1879]), Begriffsschrift. Reprinted in J. van Heijenoort (ed.), From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879–1931. Cambridge, MA: Har-vard University Press, pp. 1–82.
—(1984), Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy, ed. B. McGuin-ness, trans. M. Black et al. London: Blackwell.
Hylton, P. (2007), Quine. London: Routledge.
Kripke, S. (1972/1980) Naming and Necessity, revised edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Putnam, H. (1975), ‘The Meaning of “Meaning”’, in his Mind, Language and Reality, Philosophical Papers, volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.
215–71.
Russell, B. (1997 [1912]), The Problems of Philosophy, with an introduction by J. Perry.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Whitehead, A. N. and Russell, B. (1910; 2nd edn, 1927), Principia Mathematica. Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (2001 [1953]), Philosophical Investigations, ed. and trans. E.
Anscombe. London: Blackwell.