W.V.O. Quine

Quine's 1951 essay 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' attacked two assumptions so basic to twentieth-century philosophy that most people had stopped noticing they were assumptions at all: that there is a clean distinction between analytic truths, true purely by the meaning of their words, and synthetic truths, true by how the world happens to be, and that every meaningful statement can be reduced to some determinate set of sensory experiences that would confirm or refute it. Quine argued instead that our beliefs face experience only as an interconnected web, not one statement at a time, so that any single observation can in principle be accommodated by revising almost any part of the system rather than the specific claim it seems to threaten most directly — a holism that dissolved the analytic-synthetic distinction by showing it depended on exactly the kind of atomistic, statement-by-statement confirmation the web-of-belief picture ruled out. He drew the radical conclusion that epistemology should stop trying to justify science from some position outside it and instead become naturalized: a branch of empirical psychology studying how creatures actually construct theories from sensory input, rather than a separate discipline standing in judgment over science from a supposedly more secure philosophical vantage point. His thought experiment of radical translation, imagining a linguist trying to translate a completely unknown language from scratch, argued that even a perfect record of a speaker's behavior would never uniquely determine what their words mean, since multiple incompatible translation manuals could fit the evidence equally well — a genuinely unsettling result he called the indeterminacy of translation. He spent essentially his entire career at Harvard, wrote with an almost mathematical austerity and precision, and by the time he died at ninety-two was widely considered, alongside Wittgenstein, the most influential analytic philosopher of the twentieth century.