WVO Quine: Author of a Post-empiricist Language and Logic Ontology
by W.V.O. Quine wrote in 20th century philosphical areas such as logic, liguistics and epistemology. His work provided much brickwork for a post-empiricist foundation for comprehending the meanings of words and their relationship to the phenomenal world of experience.
W.V.O. Quine was one of the best of 20th century philosophers. He wrote much in the field of logic. Quine finally unified symbolic logic with epistemology and made a newer, better unification of philosophy in harmony with modern science, linguistic theory and without excluding those of us with faith in God. His criticism on two primary points of the philosophically scientific supporting criteria of empiricism were notable and quite brilliant. He attacked the analytic-synthetic distinction that had existed since Immanuel Kant developed the ideas in the Critique of Pure Reason. Scientific developments of knowledge of the external world had led to an increase in philosophical emphasis upon knowledge derived immediately from external data and decreasingly from scholastic and realist epistemological considerations. Quine’s attack is premised upon brilliant insights into the nature of the relationships in language more so than upon a simple disagreement about the nature of the external world and how it might be spoken of.
Quine’s criticisms of empiricism seem obviously valid. The ideas developed in a work developed later, after his attack upon two dogmas of empiricism; ‘ Ontological Relativity and other Essays’ ,provided a more full exposition of the nature of Quine’s linguistic and logic contexts for epistemology. The work is rather amazing. Taking Dewey’s ideas about language in the pragmatist trend he develops several modal logic universe contexts in which language may be said to cohere in specialized lexicon-sets. Quine was familiar with the work of the Vienna Circle that for a time included Wittgenstein, and uses Wittgenstein example of the indeterminacy of translation from the Blue and Brown Books to phenomenalize meanings of words within their own pragmatically selected area of meaning.
Essentially Quine found the reductionism of empiricism as ill-founded as the analytic-synthetic distinction. Quine does accept the intentional-extensional distinction such as is familiar between that of the psychological and empirical realms, yet language hasn’t itself got a fundamental grounding outside human thought of course. The vocabulary of a specialized field or language has a use-value pragmatically inherent in its existence. Mathematical fields have axioms that are accepted as fundamentally true and provide the basis upon which further constr4uctions are premised. The axioms are accepted as true without a prior truth. Language too hasn’t any particular meanings that are associated with words inflexibly–they may change or morph. Quine writes about language not being like a museum–and that may be a little offensive to realist initially, yet neither is Quine at all a naive nominalist.
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