Quine, Willard Van Orman
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- Empiricism Squared
- Probably wrong but great nonetheless
- A Seminal Book in Contemporary Pragmatism
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Word and Object (Studies in Communication)
Willard Van Orman Quine
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
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ASIN: 0262670011 |
Book Description
Language consists of dispositions, socially instilled, to respond observably to socially observable stimuli. Such is the point of view from which a noted philosopher and logician examines the notion of meaning and the linguistic mechanisms of objective reference. In the course of the discussion, Professor Quine pinpoints the difficulties involved in translation, brings to light the anomalies and conflicts implicit in our language's referential apparatus, clarifies semantic problems connected with the imputation of existence, and marshals reasons for admitting or repudiating each of various categories of supposed objects. He argues that the notion of a language-transcendent "sentence-meaning" must on the whole be rejected; meaningful studies in the semantics of reference can only be directed toward substantially the same language in which they are conducted.
Customer Reviews:
Empiricism Squared.......2006-09-03
Quine tells a fascinating story about translation. His is not a lazy mind.
His assumption (or belief) that language is learned completely through experience is simply false. Ample evidence drawn from experiments in psychology, neuro-physics, and even common sense demonstrate otherwise. Like the English philosophers who wrote about language and cognition centuries before him, his work will be found to be historically interesting, but ultimately dated; one might say, in the field of linguistics, pre-Copernicus.
Probably wrong but great nonetheless.......2006-06-22
First of all, unless you specialize in self-torture, don't try to read past chapter 2. (I myself died in the middle of chapter 5.) Chapters 1 and 2, however, are fantastic. You've probably heard the story before...it seems we can't tell whether by "Gavagai" the natives mean "rabbit", or "undetached rabbit part." The reason is, every single time a native is stimulated by the one, he is stimulated by the other...or something like that. That much is a fairly amusing observation, and Quine has a field day with it, suggesting that it's impossible in principle to discriminate between these putative "referents". Hmm. Well, let's just see. Say you and I are observing a "source"...a black box, out of which ticks a stream of letters. Say that, occasionally, the string of characters "R-A-B-B-I-T" appears in the stream. You have noticed that whenever this happens, I announce (gleefully) "Gavagai!" It seems you're stuck. You can never tell whether by "Gavagai!" I take myself to "refer" to "R-A-B-B-I-T" or to the rabbit-embedded "B-B" appearing in the stream. At least, not by passive observation. Once you can ask me questions about what I do take myself to be "referring" to, it seems that we can clear this issue up, but fast. Or not? Quine thinks not, and that's where things get interesting. I'm pretty sure he's wrong, but I'm not (exactly) sure why. Probably you can employ a meta-language to artificially attach referential information to sentences...more interesting, however, is the question why you would want to. Indeed, wouldn't a philosopher versed in the paradox just say "what's the difference?" when asked whether he "referred" to "R-A-B-B-I-T" or a rabbit-embedded "B-B"? The moral seems to be that you aren't stuck at all...you know what I *mean* either way, you just don't know what I'm referring to: reference, in short, doesn't contribute in the way we usually think it does to meaning. But, whatever the answers are, the puzzles are here, so read it.
A Seminal Book in Contemporary Pragmatism.......2005-11-14
This book is Quine's first full-length book, and it sets forth his most elaborate statement of his wholistic thesis of language. Instead of the metaphorical statement in "Two Dogmas" written a decade earlier, here in Word and Object Quine expresses his thesis in the literal vocabulary of behavioristic psychology with his idea of "stimulus meaning".
Much of the book is an exposition of his thesis of semantic indeterminacy as it is manifested in translation between languages, which thus appears as his indeterminacy of translation thesis sometimes called his "radical translation" thesis. In fact there is nothing radical about it; linguists have long known of such translation problems. As has long been said: translate est traduttore. But Quine uses it to critique positivism, and it is essential to his pragmatism.
In the translation situation he portrays the field linguist in the same situation that the positivist Carnap postulates in "Meaning and Synonymy in Natural Language", where Carnap attempted to describe how the field linguist can ascertain a term's "intension" or meaning by identifying its extension or range of application from the observed behavior of native speakers of an unknown language. Carnap admitted that this determination of extension involves uncertainty and possible error due to vagueness, but he excused this uncertainty and risk of error, because it occurs even in the concepts used in empirical science. While this admission of extensional vagueness in science made the fact unproblematic for Carnap, it had just the opposite significance for Quine.
For Quine extensional vagueness is an inherent characteristic of language that he calls "referential inscrutability", and which he later calls "ontological relativity." And what Carnap called intensional vagueness, Quine prefers to consider as a semantical indeterminacy in stimulus meaning but without admitting intensions.
For more on my views on Quine, please Google my book History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science, which is also on my web site philsci with free downloads by chapter - especially BOOK III, and my other reviews of Quine's books at this AMAZON site.
Thomas J. Hickey
An Essential Read for Philosophy of Language Enthusiasts.......2002-12-30
In this incomparable and engaging book Quine takes up many of the questions he raised in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and in his other early papers. In Word and Object, he levels an attack against the traditional notion of meaning that is accepted by so many, because it is understood by so few. Though the position defended here is alomost completely wrong, it is wrong for interesting reasons and, along with Quine's other works, establishes a position regarding matters semantic that, from his ultra-empiricist positivist perspective is nearly inevitable. If you don't find his position at least a little compelling, then your heart is made of stone.
Pinnacle of Philosophical Clarity.......2001-06-20
This book is a true classic, both in content and presentation; Quine's pithy style, sometimes ironic, is singular in the literature of analytic philosophy. This book describes the generation of reference and logical categories out of the confluence of "sense-data" and "stimulus synonymy", and proceeds to plow through every permutation of problems which can arise from such an endeavor. Chapter two (the [in-]famous "indeterminacy of translation" thesis) is a fascinating linguistic reformulation of the "other minds" problem, demonstrating that one must conclude a type of "ontological relativity" amongst speakers. Along with Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations," Ryle's The Concept of Mind," and Sellars' "Philosophy and the Empiricism of Mind," Quine's major work completes the quadrivium of mid-20th century analytic philosophy.
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- A look at Quine's philosophy
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Quine and Analytic Philosophy: The Language of Language (Bradford Books)
George D. Romanos
Manufacturer: The MIT Press
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ASIN: 0262680386 |
Book Description
For fifty years, Willard Van Orman Quine's books and articles have stimulated intense debate in the fields of logic and the philosophy of language. Many scholars in fact, regard Quine as the greatest living English-speaking philosopher; yet his views remain widely misunderstood and misinterpreted. This book provides the first major explication and defense of Quine's systematic philosophy and is ideally suited for use as a required or supplementary text in a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in philosophy and linguistics.
The book explores the far-reaching implications of Quine's views on language for contemporary analytic philosophy. It is unique in providing a lucid and rich description and reconstruction of the historical context from which Quine's work grew, focusing in particular on the role that Russell and Wittgenstein played in shaping the problems inherited by Quine. It presents Quine's difficult later views in an accessible fashion, bringing out as no other study has the very radical nature of his position. One of the book's highlights is its careful examination and assessment of Tarski's theory of truth as it relates to the traditions of Russell and Wittgenstein and to Quine's own philosophy.
George D. Romanos took his Ph.D. in philosophy under George D. W. Berry and Paul T. Sagal at Boston University. This book grew out of his dissertation with the active criticism and support of Quine himself.
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A look at Quine's philosophy.......1999-11-06
This book looks at Quine's philosophy and the consequences of Quine's conclusions on analytic philosophy. Though it is fairly lucid, his unquestioning acceptance of everything Quine says makes a lot of what is said seem superficial.
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The Time of My Life: An Autobiography
Willard Van Orman Quine
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ASIN: 0262670046 |
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"Some Pow'r did us the giftie grant/ To see oursels as others can't." With that play on Burns' famous line as a preface, Willard Van Orman Quine sets out to spin the yarn of his life so far. And it is a gift indeed to see one of the world's most famous philosophers as no one else has seen him before. To catch an intimate glimpse of his seminal and controversial theories of philosophy, logic, and language as they evolved, and to hear his warm and often amusing comments on famous contemporary philosophers.
From his beginnings in Akron, Ohio in the early 1900s, Quine takes us on a tour of over 100 countries over three-quarters of a century, including close observations of the Depression and two world wars. Far from a philosophical tract, it is an ebullient, folksy account of a richly varied and rounded life. When he does dip into philosophy, it is generally of the armchair sort, and laced with a gentle good humor: "There is that which one wants to do for the glory of having done it, and there is that which one wants to do for the joy of doing it. One can want to be a scientist because he wants to see himself as a Darwin or an Einstein, and one can want to be a scientist because he is curious about what makes things tick .... In normal cases the two kinds of motivation are in time brought to terms .... In me the glory motive lingered ......
In this book, Quine approaches the details of his life the way he has always approached them with a sharp sense of interest, adventure and fun. And he has a skill for picking a word that is just off-center enough to pull an ordinary event out of the humdrum of daily life and evoke its personal meaning. The result is a book of memories that is utterly mesmerizing.
Willard Van Orman Quine is the author of numerous books, including Word and Object, published by The MIT Press in 1960.
A Bradford Book.
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The Cambridge Companion to Quine (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy)
Manufacturer: Cambridge University Press
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ASIN: 0521639492 |
Book Description
The eleven essays in this volume cover all the central topics of W.V. Quine's philosophy. Quine (1908-2000) was perhaps the most distinguished analytic philosopher of the later half of the twentieth century. His celebrated attack on the analytic/synthetic tradition heralded a major shift away from the views of language descended from logical positivism. His most important book, Word and Object, introduced the concept of indeterminacy of radical translation, a bleak view of the nature of the language with which we ascribe thoughts and beliefs to ourselves and others.
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- Translation, Physics and Facts of the Matter
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The Philosophy of W.V. Quine: An Expository Essay
Roger F., Jr. Gibson
Manufacturer: University Press of Florida
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ASIN: 0813008557 |
Book Description
How we acquire our theory of the world is for W. V. Quine the central question of epistemology. Gibson sets forth Quine's philosophy as a systematic attempt to answer this question; his analysis challenges those who might view Quine's theses as multifarious and disparate.
Since many studies of Quine either attack of defend positions on specific issues, the broad scope of this essay makes it unusually valuable to philosophy students and to the general reader.
Customer Reviews:
Translation, Physics and Facts of the Matter.......2004-01-12
It is manifestly obvious that Prof. Gibson has a knack for appreciating what Quine is up to in Quine's beautiful if somewhat enigmatic prose. Gibson's essay "Translation, Physics and Facts of the Matter" from the Schillp volume dedicated to Quine demonstrates that Gibson appreciates Quine's fundamental committment to the best physical science of the day. This helps to distinguish the indeterminacy of translation from the more general underdetermination of empirical theory, a distinction that apparently eluded Chomsky for an extended period of exchanges between himself and Prof. Quine. Gibson is to be regarded as a spectacular expositor of Quine's philosophy, and this work is surely an instance.
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Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism
Lynn Hankinson Nelson
Manufacturer: Temple Univ Pr
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ASIN: 0877226474 |
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In the past fifteen years, feminist science critics have, for the most part, rejected empiricism because of its identification with positivism. Various assumptions of both empiricists and feminists, including the "tenet" that individualism is an essential element of empiricism, have led to the belief that feminist science criticism is not a part of science. This view continues the myth that science is an autonomous and apolitical activity. Building on the work of W.V.0. Quine, Lynn Nelson clears away these obstacles and establishes a framework for a much-needed dialogue between feminist science critics and other scientists and scholars about the nature of science. She makes a case for a feminist empiricism that retains a crucial role for experience, but separates empiricism from individualism.
Following Quine, Nelson argues that empiricism is a theory of evidence and is distinct from empiricist accounts of science that have been built on it. She urges feminists and empiricists to work together to develop a feminist empiricism, a view of science that can account for its obvious success in explaining and predicting experience and can encompass feminist insights into relationships among gender, politics, and science.
Basing her arguments on Quine's non-foundationalist view that theories are bridges of our own construction, the author insists, as does Quine, that the construction of these bridges is constrained by experience. She determines that individualism is inconsistent with key Quinean positions and that empiricism can survive the demise of individualism. Clearly diverging from Quine, Nelson proposes the view that the evolving network of our theories does and should incorporate political views, including those shaped by, and shaping in turn, our experiences of gender.
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Quine: A Guide for the Perplexed (Guides for the Perplexed)
Gary Kemp
Manufacturer: Continuum International Publishing Group
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ASIN: 0826484875 |
Book Description
Willard Van Orman Quine is one of the most influential analytic philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century. No serious student of modern analytic philosophy can afford to ignore Quine's work. Yet there is no doubt that it presents a considerable challenge. The book offers clear explication and analysis of Quine's writings and ideas in all those areas of philosophy to which he contributed (except technical matters in logic). Quine's work is set in its intellectual context, illuminating his connections to Russell, Carnap and logical positivism. Detailed attention is paid to Word and Object, Quine's seminal text, and to his important theories on the nature of truth, knowledge and reality. This text presents an account of Quine's<BR>philosophy as a unified whole, identifying and exploring the themes and approaches common to his seemingly disparate concerns, and showing this to be the key to understanding fully the work of this major modern thinker.
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Indeterminacy of Translation : Philosophy of Quine, Volume 3
D. Follesdal
Manufacturer: Routledge
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ASIN: 081533740X |
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Enlightened Empiricism: An Examination of W.V. Quine's Theory of Knowledge
Roger F., Jr. Gibson
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ASIN: 0813008867 |
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The Philosophy of W. V. Quine, Volume 18 (Library of Living Philosophers)
Manufacturer: Open Court
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