Abstract

This dissertation presents a comparative study of Willard Van Orman Quine and Martin Heidegger's conceptions of language. My contention is that, contrary to the customary treatment of the two as incommensurable, a dialogue between Quine and Heidegger on language is possible. ;The dissertation is divided into three sections, each sub-divided into four chapters, corresponding to the general topics which are examined throughout the dissertation as a whole, i.e., the relations of language to being, thought, truth, and meaning. ;Since readers of Quine typically do not read Heidegger and vice versa, the first two sections of my dissertation are expository, designed to present Quine's views to the readers of Heidegger and vice versa Quine's positions on ontology, epistemology, empiricism and translation, and Heidegger's theses in and after Being and Time are examined with this objective in mind. ;In the final section, four major points of comparison are developed. The first is their coincidence in assigning "ontological" roles to language, in supposing basic indeterminacies, and in placing language in the active determinations of the human world. The second is the fact that Quine's epistemological notion of conceptual scheme and Heidegger's ideas of a pre-epistemological interpretation share the common tenets that no human experience whatsoever is interpretationless and that interpretation is fundamentally holistic. I also point out critically that neither the schema nor the contents of their models of interpretation have an inherently moral and ethical character. The third shows both philosophers pointing beyond language in their criticisms of conceptions of truth as propositional correspondence. I also contend that both propose the utter immanence of the human transcendence towards truth. The fourth indicates that both reject the notion of meaning as an abstract intermediate between language and the world, remit it to the domain of human interaction, and conceive it as holistic and indeterminate. Their different versions of linguistic relativism are also compared critically in this context. Language as the tertium comparationis is thus shown to allow for critical discussions of the nodal problems of being, thought, truth, and meaning in their philosophies