It is gratifying to see that philosophers' continued interest in Words and Objections has been so strong as to motivate a paperback edition. This is gratifying because it vindicates the editors' belief in the permanent im portance of Quine's philosophy and in the value of the papers com menting on it which were collected in our volume. Apart from a couple of small corrections, only one change has been made. The list of Professor Quine's writings has been brought up to (...) date. The editors cannot claim any credit for this improvement, however. We have not tried to imitate the Library of Living Philosophers volumes and to include Professor Quine's autobiography in this volume, but we are fortunate to publish here his brand-new auto bibliography. 1975 THE EDITORS TABLE OF CONTENTS V PREFACE 1 EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION 1. 1. C. SMAR T / Quine's Philosophy of Science 3 GILBERT HARMAN / An Introduction to 'Translation and Meaning', Chapter Two of Word and Object 14 ERIK STENIUS / Beginning with Ordinary Things 27 NOAM CHOMSKY / Quine's Empirical Assumptions 53 1AAKKO HINTIKKA / Behavioral Criteria of Radical Translation 69 BARRY STROUD / Conventionalism and the Indeterminacy of Translation 82 P. F. STRA WSON / Singular Terms and Predication 97 118 H. P. GRICE / Vacuous Names P. T. (shrink)

This volume consists of the first of the John Dewey Lectures delivered under the auspices of Columbia University's Philosophy Department as well as other essays by the author. Intended to clarify the meaning of the philosophical doctrines propounded by Professor Quine in 'Word and Objects', the essays included herein both support and expand those doctrines.

Willard Van Orman Quine begins this influential work by declaring, "Language is asocial art.

The qualities that distinguished him in any discussion are on clear display in this volume, which features him in dialogue with his predecessors and peers, his ...

Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truth which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as (...) we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism. (shrink)

With his customary incisiveness, W. V. Quine presents logic as the product of two factors, truth and grammar-but argues against the doctrine that the logical truths are true because of grammar or language. Rather, in presenting a general theory of grammar and discussing the boundaries and possible extensions of logic, Quine argues that logic is not a mere matter of words.

Quintessence for the first time collects Quine's classic essays (such as "Two Dogmas" and "On What There Is") in one volume—and thus offers readers a much ...

Several of these essays have been printed whole in journals; others are in varying degrees new. Two main themes run through them. One is the problem of meaning, particularly as involved in the notion of an analytic statement. The other is the notion of ontological, commitment, particularly as involved in the problem of universals.

La Logique elementaire est a la fois une introduction a la logique et une introduction a la pensee de Quine, son but ayant ete de condenser le sujet de la logique traditionnelle en le traitant par les moyens de la logique contemporaine, afin de rendre plus intelligibles les constructions logiques de base et les raisonnements impliques dans le langage usuel. Le lecteur trouvera ici tous les elements necessaires a la comprehension du symbolisme logique, mais aussi et surtout le role de (...) la logique formelle comme instrument d'analyse du langage usuel. (shrink)

"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. (shrink)

Suppose now that two philosophers, McX and I, differ over ontology. Suppose McX maintains there is something which I maintain there is not. McX can, quite consistently with his own point of view, describe our difference of opinion by saying that I refuse to recognize certain entities. I should protest of course that he is wrong in his formulation of our disagreement, for I maintain that there are no entities, of the kind which he alleges, for me to recognize; but (...) my finding him wrong in his formulation of our disagreement is unimportant, for I am committed to considering him wrong in his ontology anyway. When I try to formulate our difference of opinion, on the other hand, I seem to be in a predicament. I cannot admit that there are some things which McX countenances and I do not, for in admitting that there are such things I should be contradicting my own rejection of them. (shrink)

In this broad-scale theoretical work, McLoughlin proposes a new set of disciplines for human science, based on a relativist view of knowledge and a naturalist view of human nature. McLoughlin addresses the major current issues of the philosophy of social science and designs his theory for cross-cultural application. He also offers an explanation of the relationships among the biological, psychological, and sociological sciences. Philosophers of science, especially social science, will appreciate this work, as will all scholars interested in the understanding (...) and explanation of past and present human behavior. (shrink)

For the faithful there is much to ponder. In this short book, based on lectures delivered in Spain in 1990, Quine begins by locating his work historically.

This book is a translation of W.V. Quine's Kant Lectures, given as a series at Stanford University in 1980. It provide a short and useful summary of Quine's philosophy. There are four lectures altogether: I. Prolegomena: Mind and its Place in Nature; II. Endolegomena: From Ostension to Quantification; III. Endolegomena loipa: The forked animal; and IV. Epilegomena: What's It all About? The Kant Lectures have been published to date only in Italian and German translation. The present book is filled out (...) with the translator's critical Introduction, "The esoteric Quine?" a bibliography based on Quine's sources, and an Index for the volume. (shrink)

In retrospecting "Two Dogmas" I find myself overshooting by twenty years. I think back to college days, 61 years agao. I majored in mathematics and was doing my honors reading in mathematical logic, a subject that had not yet penetrated the Oberlin curriculum. My new love, in the platonic sense, was Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica.

A compact, coherent introduction to the study of rational belief, this text provides points of entry to such areas of philosophy as theory of knowledge, methodology of science, and philosophy of language. The book is accessible to all undergraduates and presupposes no philosophical training.

Kant's question 'How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?' pre- cipitated the Critique of Pure Reason. Question and answer notwith- standing, Mill and others persisted in doubting that such judgments were possible at all. At length some of Kant's own clearest purported.

Things and Their Place in Theories Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and ...

Quine's areas of interest are panoramic, as this lively book amply demonstrates.

A respected Harvard logician and philosopher gathers together twenty-nine writings dealing with the foundations of mathematics, Rudolf Carnap, lin-guistics, ...

Willard van Orman Quine (1908-2000) est considere comme l'un des plus eminents representants de la philosophie analytique, notamment pour son approche holiste des theories scientifiques, pour sa these de la naturalisation de l'epistemologie, pour ses reflexions sur l'indetermination de la traduction ou encore pour sa critique des dogmes de l'empirisme. Dans Les voies du paradoxe (publie en 1966, puis revise et augmente en 1976), Quine choisit de regrouper des articles rediges sur une periode de quatre decennies (1934-1974). En alternant des (...) contributions majeures et justement celebres avec de brefs articles de nature biographique ou pedagogique, le philosophe de Harvard brosse un tableau complet des themes qui ont traverse toute son oeuvre: nature et limite de la connaissance, theorie de la signification, critique du conventionnalisme, resolution des paradoxes logiques et semantiques, determination de l'engagement ontologique des theories, analyse des problemes logiques souleves par les modalites et les attitudes propositionnelles, etc. Au meme titre que Du point de vue logique et Relativite de l'ontologie, Les voies du paradoxe est ainsi l'un des plus importants recueils d'articles de Quine. (shrink)

" This is a key book for understanding the effort that a major philosopher has made a large part of his life's work: to naturalize epistemology in the twentieth ...