The philosopher Williard Van Orman Quine
(b. 1908) died on Christmas day, 2000 at the age of 92.  During six decades he
published more than twenty books and scores of journal articles.  His writings
touched about a dozen areas of philosophy, ranging in diversity from logic to
ethics, and profoundly influenced several areas including epistemology,
philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and
philosophy of logic.

In the minds of many, including
mine, Quine is the most distinguished Anglo-American philosopher of the latter
half of the twentieth century.  Yet I must assume that most readers of this
review service, given its mental health and psychiatric orientation, are
unfamiliar with Quine.  A few may know him well, still others only vaguely or a
bit.  Most are unfamiliar.  Or so I assume.

It’s a safe assumption, I suspect. 
If the Land of Philosophers may be divided into philosophers for philosophers
and philosophers for non-philosophers, Quine was a philosopher’s philosopher. 
Some philosophers, such as Daniel Dennett and Thomas Nagel, sit astride the
division, sometimes writing for an audience of philosophers, sometimes for
audiences of non-philosophers, and masters of these distinct audience-tethered
domains.  Other philosophers (David Lewis, for example, was also a philosopher
for philosophers) enforce the division in the divide.  Quine was a
philosophers’ philosopher and for decades was without peer but also,
consequently, without wide readership outside the discipline of philosophy.

As a friend of the service I was
pleased to offer to review this book for two reasons.  One is that I wanted to
learn if a remark made by the publishers about the book is right and proper. 
This is that ‘new readers will find this the most convenient and accessible
guide to Quine currently available’ (back cover).  If so, it would be a welcome
publication, assisting non-philosophers unfamiliar with Quine with the labor of
familiarity and therein worth bringing to the attention of readers of the
service.  The other is that I admire Roger Gibson’s, the editor’s, work on Quine. 
Gibson has written two books on Quine which, in my judgment, constitute the
clearest, most careful expositions and critical analyses of Quine’s philosophy
yet to appear in print.  One of these I can recommend to those unfamiliar with
but curious about Quine.  This is Gibson’s 1982 book, The philosophy of W.
V. Quine: An expository essay (Tampa: University Presses of Florida).

Gibson’s talent is evident in his
two authorial contributions to the current volume, his opening essay "Williard
Van Orman Quine" and an essay at mid-book "Quine’s Behaviorism cum
Empiricism".  The first is a biographical essay with an outline of a few
of Quine’s major theses.  The second is a discussion of in what sense Quine was
a behaviorist, something Quine said he was, although just what being a
behaviorist meant to him is not transparent.  In all, in addition to a
substantive bibliography, the book contains 12 essays written by a number of
philosophers and guardians of Quine’s philosophic corpus including, among
others to be mentioned momentarily, Lars Bergstrom, Richard Creath, Burton Dreben,
Robert Fogelin, Dagfinn Follesdal, Peter Hylton, and Robert Kirk.   The
stresses are on Quine’s contributions to epistemology, philosophy of science,
philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, or philosophy of logic.  These are
the areas he deeply influenced.  "Not since Russell," writes Joseph Ullian
in an essay on Quine’s philosophy of logic, has anyone "contributed so
much to both philosophy and logic" (p. 270).

With the exceptions of the two
Gibson essays just mentioned, and one or two others, each essay in the volume
presupposes that its readers are familiar with philosophic problems in relevant
disciplinary areas (philosophy of language etc.).  So this is not a book for
non-philosophers.  My personal favorite is Daniel Isaacson’s "Quine and
Logical Positivism" which is a careful and clear-headed discussion of the
relation, both historical and conceptual, between Quine and logical positivism.

Logical positivism is a
philosophical movement that began in the 1920s and flourished for about two or
three decades.  One of the central positivist theses is that for any empirical
statement to be meaningful, it must in principle be possible to accumulate
observational evidence or justification for (or against) it, ideally either conclusively
confirming or disconfirming it.  This positivist thesis is sometimes known as
the verifiability theory of meaning.  It edged its way into the history of
twentieth century psychology as the demand for the operational definition of
psychological terms.  Isaacson offers an analysis of Quine’s evolving critical
attitude towards the verifiability theory and related positivist doctrines.  Quine
was harshly critical of the notion that particular empirical statements have
associated with them a unique set of confirming (or infirming) observations.  Quine
argued that a more accurate picture of the relation between empirical
statements and observations is that as a corporate or holistic body empirical
statements face the judicial court of observation.  Quine wrote: "In the
face of a recalcitrant observation we are free to choose what statements to
revise and what one to hold fast."  This deference to the holistic body as
the ‘more or less seamless-unit’ of confirmation helped to make Quine what is
known as a holist about confirmation (disconfirmation).

Quine’s holism also is the subject
of a helpful essay by Raffaella De Rosa and Ernest LePore.  De Rosa and LePore
argue that although Quine rejected the verifiability theory as applied to
individual statements, like the positivists, he did hold that "what there
is to meaning must be reconstructed in terms of verification or confirmation
conditions" (p. 81).  Quine was a verificationist about meaning without
being a positivist about statements.  Put quite differently, if one were to
consider the application of Quine’s view of empirical meaning to the
construction of scientific theories of the explanatory origin and predictive
course of illness, Quine would hold that no empirical statement in any theory
of any illness is or can be decisively confirmed or disconfirmed, but this does
not mean that a torrent of theories is to be tolerated.  Quine also held that
reasonable and non-question-begging constraints can be found for scientific
theories.  He would expect that some illness theories surely are better
confirmed (or disconfirmed) than others.

I personally bemoan the absence of
a book on Quine that helps, either deliberately or as a welcome side-effect, to
explain his views on subjects of interest to mental health professionals,
theoreticians of clinical psychology, and psychiatric theorists.  Quine had
plenty of them.  Here is another (taken from his masterwork Word and object
[MIT Press, 1960]).  Commenting on Brentano’s claim that Intentionality (aboutness)
is the mark of the mental, he writes:  "One may accept the Brentano thesis
either as showing the indispensability of intentional idioms . . . or the
emptiness of the science of intention." "My attitude," he wrote,
"unlike Brentano’s, is the second" (p. 221).  What remains an issue
of emphatic debate in the theory of mental illness is how to play this
what-to-do-with-Intentionality game.  Two chief rivals have emerged: one or
another version of Intentionalism (with the likes of Freud and Jaspers as
inspirations) and one of another form of Neurobiologicism (my neologisms),
according to which the ultimate description of mental illness is that of an
‘intentionality-less’ brain disease.

This book does little or nothing to
advance the familiarity quest of non-philosopher mental health professionals
curious about Quine on such and related matters.  Nor is it (as the back cover
promises) the most convenient and accessible guide to Quine currently
available.  Gibson’s 1982 book (mentioned above) is.  However for professional
philosophers eager to rethink Quine’s contributions to such topics as the
indeterminacy of radical translation, the underdetermination of physical
theory, positivism, holism, modal logic, naturalism, and analyticity, this is a
worthy addition to the secondary literature.  What it is can perhaps best be
described as a welcome companion to Quine for a second cousin who wishes more
fruitful family gatherings, quite apart from their convenience or
accessibility.

© 2004 George Graham

George Graham recently has become the
A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University, prior to which he
served for more than twenty-five years on the faculty of the University of Alabama
at Birmingham.  His email address is: grahamg@wfu.edu.

The Philosophy of W.V. Quine: An Expository Essay by Roger Gibson

Categories: Philosophical