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WV Quine Born
Born 25 Jun 1908 in Akron, OH -
Elementary Logic
Quine was unsatisfied with texts available for philosophy students in terms of First-Order logic, which applies quantified criteria to illogical subjects to make it possible to study them. He took six weeks and quickly wrote his own synposis -
Two Dogmas of Empiricism
Quine made a distinction between analytic and synthetic truths. For example, he purported that the sentences "No unmarried man is married" and "no bachelor is married" are two different sentences due to the different possible meanings of the word "bachelor". Reductionism says that if we reduce statement to their contextual definitions, we can make statements that are "true no matter what" -
Expanding on Set Theory(circa 1960)
Quine proposed three new axiomatic set theories. New Foundations (NF- all individual components of a stratified formula culminate in a set), Mathematical Logic (NF augmented by the a simplification of the proper classes of von Neumann–Bernays–Gödel set theory), and Set Theory and Its Logic (single-axiom schema, nearly devoid of stratification) -
Epistemology
"Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science." (Quine, 1969: 82) Quine stated that epistemology should be altered to study what sensory inputs a human observes bring about which theoretical outputs. It appears he wanted to show that epistemology, rather than being the study the results of experiments, was the study of human observation of those experiments. -
Death
Quine died on Christmas day in 2000