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A System of Logistic, Harvard University Press, 1934
This work followed and was based on Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica (1910), the goals of which included minimizing the foundational elements required to build a mathematical treatment of a subject and developing a consistent system of symbolic logic lacking paradoxes. Quine introduced a number of symbolic logic constructs and forms to this theoretical basis. Both look to a software engineer like early preparation for machine readable language development. -
On What There Is, article published in the Review of Metaphysics
This work reflects Quine’s thinking on ontology, or the issue of whether something describable or expressible in human language can be said to actually exist. -
Two Dogmas of Empiricism
In this work Quine asserts that there is no truth that can be established without empirical evidence, and that science is a fabric of theories rather than a group of independent and independently verifiable or theories. The experimental evidence favoring one theory depends for its interpretation on the reliability of the empirical proof of all of the theories involved in the experimental design and its context.
Prediction and Auxiliary Assumptions -
From a Logical Point of View (Harper & Row, New York)
This is a collection of nine essays by Quine which address as its central issue the problems of semantic precision and ambiguity in language and its related issue, to what truths does a person commit when they adopt a particular scientific theory as truth, such commitment depending on the particular linguistic expression of the theory and recording of the empirical evidence and the analysis of it supporting the theory. -
Word and Object, Technology Press of MIT (1960)
Quine’s argument in this work is called naturalism, as it fundamentally supports the original roots of science in the natural philosophy of Isaac Newton. Philosophy and empirical study of nature are, to a strict empiricists like Quine, inseparable. To understand the essentially experiential nature of language itself, Quine provides the example of a linguist having to translate to English the unknown language of a native, an experience not foreign to the original settlers of North America.