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W.V. Quine's birth and death
https://youtu.be/8U873MryWrU
A video that illustrates different parts of Quine's paper, "The Dogma of Empiricism". -
Two Dogmas of Empiricism
Quine was strongly against Logical Positivism and his works clearly showed this; in fact, his strong leanings inspired the decline of it. His essay, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, "...denied the importance (and even the existence) of the 'analytic-synthetic distinction'," (Mastin, 2009). This then ultimately led to his views in naturalistic Epistemology.
Mastin, L. (2009, January). Existence and Consciousness. Retrieved from https://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_metaphysics.html -
Anti-Reductionism
One argument of Logical Positivism was his barrage of "Reductionism", which was the idea that "any meaningful statement gets its meaning from some logical construction of terms which refers exclusively to immediate experience," (Mastin, 2009). Quine was a Verificationist, where he posited that an entire theory could verified (or falsified), but not individual statements. -
Quine's Paradox
Quine's paradox, "yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" (Quine), concerns the value of truth. In this statement, he clarifies that a sentence can be paradoxical even if it doesn't refer to itself. It was inspired by the "liar paradox", where a statement declares a previous statement false and the next true. -
Naturalism
To Quine, naturalism is "the recognition that it is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described," (1981). He also makes two points: one, that science is not necessarily restrictive as we may think and two, that scientific knowledge is no different than normal knowledge(1). -
Naturalism
(1)Hylton, Peter and Kemp, Gary, "Willard Van Orman Quine", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/quine/.