Willard Van Orman Quine

daniel isaacson
9 Quine and Logical Positivism
1. introduction
In “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Quine’s most widely cited and
reprinted paper, he famously rejects the analytic-synthetic distinction
and a verificationist theory of meaning. Both of these had been
fundamental tenets of logical positivism (or logical empiricism, as
it has also been called), and Quine has been seen as an archcritic
of this philosophical movement, one whose criticisms have contributed
significantly to its demise during the second half of the
twentieth century. 1 And while logical positivism waned, Quine’s
philosophy waxed and gained ascendancy. 2
This view of Quine and logical positivism – correct, as far as it
goes – leaves out of account the significant fact that contact with
members of the Vienna Circle, the chief begetters of logical positivism,
and especially with its leading figure, Rudolf Carnap, was
crucial for Quine in the early years of his philosophical development
and that Carnap’s ideas and some ideas of other positivists,
notably Otto Neurath, remained important to him throughout his
philosophical life. This fact Quine himself insisted on and prominently
acknowledged. Word and Object, Quine’s most important
statement of his philosophy, bears the dedication, “To Rudolf Carnap,
Teacher and Friend,” and Quine chose a passage from Neurath
as one of the two epigraphs for that book. 3 In “On Carnap’s Views
on Ontology,” a paper Quine wrote and published at the same time
as “Two Dogmas,” he declares, even while addressing philosophical
differences between himself and Carnap, that “no one has influenced
my philosophical thought more than Carnap” (OCVO 203). At the
time of Carnap’s death, in 1970, Quine wrote of him,
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