Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine and Logical Positivism 215
In later years his views went on evolving and so did mine, in divergent
ways. But even where we disagreed he was still setting the theme; the line
of my thought was largely determined by problems that I felt his position
presented. (HRC 41)
And long after Carnap’s death, when neither expressing gratitude
to the living nor eulogizing the recently dead could be his purpose,
Quine, in the final paragraph of a paper expressing major criticisms
of Carnap, declared, “I, like many, have been influenced more by
him than by any other philosopher” (CPT 333).
Besides the history of Quine’s philosophical development and the
testimony of his acknowledgments to Carnap, there are striking indications,
internal to Quine’s philosophy, of affinities to logical positivism.
Crucially there is Quine’s own adherence to verificationism –
of course, not in the form rejected by him in “Two Dogmas,” by
which “the meaning of a statement is the method of empirically
confirming or infirming it” (TDEa 37). What was wrong with the
Vienna Circle’s verificationism was not the role it assigned to verification
but the unit of language to which verification was taken to
apply. “Our statements about the external world face the tribunal
of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body”
(TDEa 41). For Quine, “meaning remains centered as always on verification”
(EN 89). Quine’s diagnosis of where the Vienna Circle went
wrong in their verificationism is that they “espoused a verification
theory of meaning but did not take it seriously enough” (EN 80).
Quine’s espousal of a verificationism in which whole theories
rather than individual statements are the units of verification and
so of meaning leads to his doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation.
According to this doctrine, any translation of a theory expressed
in one language into an expression of it in another language
will be as correct as any other, so long as the net empirical implications of
the theory as a whole are preserved in translation. But it is to be expected
that many different ways of translating the component sentences, essentially
different individually, would deliver the same empirical implications for the
theory as a whole; deviations in the translation of one component sentence
could be compensated for in the translation of another component sentence.
Insofar, there can be no ground for saying which of two glaringly unlike
translations of individual sentences is right. (EN 80)
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