Willard Van Orman Quine

216 daniel isaacson
For Quine, such indeterminacy appears to be “inescapable” when
“we take a verification theory of meaning seriously” (EN 80). Quine
recognizes that this doctrine of indeterminacy upsets our preconceptions
about language:
Should the unwelcomeness of the conclusion persuade us to abandon the
verification theory of meaning? Certainly not. The sort of meaning that is
basic to translation, and to the learning of one’s own language, is necessarily
empirical meaning and nothing more. 4 (EN 81)
It seems natural, then, despite Quine’s rejection of what were central
doctrines of logical positivism in the 1930s, to see him as working
within rather than against the empiricist project of logical positivism.
A. J. Ayer (1959), in the introduction to his anthology Logical
Positivism, declared,
In the United States a number of philosophers like Quine, Nagel and Nelson
Goodman conduct logical analysis in a systematic scientific spirit that is
probably closer to the original ideal of the Vienna Circle than anything that
is now to be met with elsewhere. (pp. 7–8)
And Quine’s long-time colleague Hilary Putnam (1990) hailed Quine
as “The Greatest Logical Positivist” (in an article for which this
accolade served as title):
Quine is often thought to have destroyed logical positivism, with his rejection
of the analytic-synthetic distinction and his likening of philosophy to
natural science rather than to pure logic, and indeed, a generation of young
“scientific realist” philosophers has been inspired by him to denounce logical
positivism root and branch. But reading these essays, I must say that I
am inclined to class Quine as the last and greatest of the logical positivists,
in spite of his criticisms of the movement. (p. 269)
These views of the relation between Quine and logical positivism
are in keeping with a characteristic of logical positivism itself,
namely, that its adherents held no single doctrine sacrosanct. Joergen
Joergensen (1951), a Scandinavian associate of the Vienna Circle,
writing its history, declared that “what unites its members is...not
so much definite views or dogmas as definite tendencies and endeavors.
An evidence of this is the often considerable divergence and
lively discussion between its members and the amendments in the
fundamental views that have occurred several times in the course
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