Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine and Logical Positivism 249
the problem of giving an empiricist account of mathematics. Only
in his penultimate book, Pursuit of Truth, does he devote an entire
section to mathematics (§40, “Truth in Mathematics,” one page
long), and only in his final book, From Stimulus to Science, does he
devote an entire chapter to it (chap. 5, “Logic and Mathematics,”
seven pages). (This first and last chapter on logic and mathematics
itself raises a major issue, which we will touch on toward the end of
the next section, namely, that Quine there seems to abandon the idea
that mathematics has empirical content, which in earlier writings
is accounted by Quine as an important point of disagreement with
Carnap.)
4. quine’s positivism
When Quine arrived in Vienna in 1932, he was already publishing
work in logic, but nothing of this gave expression to a recognizable
philosophy. Even so, he was by this stage a determined empiricist and
inclined toward behaviorism. Recalling his undergraduate studies,
Quine writes, “My mathematics courses brought high marks but
often imperfect understanding. I got more pleasure from Stetson’s
course in psychology, where we read Watson on behaviorism.” (TL
59). But by Quine’s account, his behaviorist proclivities predated this
course:
The distrust of mentalistic semantics that found expression in “Two Dogmas”
is thus detectable as far back as my senior year in college [when he
wrote his thesis on Principia Mathematica]. Even earlier I had taken kindly
to John B. Watson’s Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist, which
Raymond Stetson had assigned to us in his psychology class. Nor do I recall
that it shocked any preconceptions. It chimed in with my predilections.
(TDR 265–6)
Quine has described the philosophy he studied at Oberlin as “meager”
(TL 82). At Harvard his study of philosophy was dictated by his
determination to pass the preliminary examinations at the end of
his first year, with the aim of completing his Ph.D. in two years.
This meant devoting himself to the chore of historical courses, such
as “Woods on Plato, Prall on Leibniz, and Lewis on Kant” (TL 82). We
have already noted how little Quine was guided by his thesis supervisors
at Harvard, A. N. Whitehead and C. I. Lewis. As at Oberlin,
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