Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine and Logical Positivism 257
Carnap’s view of their debate, that there was no unbridgeable gap between
them.
acknowledgements and dedication
I am grateful to Roger Gibson, in his capacity as editor of this volume, for his
patience, encouragement, and help while I was writing this chapter. I also
wish to record my gratitude to others who have generously helped me in
my attempts to understand Quine and logical positivism. First and foremost
is Burton Dreben, my undergraduate tutor in philosophy, whose passionate
exposition and interpretations of Quine and Carnap were for me the
beginning of serious philosophy. I sorely miss his judgment on this chapter,
also that of Quine, to whom I am grateful for his responses to earlier
attempts of mine to understand the relationship between his philosophy
and Carnap’s, and the judgment of A. J. Ayer as well, to whom I am grateful
for his trenchant and kindly help to me in my attempts as a graduate
student and later to understand verificationism and analyticity. I dedicate
this chapter to the memory of these three great philosophers and teachers.
Others to whom I have incurred debts of gratitude in my treatment of
the topic are Bradley Armour-Garb, Oswaldo Chateubriand, Martin Davies,
Dagfinn Føllesdal, Michael Dummett, Alexander George, Peter Hacker,
Jerrold J. Katz, Georg Kreisel, Brian McGuinness, Adrian Moore, Alex
Orenstein, and Simon Saunders. In pursuing this topic, I made heavy demands
on the resources, both printed and electronic, of the Oxford Philosophy
Library, and I am grateful to Hilla Wait, Nicola Carter, Daniel Drury,
and Colin Cook for their expert and generous help. Finally, I am indebted
and deeply grateful to my wife, Kassandra, for her love and encouragement
while I worked on this chapter.
notes
1. “There are no longer any logical positivists left” (Wisdom 1963, 335).
“Logical positivism is dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement
ever becomes” (Passmore 1967, 56). “[T]he criticisms brought against
the logical empiricists’ program, and against Carnap in particular, by
Quine in the early 1950s are quite generally regarded as having been
successful – not just in the historical sense (namely, that those criticisms
were of great influence upon philosophical opinion, and may even
be said to have initiated the decline of logical empiricism as a living enterprise),
but in the substantive philosophical sense that this entirely
favorable reception of Quine’s criticisms was warranted” (Stein 1992,
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006