Willard Van Orman Quine

joseph s. ullian
10 Quine and Logic
I
No one since Russell has contributed so much to both philosophy
and logic as Quine. No major philosopher has given anything like so
much to logic, nor has any important figure in logic borne Quine’s
stature as a philosopher. His work in the two fields, though distinguishable,
has been very much related. He has been a pioneer
philosopher of mathematical logic, while he has integrated his view
of logic into the very core of his epistemology. I will discuss how
logic fits with the rest of Quine’s philosophy and what motivated
his choices as an expositor and teacher of logic. I will examine in
particular aspects of his text Methods of Logic, now in its fourth
edition.
Logic plays a central role in Quine’s philosophy. Quine is preeminently
an epistemologist. His epistemology is wedded in interlocking
ways to empiricism, naturalism, and physicalism; together they lead
him to see science not only as the arbiter of what is to be believed
about the world but also as providing the context in which we must
make our philosophy. Rather than pursue some first philosophy, we
look to science for our bearings: “[I]t is within science...that reality
is to be identified and described” (TPT 21). And “the basic structure
of the language of science...is the predicate calculus: the logic of
quantification and truth-functions” (FM 160).
To understand the consequences of scientific theories and the relationships
among their constituents, we must be prepared to regiment
scientific discourse into the idiom of first-order logic: “Implication...isthelifeblood
of theories....Itiswhat relates a theory
to its checkpoints” (FSS 51). Not that there is a unique translation
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