These essays, along with several manuscripts published here for the first time, offer a more complete and highly defined picture than ever before of one of the ...
The qualities that distinguished him in any discussion are on clear display in this volume, which features him in dialogue with his predecessors and peers, his ...
Quintessence for the first time collects Quine's classic essays (such as "Two Dogmas" and "On What There Is") in one volume—and thus offers readers a much ...
This essay addresses the problem of how to account for our meeting of minds, for our being able to linguistically express agreement regarding external events despite wild dissimilarity of our nerve nets. An explanation is provided based on the instinct of induction, the instinct of similarity, and natural selection. There are three networks at play in the meeting of minds: perceptual similarity, the intersubjective harmony of similarity standards and thus the relation structuring the intake of perceptions; implication, the relation expressed (...) by the universally quantified conditional and structuring our system of the world; and class membership, the relation structuring the domain of pure mathematics. (shrink)
For the faithful there is much to ponder. In this short book, based on lectures delivered in Spain in 1990, Quine begins by locating his work historically.
Selected Logic Papers, long out of print and now reissued with eight additional essays, includes much of the author's important work on mathematical logic and ...
" This is a key book for understanding the effort that a major philosopher has made a large part of his life's work: to naturalize epistemology in the twentieth ...
With his customary incisiveness, W. V. Quine presents logic as the product of two factors, truth and grammar--but argues against the doctrine that the logical ...
Things and Their Place in Theories Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and ...
A respected Harvard logician and philosopher gathers together twenty-nine writings dealing with the foundations of mathematics, Rudolf Carnap, lin-guistics, ...
Our only channel of information about the world is the impact of external forces on our sensory surfaces. So says science itself. There is no clairvoyance. How, then, can we have parlayed this meager sensory input into a full-blown scientific theory of the world? This is itself a scientific question. The pursuit of it, with free use of scientific theory, is what I call naturalized epistemology. The Roots of Reference falls within that domain. Its more specific concern, within that domain, (...) is reference to concrete and abstract objects: what such reference consists in, and how we achieve it. (shrink)
In the course of the discussion, Professor Quine pinpoints the difficulties involved in translation, brings to light the anomalies and conflicts implicit in our ...
