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Username Please enter your Username. In the process, he shook a fundamental belief widely held by philosophers and began a debate that is, to this day, unsettled. His work in this period has had a lasting and profound impact on the history of philosophy, especially on the logical positivists the most notable of whom was Carnap , contending that their philosophical project was misconceived.
Had Quine's philosophical career ended here, he would deserve to be considered among the giants of the 20th century. But, he was far from done. Quine argued that there were many ways, each consistent with all potentially available evidence, of translating between any two languages.
In attacking the analytic-synthetic distinction and arguing for the indeterminacy of translation, Quine was attacking a "dogma" deeply rooted in the Western philosophical tradition -- that words have meanings. The connection between these arguments and word meaning is this: If words were to have determinate meanings, then one could speak of two words being synonymous if they had the same meaning.
It would follow, then, that an analytic truth would be one that could be turned into a logical truth by replacing some of the words in the sentence by their synonyms.
Similarly, if words have meanings, then only one translation between two languages would be acceptable -- that which mapped each word in one language to a word in the other language that had the same meaning.
Quine's work in the s aimed at destabilizing meaning. This notion of meaning being unstable, which has its roots in Quine, is central to the contemporary postmodern project. Further, Quine argued that our knowledge forms a "web of belief. His work in the s partially anticipates and lays the groundwork for Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions , a work at the very basis of the postmodern canon.
The idea expressed therein -- that scientific theories are simply descriptions of observed phenomena rather than deep descriptions of "reality" -- is a clear extension of Quine's web of beliefs. Quine's style of writing was elegant and rigorous. His argumentation was famously clear and well-phrased. His work helped set the standard for philosophical rigor and clarity that is still dominant today in departments of analytic philosophy.
In his later years, Quine continued to struggle with ideas in language and logic and produced much philosophical writing, including the "Philosophy of Logic" , in which he revisits issues of logic, truth and meaning.
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