Blackwell Reference Online

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(1908–) An analytic metaphysician who is first and foremost a philosophical naturalist. His naturalism has two components: first, he rejects the traditional quest for a first philosophy, i.e. the quest for a ground somehow outside of science upon which science can be justified; second, he accepts science as the final arbiter concerning questions of what there is.But how are we to determine what science says, or assumes, there is? Quine urges that one way we can determine what a scientific theory says there is (its ontology)is by first regimenting the theory in first-order predicate logic and then ascertaining the values of the bound variables of the sentences held true in the theory. For Quine, to be is to be the value of a bound variable. However, Quine argues that if there is one ontology that fulfils a theory, there is more than one. This latter claim is the crux of his famous doctrine of ontological relativity (or inscrutability of reference). That doctrine claims that it makes no sense to say what the objects of a theory are, beyond saying how to interpret or reinterpret that theory in another; there is no saying absolutely what the objects of a theory are. Quine's preferred argument for ontological relativity is his proxy function argument. According to this argument, one can effect a one-to-one reinterpretation of the denotata of a theory without disturbing either the logical ... log in or subscribe to read full text