Willard Van Orman Quine
1908-2000 · Analytic Metaphysics · Prominent
Quine taught philosophy at Harvard, and in Two Dogmas of Empiricism he attacked the old line between truths of meaning and truths of fact. No belief faces the evidence alone, he held. Your beliefs meet the world as one connected body, and when something goes wrong you choose where to make the repair. He also held that translation between languages is never settled by the evidence.
Signature
The position Quine is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Natural Processes
- leans Mechanistic
- Knowledge
- Naturalism
Positions on the 7 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- leans Mechanistic (25 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Mind
- leans Brain Only (25 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- Identity
- leans Changing (75 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Meaning
- leans Constructed (25 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Nature of Reality
- leans Multiplicity (75 on a 0–100 scale from Unity to Multiplicity)
- Ground of Being
- leans Immanence (25 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Nature
- mildly between Mastery and Harmony (44 on a 0–100 scale from Mastery to Harmony)
13 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Quine refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Highest Good
- Knowledge
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Natural Emergence
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Perception
- Conceptual Mediation
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Naturalism
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Agency
- Compatibilism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Time
- Block Universe
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Language
- Representation / Language-Game / Conventional
What is the fundamental nature of language? - Human Nature
- Evolved Animal
What is human nature?