威拉德·范奥曼·蒯因Willard Van Orman Quine

威拉德·范奥曼·蒯因的父亲是Cloyd Robert Quine，一位创立了阿克伦设备公司的工程师。他的母亲Harriet 蒯因 蒯因是一名教师。蒯因（或他的朋友们所熟知的蒯因）是家中最小的儿子。他在学校时的兴趣主要是科学方面的，但从很小的时候起，他就开始对哲学问题产生兴趣。例如，当他只有九岁时，天堂和地狱的概念就让他感到困扰。他的哥哥William在他离开学校之前给了他James的Pragmatism，这本书让他着迷。

离开学校后，蒯因在俄亥俄州奥伯林的奥伯林学院学习，他的兄弟威廉也曾在那里学习。一位同学建议他阅读伯特兰·罗素的著作会很有趣，而阅读伯特兰·罗素和阿尔弗雷德·诺思·怀特海的Principia Mathematica很快使蒯因确信，他应该把数学作为主修科目，把数学哲学作为次要课题。O'Grady在[6]中写道：-

蒯因在奥伯林的岁月是田园诗般的。他的寄宿公寓里充满了志同道合的人，是“一个理想的场所，可以让人变得善于表达”。他通过阅读伯特兰·罗素，对宇宙理解的渴望变得更加敏锐。

他于1930年从奥伯林学院毕业，然后获得奖学金前往哈佛大学攻读博士学位。他抵达哈佛后不久，就与他在奥伯林学院认识的Naomi Clayton结婚。蒯因在阿尔弗雷德·诺思·怀特海的指导下，两年内完成了博士学位。正是阿尔弗雷德·诺思·怀特海把他介绍给了伯特兰·罗素，当时伯特兰·罗素正在访问哈佛并在那里讲学，从那时起，蒯因开始与伯特兰·罗素通信。1932年，蒯因在哈佛获得哲学博士学位，他在描述接下来的一年——也许是对他未来研究最重要的一年——时，带着某种就事论事的方式说道：-

1932年——我已经获得了博士学位，并且和我的第一任妻子结了婚——我获得了一项旅行奖学金。那是很棒的一年。我们非常精确地用完了我们的资源——回到美国时，我身上有7美元。然后我在1933年回到哈佛，担任初级研究员。

对蒯因来说，这确实是“很棒的一年”，他由Sheldon旅行奖学金资助，进行了一次激动人心的欧洲之行。在维也纳，他会见了Philip 菲利普·弗兰克、Moritz Schlick以及逻辑实证主义维也纳学派的其他成员。他还会见了英国哲学家A J Ayer和Kurt 库尔特·弗雷德里希·哥德尔。

蒯因在阿尔弗雷德·塔斯基的陪同下在华沙度过了六周，随后前往布拉格，在Rudolf Carnap指导下学习。用蒯因自己的话说，他成了Carnap的“热忱门徒”，并发现了：

……被一位活生生的老师而非一本死书在智识上点燃，究竟意味着什么。

蒯因于1933年回到哈佛，接受初级研究员职位，并出版了他的第一本书A System of Logistics，那是他学位论文的出版版本。从这时起直到因战时服役而中断职业生涯为止，蒯因的研究主要集中于逻辑，但始终带有哲学动机。他在这一时期发表的最重要论文之一，是1937年发表在American Mathematical Monthly上的New Foundations for Mathematical Logic。在这篇论文中，他提出了自己发明的非正统集合论系统，该系统按论文标题被称为NF集合论。蒯因没有为该理论给出模型，也没有证明该系统是一致的。这给数理逻辑学家带来了一个棘手问题，并引起了相当多的兴趣。

蒯因于1936年被聘为哈佛教职员，任哲学讲师。后来他谈到自己职业生涯这一阶段的教学生涯时写道：

我最享受的与其说是哲学方面，不如说是数学方面，因为它更少取决于意见。是澄清，而不是辩护。以证明为依据。我最初在两个系都教课，但我的聘任是在哲学系。我教数理逻辑和集合论，也教哲学中的逻辑通识课程。哈佛在让我教授自己感兴趣的內容方面很好。我为专修学生开了一门我自选的、讲我自己想法的哲学课程。

1940年对哈佛的蒯因来说是令人兴奋的一年，因为就在那一年，Carnap和阿尔弗雷德·塔斯基都访问了哈佛，三人就逻辑实证主义展开了辩论。尽管蒯因是Carnap的坚定朋友，但两人在许多哲学问题上采取了颇为不同的立场，这引发了热烈的讨论和挑战。

蒯因于1941年晋升为副教授，但不久之后，由于第二次世界大战，他服了兵役。从1942年起，他在美国海军情报部门工作了四年，先是担任上尉，后升为少校，负责破译来自沿海德国潜艇的信息。他后来写到这项破译信息的工作：-

德国人有一台复制恩尼格玛机来破解复杂的密码。他们每天在机器上设置不同的密钥。我们必须通过拦截潜艇发出的、给出测向信息的信息来艰难地获取它。比如说，从前一天的信息中我们知道他被派去进行加油会合，所以一个很好的猜测是某个词会是‘加油’。然后，如果我们的人能匹配这个词，他们就能得到整个密钥设置。

1945年，已有两个女儿的蒯因与妻子分居，两年后离婚。他回到哈佛大学，并于1948年晋升为教授。他于1948年再婚，第二任妻子是Marjorie Boynton，他在海军服役时与她相识。蒯因与第二任妻子育有两个孩子，一个女儿和一个儿子。儿子杰西·道格拉斯 B 蒯因撰写了父亲的讣告。1953-54年间，蒯因是牛津大学的伊士曼访问教授，在此期间他出版了一本书From a Logical Point of View，这是他早期文章的合集。这部作品中的一篇文章Two Dogmas of Empiricism，他最初于1951年发表，正是这篇文章使他赢得了作为一流哲学家的声誉。这篇文章[6]：-

……挑战了公认的知识、意义和真理观念，并通过论证逻辑和数学如同事实陈述一样，可以根据经验进行修正，甚至超越了逻辑实证主义的极端经验主义。

在这篇文章中，蒯因论证说：-

……在综合陈述（其成立取决于经验）和分析陈述（无论如何都成立）之间寻求界限是愚蠢的。

他反对还原论的教条，即：-

……认为每一个有意义的陈述都等价于某种以指称直接经验的词项为基础的逻辑构造。

蒯因声称：-

任何陈述都可以被坚持为真，无论发生什么，只要我们在[我们的信念]系统中其他地方做出足够剧烈的调整。我们所谓的知识或信念的整体，从最偶然的地理和历史事务到最深刻的原子物理学乃至纯数学和逻辑的定律，都是人造的织物，只在边缘处与经验相接触。

蒯因于1956年成为哈佛大学埃德加·皮尔斯哲学讲席教授，他一直担任此职直到1978年退休。退休后，他继续担任哈佛大学埃德加·皮尔斯荣休讲席教授，多年间每天通勤至他在爱默生楼的角落办公室。他对旅行的热情在退休后依然不减，一生中访问了118个国家。

我们在上文已评论过蒯因在数理逻辑方面的工作。符号逻辑对他而言代表了科学语言的框架。他谦虚地说：-

我不使用计算机做任何事情，尽管我在数理逻辑中的一个小成果已成为计算机理论的工具，即蒯因 McCluskey原理。它对应于串联或并联的端子，因此如果你简化数理逻辑步骤，你就简化了布线。我得出它并非出于对计算机的兴趣，而是作为一种教学手段，一种引入数理逻辑教学方式的巧妙方法。

蒯因发展了一种新型哲学，他称之为naturalized epistemology。他声称认识论唯一合法的角色是描述知识实际获得的方式，因此，根据蒯因，其功能是描述当前科学如何达到科学共同体所接受的信念。

蒯因的出版物是关于逻辑、形而上学、语言哲学和逻辑哲学的著作。他的22本书包括A System of Logistic（1934）、Mathematical Logic（1940）、Elementary Logic（1941）、On What There Is（1948）、From a Logical Point of View（1953）、Word and Object（1960）、Set Theory and Its Logic（1963）、Philosophy of Logic（1970）、The Time of My Life: an autobiography（1985）、Quiddities（1990）和From Stimulus to Science（1995）。

蒯因因其杰出贡献赢得了许多奖项和奖章。这些包括詹姆斯·D·默里 Butler金质奖章（1965年）、布拉格的F Polacky金质奖章（1991年）、布拉格的查理大学金质奖章（1993年）、斯德哥尔摩的Rolf Schock奖（1993年）和东京的京都奖（1996年）。Creative Arts and Moral Sciences的京都奖聚焦于哲学领域，并将该奖授予蒯因，作为美国20世纪最杰出的哲学家之一。事实上，正如[2]所述：-

他收集的奖项和荣誉学位必定远多于任何其他当代哲学家或几乎任何其他学者；但他最乐于收集的是他访问过的国家。他对这些国家的数量极为自负，也对自己的多种语言能力自负。他喜欢词源学和关于词语的不寻常事实。他的写作以对词语的感觉和常常机智的运用而著称。他的政治观点属于右翼，但他很得体，在他知道持不同倾向的人面前不发表这些观点。

他的成就被总结如下：-

因此我们可以说，蒯因博士的许多论题和论证已成为现代认识论和本体论以及语言哲学和一般科学哲学辩论的中心。他产生了深刻而强大的影响，没有这种影响，就不可能理解哲学的当前状态。

里尔大学、牛津大学、剑桥大学、乌普萨拉大学、伯尔尼大学和哈佛大学等十八所大学授予他荣誉学位。他当选为许多学术团体的会士，包括美国艺术与科学院（1949年）、英国科学院（1959年）、巴西哲学研究所（1963年）、National Academy of Sciences（1977年）、法兰西学院（1978年）和Norwegian Academy of Sciences（1979年）。

一些有趣的小事显露了他的部分性格。他所有的书都是用那台1927年的雷明顿打字机打出的，他的博士论文也是用它写的；他改造了这台打字机，用一些数学符号替换了诸如!、?和1这样的字符。有一次有人问他，没有问号怎么办，他回答说：

嗯，你看，我只处理确定的事情。

他在他的书The Time of My Life中这样描绘自己：

我井井有条，我节俭度日。大多数时候我唯一的情感就是不耐烦，偶尔读到诗歌的某些段落会深深打动我，所以，出于我的性格，我读诗很少。

在哲学和数学之外，蒯因热爱音乐，尤其是迪克西兰爵士乐、墨西哥民歌以及吉尔伯特和丹尼斯·苏利文。他喜欢弹钢琴，还在几个爵士乐队中弹班卓琴。

Willard Van Quine's father was Cloyd Robert Quine, an engineer who founded the Akron Equipment Company. His mother, Harriet Van Orman, was a teacher. Willard (or Van as he became known to his friends) was the youngest son of the family. His interests at school were mainly scientific but from a young age he began to interest himself with philosophical questions. For example, the concepts of heaven and hell worried him when he was only nine years old. His older brother William gave him James's Pragmatism before he had left school and the book fascinated him.

After leaving school Quine studied at Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, where his brother William had also studied. A fellow student suggested that he would find reading Bertrand Russell's works interesting and indeed reading Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica quickly convinced Quine that he should study mathematics as his major subject with the philosophy of mathematics as a secondary topic. O'Grady writes in [6]:-

Quine's years at Oberlin were idyllic. His rooming house, full of kindred spirits was "an ideal setting in which to wax articulate". His appetite for cosmic understanding was sharpened by reading Russell.

He graduated from Oberlin College in 1930 and then won a scholarship to study for his doctorate at Harvard University. He married Naomi Clayton, whom he had known at Oberlin College, soon after arriving in Harvard. Quine completed his doctorate in two years supervised by Alfred North Whitehead. It was Whitehead who introduced him to Russell, who was visiting Harvard to lecture there, and from that time Quine began a correspondence with Russell. Awarded a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard in 1932, Quine described the following year, perhaps the most important for his future research, in a somewhat matter of fact way:-

In 1932 - I already had my PhD and was married to my first wife - I had a travelling fellowship. That was a great year. We used up our resources very accurately - I had $7 when we got back to America. Then I came back to Harvard as a Junior Fellow in 1933.

Indeed it was "a great year" for Quine who made an exciting visit to Europe financed by a Sheldon Traveling Fellowship. In Vienna he met Philip Frank, Moritz Schlick and other members of the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists. He also met the British philosopher A J Ayer and Kurt Gödel.

Quine spent six weeks in Warsaw with Tarski before going on to study at Prague under Rudolf Carnap. Quine became, in his own words, "an ardent disciple" of Carnap discovering:-

... what it was to be intellectually fired by a living teacher rather than by a dead book.

After Quine returned to Harvard in 1933 to take up the Junior Fellowship he published his first book A System of Logistics which was the published version of his doctoral thesis. From this time up to the break in his career for war service Quine's research was mainly on logic although always with a philosophical motivation. One of the most important papers he published during this period was New Foundations for Mathematical Logic in the American Mathematical Monthly in 1937. In this paper he presented his invention of the heterodox system of set theory, which is known as NF set theory after the title of the paper. Quine presented no model for this theory, nor did he prove that the system was consistent. This posed an awkward problem for mathematical logicians and led to quite a bit of interest.

Quine was appointed onto the staff at Harvard in 1936 as an Instructor in Philosophy. He later wrote about his teaching at this stage in his career:-

What I enjoyed most was more the mathematical end than the philosophical, because of it being less a matter of opinion. Clarifying, not defending. Resting on proof. I taught first in both departments, but my appointment was in the Philosophy Department. I taught Mathematical Logic and Set Theory as well as a general course of Logic in Philosophy. Harvard was good about letting me teach my own interests. I gave a course in Philosophy of my own choosing, my own ideas, for concentrators.

The year 1940 was an exciting one for Quine at Harvard for in that year both Carnap and Tarski visited Harvard and the three debated logical positivism. Although Quine was a firm friend of Carnap the two took somewhat different stands on many philosophical issues which led to lively discussions and challenges.

Quine was promoted to Associate Professor in 1941 but shortly after, because of World War II, he undertook war service. From 1942 he spent four years in the United States Navy Intelligence, first as a Lieutenant then as a Lieutenant Commander, decrypting messages from German submarines off the coast. He later wrote of this work decrypting messages:-

The Germans had a replica Enigma breaking complicated ciphers. Each day they had a different setting on the machine. We had to get it the hard way, by intercepting a message from a submarine that gave direction finders. We would know, say, from the preceding day's message he had been sent on a refuelling rendezvous, so a good guess was that some word would be 'refuelling.' Then if our men could fit the word, they could get the setting for the whole.

In 1945 Quine and his wife, having had two daughters, separated and they were divorced two years later. He returned to Harvard where he was promoted to Professor in 1948. He married again in 1948, his second wife being Marjorie Boynton whom he met while serving in the Navy. Quine and his second wife had two children, a daughter and a son. The son, Douglas B Quine, has written an obituary of his father. During 1953-54 Quine was Eastman Visiting Professor at Oxford and during that time he published a book From a Logical Point of View which was a collection of his earlier articles. One article in this work Two Dogmas of Empiricism, which he had first published in 1951, was the one which made his reputation as a leading philosopher. This article [6]:-

... challenged received notions of knowledge, meaning and truth, and exceeded even the extreme empiricism of logical positivism by arguing that logic and mathematics, like factual statements, are open to revision in the light of experience.

In the article Quine argued that it was:-

... folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements, which hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements, which hold come what may.

He argued against the dogma of reductionism, or:-

... the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience.

Quine claimed:-

Any statement can be held true come what may, if we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system [of our beliefs]. The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges.

Quine became Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy at Harvard in 1956, a post he retained until he retired in 1978. He continued as Edgar Pierce Professor Emeritus at Harvard, commuting daily to his corner office in Emerson Hall, for many years after he retired. His passion for travelling continued after his retirement and throughout his life he visited 118 countries.

We have commented above about Quine's work in mathematical logic. Symbolic logic represented for him the framework for the language of science. He modestly said:-

I do not do anything with computers, although one of my little results in mathematical logic has become a tool of the computer theory, the Quine McCluskey principle. And corresponds to terminals in series, or to those in parallel, so that if you simplify mathematical logical steps, you have simplified your wiring. I arrived at it not from an interest in computers, but as a pedagogical device, a slick way of introducing that way of teaching mathematical logic.

Quine developed a new type of philosophy, which he called naturalized epistemology. He claimed that epistemology's only legitimate role is to describe the way knowledge is actually obtained so, according to Quine, its function is to describe how present science arrives at the beliefs accepted by the scientific community.

Among Quine's publications are works on logic, metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of logic. His 22 books include A System of Logistic (1934), Mathematical Logic (1940), Elementary Logic (1941), On What There Is (1948), From a Logical Point of View (1953), Word and Object (1960), Set Theory and Its Logic (1963), Philosophy of Logic (1970), The Time of My Life: an autobiography (1985), Quiddities (1990), and From Stimulus to Science (1995).

Quine won many prizes and medals for his outstanding contributions. These included the Murray Butler gold medal (1965), the F Polacky gold medal in Prague (1991), the Charles University gold medal in Prague (1993), the Rolf Schock Prize in Stockholm (1993), and the Kyoto Prize in Tokyo (1996). The Kyoto Prize for Creative Arts and Moral Sciences focused on the field of philosophy and made the award to Quine as one of America's pre-eminent 20th century philosophers. Indeed, as stated in [2]:-

He must have collected far more prizes and honorary degrees than any other contemporary philosopher or than almost any other academic; but what he most rejoiced in collecting were the countries that he had visited. He was immensely vain about their number, and vain, too, about his ability to speak a number of languages. He liked etymology and unusual facts about words. His writing was distinguished by a feeling for words and an often witty use of them. His political opinions were on the Right, but he was tactful in not voicing them in the presence of people he knew to be of a different inclination.

His achievements were summarised as:-

We may therefore say that the many theses and arguments of Dr Willard Van Orman Quine have become the centre of debate for modern epistemology and ontology as well as philosophy of language and philosophy of science in general. He has created a profound, powerful influence without which it would not be possible to understand the current state of philosophy.

The University of Lille, Oxford University, Cambridge University, Uppsala University, the University of Bern, and Harvard University were among the eighteen universities awarding him an honorary degree. He was elected to fellowships of many learned societies including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1949), the British Academy (1959), the Instituto Brasileiro de Filosophia (1963), the National Academy of Sciences (1977), the Institut de France (1978), and the Norwegian Academy of Sciences (1979).

A little of his character is shown by some entertaining episodes. All his books were typed on the 1927 Remington typewriter, on which he wrote his doctoral thesis, which he had modified by including some mathematical symbols instead of characters such as !, ?, and 1. When once he was asked how he managed without a question mark he replied:-

Well, you see, I deal in certainties.

He gave this picture of himself in his book The Time of My Life :-

I am orderly and I am frugal. For the most part my only emotion is impatience, I am deeply moved by occasional passages of poetry, and so, characteristically, I read little of it.

Outside philosophy and mathematics Quine loved music, especially Dixieland jazz, Mexican folksongs, and Gilbert and Sullivan. He enjoyed playing the piano and he played banjo in several jazz groups.