Willard Van Orman Quine has been considered a philosopher who stands at the intersection of analytical, positivist, and pragmatist approaches. In this book, an attempt has been made to clarify Quine's naturalistic approach by relying on Quine's basic ...
Willard Van Orman Quine has been considered a philosopher who stands at the intersection of analytical, positivist, and pragmatist approaches. In this book, an attempt has been made to clarify Quine's naturalistic approach by relying on Quine's basic arguments about "semantic holism", "indeterminacy of translation" and "rejecting the distinction between analytical and synthetic propositions". By referring to Quine's works and opinions and the opinions of his commentators, the author has tried to show that Quine's naturalistic approach in the field of language leads to behaviorism and semantic nihilism, and here semantic nihilism means the negation of meaning as a subjective or abstract identity. According to Quine, knowledge, mind, and meaning are parts of a single world and should be studied in the light of the same empirical spirit that gave life to the natural world. Therefore, the meaning must be understood empirically and any description of it refers to its obvious and general characteristic. With this definition, "meaning" is a feature of behavior, and in a sense it is the same as usage. It is the result of this view of behaviorism that is considered the spirit of the thesis of semantic nihilism.
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