Willard Van Orman Quine

Willard Van Orman Quine spent fifty years at Harvard proving that the distinctions philosophers and scientists leaned on without noticing were doing most of the work. He dismantled the line between truths of meaning and truths of fact. He showed that each sentence does not face the world on its own but only as part of a whole web of belief. He argued that there is no fact of the matter about what your words refer to, that two complete translation manuals for a language can fit all possible behavior while assigning incompatible meanings, and that the right response to all of this is not skepticism but the transformation of epistemology into a branch of natural science. He could not have known, dying in 2000, that engineers would soon instantiate something with exactly the topology he had described—a vast web of mutually supporting parameters in which no single weight carries a discrete fact, all adjusting together under the pressure of