Pursuit of Truth

Quine's 1990 short late synthesis of his philosophy

Tradition: Analytic philosophy / Quinean naturalism

Quine's 1990 short late synthesis — his philosophy in 100 compressed pages

Published by Harvard University Press in 1990 (revised edition 1992), 'Pursuit of Truth' is Quine's late, deliberately short synthesis of his philosophical position — written when Quine was 82, six years after the death of his wife Marjorie, ten years after his formal Harvard retirement, and eight years before his own 2000 death. Across six chapters — Evidence, Reference, Meaning, Intension, Truth, and (in the revised second edition) a new addendum — Quine restates in roughly one hundred pages the central positions of a forty-year career: holism (the web-of-belief picture); the underdetermination of theory by evidence; the indeterminacy of translation (the gavagai thought-experiment of 'Word and Object' is recapitulated); the indeterminacy of reference (the Dewey-Lecture argument is restated); naturalised epistemology; ontological relativity; the rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction; the meaning-as-stimulus-meaning analysis. The book's distinctive achievement is compression: Quine had taken six hundred pages of 'Word and Object' (1960) plus the essays of 'From a Logical Point of View' (1953) and 'Ontological Relativity' (1969) and condensed the substantive results into a single short volume. The book has been continuously used as the standard short introduction to Quine for graduate students and the general philosophical reader; for many readers it is the most accessible entry into the Quinean philosophical position.