With this third and final part, we seek, as far as possible, to complete our account of Quine’s philosophy. In doing so, we focus on the place of semantic theory in the thought of the Harvard philosopher and on the questions it raised concerning the foundations of analytic philosophy, and of logical positivism in particular.
Thus, the first part addressed semantics and the philosophy of language, and this was followed by a second part in which we traced the semantic revisions of the philosophy of logic. In the present part, we turn to the distinctive shift in the philosophy of science, where Quine brought epistemology into the heart of science and advanced a position that sparked wide-ranging debate among scientists and philosophers of science, namely the naturalisation of knowledge, or what he termed naturalised epistemology. Given the overlap and interconnection of philosophical approaches, we also examine the relationship between the philosophy of science and the issues Quine raised in relation to ontology, where he advanced the position of ontological relativity, as well as the problem of translation. He showed that scientific theories may differ from one another even when they concern the same scientific reality, much as the notebooks of translators engaged in radical translation may differ when translating a people whose language has never previously been rendered into another language.