Il realismo scientifico di Quine

This work analyses the ontological perspective of Quine. Although he defines himself as a robust realist, the aim is to highlight, by investigating several passa- ges of Quine’s main works, how that robust realism is ambiguous to say the least. It is indeed possible to find in Quine’s words themselves an ontological position that may be called scientific realism, or a kind of realism connected to scientific theories. This is because Quine declares that the knowledge of reality is not based on its ontological consistency, but on the conceptual scheme that is the result of the combination of observable stimuli and a linguistic framework. In order to further illustrate this point, Quinean theses about reference and truth will be analysed. This will help better understand how the aforementioned robust realism is instead controversial, and for this reason is worthy of closer examination, so as to unravel all its ambiguities.