New Perspectives on Quine's Word and Object

[Introduction to Special Issues] Quinean theses marked several fields of philosophy and, since its publication, "Word and Object" has become a landmark in the canon of analytical philosophy. The Quinean contribution is not limited to the philosophy of language. His work sheds light on many important topics in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of mathematics. He is celebrated for introducing a naturalised conception of epistemology, which emphasised the role of the natural scientific method in determining the processes of knowledge acquisition. On the one hand, this view brought him to embrace behaviourism, the thesis that psychological terms do not refer to inner mental states and instead are to be analysed in terms of speakers’ dispositions to verbal behaviour. On the other hand, he rejected the traditional philosophical study of scientific knowledge and mathematics in particular, because of its failure to reduce mathematics to pure logic.