W. V. O. Quine

Quine's 1951 essay attacks the analytic-synthetic distinction and the idea that individual statements can be tested in isolation. He argues that our beliefs face experience as a connected web rather than one sentence at a time.

The web of belief is Quine's image for how logic, science, mathematics, and ordinary claims support one another. In this view, even central beliefs can in principle be revised, though changing them would have a higher cost.

Word and Object, published in 1960, develops Quine's ideas about language, translation, and ontology. It includes his famous argument for the indeterminacy of translation, often illustrated with the example of a native speaker saying gavagai.

Quine's slogan is often summarized as to be is to be the value of a variable. In practice, he asks what kinds of entities our best theories must quantify over, such as numbers, physical objects, or sets.