For 10 points, name this American author of Ontological Relativity, Word and Object, and "Two Dogmas of Empiricism."
This thinker tackled the "Plato's Beard" problem in one of his works, in which he refutes the fictional philosopher McX who claims that Pegasus exists. He argued that not just individual statements, but entire fields, are verified in his "holism." He is the first namesake of an "indispensability argument" for mathematical realism. This man analyzed how the word "gavagai" corresponds to seeing a rabbit run in different cultural contexts and under linguistic barriers, which he termed (*) "indeterminacy of translation." In his magnum opus, he attacked reductionism and the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements. For 10 points, name this American author of Ontological Relativity, Word and Object, and "Two Dogmas of Empiricism."
This thinker tackled the "Plato's Beard" problem in one of his works, in which he refutes the fictional philosopher McX who claims that Pegasus exists.
Willard Van Orman Quine