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Central to Quine's philosophy is his linguistic [[behaviorism]]. Quine has remarked that one may or may not choose to be a behaviorist in psychology, but one has no choice but to be a behaviorist in linguistics.<ref>''The Cambridge Companion to Quine'', Roger F. Gibson, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 199</ref>
This influence can be seen in ''Word and Object''. In chapter 2 a linguist has to translate a native's unknown language into English. What is so specifically behavioristic there is that the linguist has nothing to go on but verbal behavior from the native and the visible environment the native interacts with. The same view is displayed in chapter 3 where Quine describes how a baby learns its first words. In this chapter Quine also mentions [[B.F. Skinner]], a well known behaviorist, as one of his influences. (The opposite view to Quine's and Skinner's in [[philosophy of language]] is notoriously represented by [[Noam Chomsky]]'s [[linguistic nativism]].) <ref>Quine, Willard Van Orman, ''Word and Object'' [1960]. New edition, with a foreword by Patricia Churchland, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2015, p. 73</ref>
==Translation and meaning==
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