Meaning

noun United States philosopher and logician who championed an empirical view of knowledge that depended on language (1908-2001)

originFrom Quine, named after the American logician and philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000). Verb etymology 1, verb sense 1 (“to append (a text) to a quotation of itself”) was coined by the American cognitive and computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter (born 1945) in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979; see the quotation), referring to Quine’s study of indirect…

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0