White was born Morton Gabriel Weisberger in the Lower East Side of New York City.
He attended City College of New York as an undergraduate before doing his postgraduate studies at Columbia University, where he completed his Ph.D. in 1942 under Ernest Nagel, who was himself a student of John Dewey.
"Time and recent events," he wrote, "have brought the liberal outlook under a very different kind of attack- an attack with which I have no sympathy- and I fear that my own critical observations might wrongly be associated with arguments, positions, and purposes quite foreign to my own."
At Harvard, White was a colleague of Willard Van Orman Quine, and the philosophical views of the two are closely related, particularly in their rejection of a sharp distinction between a priori and empirical statements.
Using the framework of holistic pragmatism, White argues that philosophical inquiry can just as well be applied to cultural institutions beyond science, such as law and art.