Intuition, the Paradigm Case Argument, and the Two Dogmas of Kant’otelianism

Abstract

One of the most famous philosophical controversies, and one of the most significant for the history of late twentieth and early twenty-first century philosophy, was one in which H. Paul Grice and Sir Peter Strawson defended the analytic/synthetic distinction against Morton White’s and Quine’s arguments against it (in 1956, in 1950, and in 1951 respectively). I shall specifically examine Grice and Strawson’s Paradigm Case Argument in support of the distinction and their reductio argument against Quine’s ‘elimination’ of the synonymy relation; in so doing I will also be addressing Scott Soames’s use of the same form of argument against Quine’s ‘elimination’ of sentence-meaning. I shall argue that those reductio arguments fail to undermine Quine’s and White’s arguments against the analytic/synthetic distinction and, considering Grice’s latest views of the controversy, show how the arguments of Atlas (2005) provide a Gricean and Chomskyan defence of the analytic/synthetic distinction. I shall also examine critically Saul Kripke’s famous ‘argument from linguistic intuition’ in defence of essential properties. It too is a form of the Paradigm Case Argument in the Gricean fashion. I shall argue that the arguments from linguistic intuition fail to support the dogma of essential properties. In the next section I shall point out to future historians of English-speaking twentieth-century philosophy some of the salient features of the development of the ideas.1