Quine, Analyticity, and Transcendence

Abstract

In “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” [TD], Quine characterizes and rejects three approaches to making sense of analyticity. One approach attempts to reduce putative analytic statements to logical truths by synonym substitution; thus, supposing “unmarried men” is synonymous with “bachelors,” “All bachelors are unmarried men” reduces to “All bachelors are bachelors.” A second approach is to identify analytic statements with “semantic rules,” or “meaning postulates.” A third approach relies on the verificationist theory of meaning. According to that theory, “every meaningful statement is held to be translatable into a statement (true or false) about immediate experience” [TD, 38] or, less radically, “each statement, taken in isolation from its fellows, can admit of confirmation or infirmation” [TD, 41]. Analytic statements are, then, those that are confirmed come what experiences may. If either version of the verificationist approach were correct, then there would be objective facts about the extensions of terms from intuitive semantics, for example, “ ‘. . .’ is synonymous with ‘_’ ” and “ ‘. . .’ is analytic,” across all languages. In short, such metalinguistic terms would be transcendent. In this essay, I focus my discussion primarily on the third, verificationist, approach – though what I shall have to say will bear on the second approach as well. In particular, I explain the models of language contained in verificationism and the weaker confirmationism, and why most positivists abandoned the former for the latter. I explain the connection between confirmationism and intuitive semantics and why considerations of holism alone are incapable of