Quine’s View(s) of Logical Truth

Abstract

The effort to undermine the distinction between necessary and contingent truth is a theme that dominates Quine's work. It has led him to argue at length that the laws of logic have no special epistemic status, but his accounts of the topic show strains and apparent inconsistencies. My aim here is to clarify Quine's view of logical truth. The discussion will be largely confined to propositional logic. Predicate logic raises further problems about ontology and reference (see [17], 60-61), and anyway propositional logic generates the main philosophical issues. Kleene, for example, has traced the oddities of intuitionistic predicate logic and arithmetic to the replacement of the classical propositional