‘Two dogmas’ revisited

Abstract

I believe that the time has come to take another look at Quine's (1951) celebrated article ‘Two dogmas of empiricism’. The analysis of this article that is usually offered in philosophy seminars is very simple: Quine was attacking the analytic–synthetic distinction. His argument was simply that all attempts to define the distinction are circular . I think that this is much too simple a view of what was going on. (The continuing recognition of the great importance of ‘Two dogmas’ shows that at some level many readers must be aware that something deep and momentous for philosophy was going on.) I shall argue that what was importantly going on in Quine's paper was also more subtle and more complicated than Quine and his defenders (and not just the critics) perceived. Some of Quine's arguments were directed against one notion of analyticity, some against another. Moreover, Quine's arguments were of unequal merit. One of the several notions of analyticity that Quine attacked in ‘Two dogmas of empiricism’ was close to one of Kant's accounts of analyticity (namely, that an analytic judgment is one whose negation reduces to a contradiction), or, rather, to a ‘linguistic’ version of Kant's account: a sentence is analytic if it can be obtained from a truth of logic by putting synonyms for synonyms. Let us call this the linguistic notion of analyticity. Against this notion, Quine's argument is little more than that Quine cannot think how to define ‘synonymy’.