Willard Van Orman Quine

ichard creath
2 Quine on the Intelligibility and
Relevance of Analyticity
W. V. O. Quine ‘s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (TDEa 20–43) is perhaps
the most famous paper in twentieth-century philosophy. Certainly,
it is the most widely reproduced of Quine’s works. Even if it
had been ignored, it would still hold a special place for Quine, for to
a large extent Quine has defined himself and his philosophy in opposition
to Rudolf Carnap’s separation of our scientific claims into
the analytic and the synthetic as well as in opposition to any theory
of knowledge, such as Carnap’s, in which the analytic-synthetic distinction
figures so prominently. “Two Dogmas” is central to Quine’s
work if only because it contains his first sustained public attack on
analyticity. Moreover, the paper’s last section is the first, and one of
the most systematic, of his sketches of an alternative epistemology.
Given the amount of attention that “Two Dogmas” has had
and the variety of its readers, it is hardly surprising that its arguments
have been variously understood. It has been called an attack
on empiricism or on reductionism. It has been said to embrace a
behaviorism of an antitheoretical sort. The fault that it finds in analyticity
is sometimes said to lie in the circularity of the definitions
for it. None of this seems to me to be very likely. Sometimes the
paper is said to say exactly what Quine was saying nearly fifty years
later. This also seems unlikely, for Quine continued to develop and
modify his arguments and to reassess their relative importance. Nor
is it surprising that he would have. Indeed, the rich body of Quine’s
later writings and discussions can be a hindrance as well as a help
in understanding what some earlier passage may have meant, either
to Quine or to his readers. Such evidence should be used, of course,
but with caution. It is not my intention here to focus exclusively
on “Two Dogmas.” Rather, I shall step back a bit in order to come
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