Willard Van Orman Quine

48 richard creath
fully to grips with the central thrust of Quine’s argument against
analyticity. This has a number of distinct parts. We must identify
that central argument and the demands Quine places on any satisfactory
scientific concept, evaluate the legitimacy of these demands,
and assay what it would take to meet the reasonable part thereof. In
addition, I shall try to determine to what extent the situation regarding
analyticity may have changed in the last fifty years – either in
Quine’s arguments, in his assessments of their relative merits, or in
the responses that can be made to them. This will allow us to reflect
on the prospects both for an analytic-synthetic distinction and for
epistemologies defined by it or in opposition to it.
1. intelligibility
Quine begins his attack on analyticity by distinguishing two classes
of analytic claims. The first comprises the logical truths, that is,
those that remain true under all reinterpretations of their nonlogical
terms. For example, ‘All white horses are white’ is a logical
truth since every reinterpretation of its nonlogical terms, ‘white’ and
‘horses’, yields another truth such as ‘All black ravens are black’.
The second class of analytic claims comprises such truths as ‘No
bachelor is married’. These, which Quine would later call truths
of essential predication (see CLT 402 ff), become logical truths when
synonyms are substituted for synonyms. For example, assuming ‘unmarried
man’ and ‘bachelor’ are synonymous, substituting the former
for the latter in ‘No bachelor is married’ yields the logical truth
‘No unmarried man is married’. This reduction of the class of essential
predications to the class of logical truths would do as a general
characterization of this second class of analytic sentences but for the
fact that synonymy is itself, according to Quine, just as obscure and
in the same way as analyticity. We might search in turn for a general
criterion of synonymy in terms of definition, meaning, necessity,
and the like. Quine finds these, too, unilluminating and suggests
that they can be understood only by appeal to analyticity.
This would obviously be circular, which suggests that what Quine
objects to about this whole family of terms is the circularity of such
attempts at clarification. This suggestion is further reinforced by the
fact that Quine explicitly makes the charge of circularity when he
summarizes a reprise of this argument a few years later (see CLT 403).
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006