Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine on the Intelligibility and Relevance of Analyticity 53
these: What claims need no justification at all? What inferences need
no further justification? What inference preserves the degree of justification
of any set of premises? Quine does eventually begin to
address such questions, though in a less overtly epistemic and normative
form. He does not do so, however, either in “Two Dogmas”
or in the second chapter of Word and Object, which deals with translation
and meaning.
Insofar as Quine’s survey of ways to clarify concepts of meaning
includes those attempts that would have been most naturally offered
(and I think that, with the caveat of the previous paragraph, it does
so) and insofar as the attempts fail (and they do), Quine can claim to
have the basis of an inductive argument that the requisite behavioral
criteria will not be forthcoming. So Quine does have an argument
against the intelligibility of analyticity. It was never intended to be
airtight. But its structure is fairly clear, its basis is a reasonable and
minimal demand for behavioral criteria, and what it would take to
defeat the argument is also clear. This is just what one would want
from an argument in science.
2. relevance
I shall postpone the question of whether Quine’s challenge to provide
behavioral criteria for analyticity can be met and shall turn instead to
the so-called second dogma of empiricism. The opening paragraph of
“Two Dogmas” identifies the second dogma as reductionism, and §5,
where the second dogma is discussed, links it to the verification theory
of meaning. This challenge to reductionism and the verification
theory is slightly unexpected because, while both terms have many
senses, Quine is in some sense both a reductionist and a verificationist.
Quine generally favors whatever reductions can be achieved,
whether in ontology or in ideology, and the whole demand for behavioral
criteria has its roots in verificationist accounts of significance.
In any case, Quine’s motivation for taking them up here is that the
verification theory (of meaning rather than significance) purports to
be an account of synonymy. If it is acceptable in this capacity, then
analyticity can be saved after all. So analyticity is still the topic. Indeed,
Quine says that the two dogmas are at root identical (see TDEa
38). Even so, something has profoundly changed in Quine’s discussion
in §§5–6 beyond his consideration of a subsidiary thesis about
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