Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine on the Intelligibility and Relevance of Analyticity 61
does not immediately give us a notion of synonymy that will do for
translation. But even as it stands, with just an intralinguistic notion
of synonymy, it is sufficient to define ‘analytic’ as suggested in
“Two Dogmas” for any language, including English, for which the
logical truths can be identified. For that matter, it is premature to
give up on translation. In The Logical Syntax of Language, Carnap
had defined a translation relation that presupposed only an intralinguistic
notion of implication (definable on the basis of an intralinguistic
notion of synonymy). 7 The fundamental idea was that a translation
is a mapping of expressions of one language into those of
another so as to preserve intralinguistic implication. This is a very
strong requirement and is likely to result in there being no satisfactory
translations rather than there being several. In this, Carnap’s definition
accords better with standard expectations than does Quine’s
discussion of the indeterminacy of translation. In any case, translation
is beside our present point; what Quine says is enough to save
analyticity.
These are not the only changes in Quine’s views nor even necessarily
the most important ones. It could be argued that his preoccupation
with reference and ontology generally gave way to a greater concern
for issues of an epistemic sort, and what he said about these may ultimately
be more momentous than the changes we have discussed.
Because of the importance and originality of his holistic picture, one
can only applaud the increased attention to epistemology. But analyticity
is important too, and regarding it the situation seems to have
changed dramatically following “Two Dogmas,” no doubt more fundamentally
than Quine admitted. In that earlier paper, the demand
for behavioral criteria had raised a deep and potentially fatal question
about analyticity. If the demand could not be met, both the concept
of analyticity and the epistemology that rested on it would have to be
rejected as unintelligible. The evidence from Quine’s later writing,
however, is that the crucial demand can be met to the full extent that
it is legitimate. Moreover, “Two Dogmas” introduced a sketch for a
novel approach to science. This would render analyticity irrelevant
if each of two conditions were to be met. First, enough details would
have to be provided to assure us that that new approach is what it
seems in avoiding concepts from the theory of meaning without generating
other difficulties. Second, a non-question-begging argument
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