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destruction in the persons of two of its outstanding representatives.
Either the whole debate is unintelligible or the basic tenet
of empiricism is false.
In the Philosophical Review, July, 1953, A. S. Kaufman has
attempted to answer White and Quine in his article: “The Analytic
and the Synthetic: a Tenable ‘Dualism.’” He urges that
despite the difficulties suggested, “men are able to fix the distinction
[between analytic and synthetic] whenever it becomes
important to do so.”(Footnote: 29 He then goes on to point out
that when once the definition of a concept is arbitrarily selected,
the distinction between analytic and synthetic is determinable
within the context of the definition.(Footnote: 30 “We make
sentences analytic or synthetic by fixing the meanings of component
expressions.”(Footnote: 31
But it seems to me that Kaufman has either missed the point
of White and Quine, or else he has surrendered the philosophical
distinction of the view he defends: for the whole point is
that we could not fix a meaning at all if at least the meaning of
meaning were not fixed and understood to begin with. If, as
Kaufman suggests, it is possible to distinguish between analytic
and synthetic---and if it were not possible, no statement would
be intelligible or meaningful, then it can only be in terms of a
synthetic a priori that repudiates its empiricist background.
And even if we overlook this point, then we still have the
problem of how an arbitrarily fixed meaning can have any real
significance in a discussion of the possibility of human knowledge:
indeed, unless there are some meanings which are fixed
apart from experience on the empirical level, intelligible predication
seems hopeless. How foolish it is for an empiricist to
expound his view! For neither he nor we shall be able to understand
him, since, by his own presuppositions, we cannot understand
the meaning of understanding or meaning itself! If no
meanings are necessarily fixed, . . . . . . . . !