ONT Re: Quine -- Two Dogmas Of Empiricism
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TDOE. Note 2
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| 1. Background for Analyticity
|
| Kant's cleavage between analytic and synthetic truths
| was foreshadowed in Hume's distinction between relations
| of ideas and matters of fact, and in Leibniz's distinction
| between truths of reason and truths of fact. Leibniz spoke
| of the truths of reason as true in all possible worlds.
| Picturesqueness aside, this is to say that the truths
| of reason are those which could not possibly be false.
| In the same vein we hear analytic statements defined as
| statements whose denials are self-contradictory. But this
| definition has small explanatory value; for the notion of
| self-contradictoriness, in the quite broad sense needed for
| this definition of analyticity, stands in exactly the same
| need of clarification as does the notion of analyticity
| itself. The two notions are the two sides of a single
| dubious coin.
|
| Kant conceived of an analytic statement as one that attributes to its
| subject no more than is already conceptually contained in the subject.
| This formulation has two shortcomings: it limits itself to statements of
| subject-predicate form, and it appeals to a notion of containment which is
| left at a metaphorical level. But Kant's intent, evident more from the use
| he makes of the notion of analyticity than from his definition of it, can be
| restated thus: a statement is analytic when it is true by virtue of meanings
| and independently of fact. Pursuing this line, let us examine the concept of
| 'meaning' which is presupposed.
|
| Quine, "Two Dogmas", pp. 20-21.
|
| W.V. Quine,
|"Two Dogmas of Empiricism", 'Philosophical Review', January 1951.
| Reprinted as pages 20-46 in 'From a Logical Point of View',
| 2nd edition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1980.
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