ONT Re: Quine -- Two Dogmas Of Empiricism
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TDOE. Note 7
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| 2. Definition
|
| There are those who find it soothing to say that the analytic statements
| of the second class reduce to those of the first class, the logical truths,
| by 'definition'; "bachelor", for example, is 'defined' as "unmarried man".
| But how do we find that "bachelor" is defined as "unmarried man"? Who
| defined it thus, and when? Are we to appeal to the nearest dictionary,
| and accept the lexicographer's formulation as law? Clearly this would
| be to put the cart before the horse. The lexicographer is an empirical
| scientist, whose business is the recording of antecedent facts; and if
| he glosses "bachelor" as "unmarried man" it is because of his belief that
| there is a relation of synonymy between those forms, implicit in general or
| preferred usage prior to his own work. The notion of synonymy presupposed
| here has still to be clarified, presumably in terms relating to linguistic
| behavior. Certainly the "definition" which is the lexicographer's report
| of an observed synonymy cannot be taken as the ground of the synonymy.
|
| Quine, "Two Dogmas", p. 24.
|
| 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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