ONT Re: Quine -- Two Dogmas Of Empiricism
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TDOE. Note 17
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| 4. Semantical Rules
|
| Analyticity at first seemed most naturally definable by appeal
| to a realm of meanings. On refinement, the appeal to meanings
| gave way to an appeal to synonymy or definition. But definition
| turned out to be a will-o'-the-wisp, and synonymy turned out to be
| best understood only by dint of a prior appeal to analyticity itself.
| So we are back at the problem of analyticity.
|
| I do not know whether the statement "Everything green is extended"
| is analytic. Now does my indecision over this example really betray
| an incomplete understanding, an incomplete grasp of the "meanings",
| of "green" and "extended"? I think not. The trouble is not with
| "green" or "extended", but with "analytic".
|
| It is often hinted that the difficulty in separating analytic
| statements from synthetic ones in ordinary language is due to
| the vagueness of ordinary language and that the distinction is
| clear when we have a precise artificial language with explicit
| "semantical rules". This, however, as I shall now attempt to
| show, is a confusion.
|
| Quine, "Two Dogmas", p. 32.
|
| 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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