Two Dogmas of Empiricism

Introduction

Quine presented the paper to the American Philosophical Association in December 1950; it appeared in the Philosophical Review in January 1951 and was reprinted in From a Logical Point of View (1953). He tries in turn to explain analyticity through meaning, synonymy, definition and the semantic rules of artificial languages, and finds that each attempt goes in a circle. Against the second dogma, the idea that each statement can be confirmed in isolation, he holds that our knowledge is a man-made fabric that meets experience only along its edges; any statement can be held true if we adjust enough elsewhere, and none, not even a law of logic, is immune to revision. The paper ends by recommending a more thorough pragmatism.

Connections

Criticizes

• The Logical Structure of the World1928 · Rudolf Carnap

Taken up in

• Word and Object1960 · W. V. O. Quine
• Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature1979 · Richard Rorty

Criticized in

• On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme1974 · Donald Davidson

More works by W. V. O. Quine

• 1960Word and Object
• 1969Epistemology Naturalized