The two dogmas of empiricism: is the rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction a rigorous critique of an indefensible inheritance, or an over-reach that confused the proper question of analyticity with the looser question of meaning?

W.V.O. Quine, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The analytic-synthetic distinction and the reductionism it underwrites — the two dogmas of empiricism — are not defensible.1 Every attempted explication of analyticity (Carnap's meaning postulates, the appeal to synonymy, the appeal to definition) presupposes the very notion of meaning that an account of analyticity is supposed to clarify.2

Reductionism — the idea that each meaningful statement can be confirmed in isolation by some bundle of sense-experience — fails because our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body.3 The two dogmas are abandoned together, and what replaces them is confirmation holism: knowledge is a single fabric whose interior is shielded from direct experiential pressure but whose every part is in principle revisable.45

Sources

  1. But the dogma of reductionism has, in a subtler and more tenuous form, continued to influence the thought of empiricist.. The notion lingers that to each statement, or each synthetic statement, there is associated a unique range of possible sensory events such that the occurrence of any of them would add to the likelihood of truth of the statement, and that there is associated > TWO DOGMAS > OF EMPIRICISM > 41 also…
    From a Logical Point of View, pp. 47–48
  2. Carnap's present positionTM is that one has specified a language quite rigorously only when he has fixed, by dint of so-called meaning postulates, what sentences are to count as analytic. The "Two dogmas." +8 See particularly "Meaning postulates." proponent is supposed to distinguish between those of his declarations which count as meaning postulates, and thus engender analyticity, and those which do not.
    THE PARADOX OF EPIMENIDES, pp. 134–135
  3. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill-founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as we: shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another &ect is a shift toward pragmatism. > 1.
    From a Logical Point of View, pp. 26–27
  4. Because of the easy interdefinability of these terms, one of them suffices to represent the group; and a handy choice is 'analytic'. In recent classical philosophy the usual gesture toward explaining 'analytic' amounts to something like this: a statement is analytic if it is true by virtue solely of meanings of words and independently of matters of fact.
    THE PARADOX OF EPIMENIDES, pp. 146–147
  5. I suspect it is responsible for my being widely classified as a pragmatist. I don't object, except that I am not clear on what it takes to qualify as a pragmatist. I was merely taking the word from Carnap and handing it back: whatever sense framework science pragmatic, so rest of science. stand off, dogmas, consider point repudiating them.
    Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist, pp. 397–398

Where the argument is made

  • 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' (1951, Philosophical Review, in From a Logical Point of View) — the canonical paper
  • 'Truth by Convention' (1936) — the early version of the critique
  • 'Carnap and Logical Truth' (1954, in The Ways of Paradox)
  • 'On Carnap's Views on Ontology' (1951, in The Ways of Paradox)
  • the relevant passages in Word and Object on stimulus-synonymy and the failure of the analytic

How the argument was received

'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' (1951) is among the most cited papers in twentieth-century philosophy and the canonical break with Carnapian logical empiricism. Grice and Strawson's 'In Defense of a Dogma' (1956) defended an everyday analytic-synthetic distinction grounded in linguistic competence rather than in the formal-semantic reconstruction Quine had attacked. Carnap's reply (in Schilpp, 1963) maintained that the meaning-postulates approach handles the circularity charge once one accepts the framework relativity of analyticity. The contemporary defence of analyticity (Paul Boghossian's 'Analyticity Reconsidered' 1996; Gillian Russell's Truth in Virtue of Meaning 2008; Jerrold Katz's Cogitations 1986) reconstructs the distinction on more careful grounds. The position remains contested in contemporary philosophy of language.