Indeterminate Analyticity

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1982

Despite the notoriety of Quine's article, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and the controversy that it engendered, the accepted account of Quine's attack on analyticity is inaccurate. According t o such accounts, Quine's basic argument against the analytic-synthetic distinction consists of the claim that the notion of analyticity is unclear because it is prior t o or in some sense rests upon related notions, such as synonymy, which are themselves unclear. In addition, most accounts view Quine's claim that no statement is immune t o revision as a part of his attack o n analyticity, but they misconstrue the function of this thesis. I shall argue that such accounts mischaracterize the actual structure of Quine's attack on analyticity. I believe that the failure t o make this structure explicit has been the cause of numerous misinterpretations of Quine's position. In order t o correct these errors, I shall devote this paper to a n analysis of the basic form of Quine's attack on the notion of analyticity. As a model of the accepted account, 1 shall employ Graham Priest's depiction of Quine's arguments as offered in his recent article, "Two Dogmas of Quineanism." (Priest (1)).

Williard van Orman Quine famously discussed in Two Dogmas of Empiricism that empiricism of the first half of the 20 th century, namely the logical positivism, suffer from two dogmas that go against the nature of empirical thought. One dogma is the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths; the other is a radical reductionism that suggests every meaningful statement can be reduced to a logical construction of immediate experience. Quine argues that the first dogma is an ungrounded, circular belief of empiricism that needs to be abandoned, whereas he argues that the second dogma is an unsatisfactory and unrealistic account of meaning, and suggest that instead of searching meanings on a sentencelevel, we need to adopt a holistic view that emphasizes the importance of a whole background of beliefs and theories when deciding the truthvalue of a given sentence. My argument is that his attack on the distinction between analytic and synthetic is successful against the logical positivist account of analyticity, and in general makes it very difficult to come up with a justified notion of analyticity. As for his criticism of reductionism and his holism, I think he is right to some extent that the meaning and the truth-value of a sentence is not entirely based on a formal structure of sense-experience related to only that sentence.

Erkenntnis 48 (1) 1998 S. 81-99 , 1997

Quine claims that holism (i.e., the Quine-Duhem thesis) prevents us from defining synonymy and analyticity (section II). In Word and Object, he dismisses a notion of synonymy which works well even if holism is true. The notion goes back to a proposal from Grice and Strawson and runs thus: R and S are synonymous iff for all sentences T we have that the logical conjunction of R and T is stimulus-synonymous to that of S and T. Whereas Grice and Strawson did not attempt to defend this definition, I try to show that it indeed gives us a satisfactory account of synonymy. Contrary to Quine, the notion is tighter than stimulus-synonymy – particularly when applied to sentences with less than critical semantic mass (section III). Now according to Quine, analyticity could be defined in terms of synonymy, if synonymy were to make sense: A sentence is analytic iff synonymous to self-conditionals. This leads us to the following notion of analyticity: S is analytic iff, for all sentences T, the logical conjunction of S and T is stimulus-synonymous to T; an analytic sentence does not change the semantic mass of any theory to which it may be conjoined (section IV). This notion is tighter than Quine's stimulus-analyticity; unlike stimulus-analyticity, it does not apply to those sentences from the very center of our theories which can be assented to, come what may, even though they are not synthetic in the intuitive sense (section V). Conclusion: We can have well-defined notions of synonymy and analyticity even if we embrace Quine's holism, naturalism, behaviorism, and radical translation. Quine's meaning skepticism is to be repudiated on Quinean grounds.

Synthese, 2006

This paper investigates the relation between Carnap and Quine's views on analyticity on the one hand, and their views on philosophical analysis or explication on the other. I argue that the stance each takes on what constitutes a successful explication largely dictates the view they take on analyticity. I show that although acknowledged by neither party (in fact Quine frequently expressed his agreement with Carnap on this subject) their views on explication are substantially different. I argue that this difference not only explains their differences on the question of analyticity, but points to a Quinean way to answer a challenge that Quine posed to Carnap. The answer to this challenge leads to a Quinean view of analyticity such that arithmetical truths are analytic, according to Quine's own remarks, and set theory is at least defensibly analytic.