Tradition
Two Dogmas of Empiricism
Overview
"Two Dogmas of Empiricism" is a canonical essay by analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine published in 1951. According to University of Sydney professor of philosophy Peter Godfrey-Smith, this "paper [is] sometimes regarded as the most important in all of twentieth-century philosophy". The paper is an attack on two central aspects of the logical positivists' philosophy: the first being the analytic–synthetic distinction between analytic truths and synthetic truths, explained by Quine as truths grounded only in meanings and independent of facts, and truths grounded in facts; the other being reductionism, the theory that each meaningful statement gets its meaning from some logical construction of terms that refer exclusively to immediate experience.
"Two Dogmas" has six sections. The first four focus on analyticity, the last two on reductionism. There, Quine turns the focus to the logical positivists' theory of meaning. He also presents his own holistic theory of meaning.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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As we have taken upon us the task of determining, clearly and certainly, the limits of pure reason in the sphere of transcendentalism, and as the efforts of reason in this direction are persisted in, even after the plainest and most expressive warnings, hope still beckoning us past the limits of experience into the splendours of the intellectual world—it becomes necessary to cut away the last anchor of this…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason
States what Two Dogmas of Empiricism is; the author is tied to Two Dogmas of Empiricism in the knowledge graph.
Let me be permitted on this occasion to make one more remark, namely, that every step that we make with pure reason, even in the practical sphere where no attention is paid to subtle speculation, nevertheless accords with all the material points of the Critique of the Theoretical Reason as closely and directly as if each step had been thought out with deliberate purpose to establish this confirmation. Such a…
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason
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The second type, which may be called evolutionism, derived its predominance from Darwin, and must be reckoned as having had Herbert Spencer for its first philosophical representative; but in recent times it has become, chiefly through William James and M. Bergson, far bolder and far more searching in its innovations than it was in the hands of Herbert Spencer. The third type, which may be called "logical atomism"…
Bertrand Russell, Our Knowledge of the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy
Close in meaning to Two Dogmas of Empiricism; the term itself is not named.
Philosophers who discussed Two Dogmas of Empiricism
Related ideas
- Garrett Birkhoff
- General relativity
- Homer
- Immanuel Kant
- Analytic philosophy
- John von Neumann
- Truth value
- Law of excluded middle
- Logical positivism
- Metaphysics
- Classical mechanics
- Holism
- Word and Object
- P. F. Strawson
- Sense data
- Skepticism
- Indeterminacy of translation
- Semantics
- Empirical evidence
- University of Sydney
- University of Chicago
- Paul Grice
- Willard Van Orman Quine
- Logical truth
Place in the tradition
Part of American philosophy.