Reading Questions for Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”

Due Date: 10/18

What is the analytic/synthetic distinction? What is the distinction between intension and extension? What, according to Quine, is the primary business of the theory of meaning, and why is it not identifying the kinds of objects that are meanings?

1. What are the two types of analytic sentences? How are they related? I.e., what gets us interested in synonymy?

Why is lexicographic definition not sufficient to explain synonymy? Why is explication not sufficient to explain synonymy? Why is legislative definition (conventional introduction of new notations) unhelpful, despite being acknowledged as the one clear case of synonymy?

Why is interchangeability salva veritate unable to explain synonymy (and so analyticity)? How is the argument in favor of interchangeability supposed to be circular?

Quine discusses two types of semantical rules; how does each type supposedly fall short of yielding an understanding of analyticity?

2. In the final paragraph of §4 Quine acknowledges that it initially seems reasonable to suppose that the truth of sentences can be analyzed into their linguistic and extralinguistic components; why does it initially seem reasonable? What position are we left in after the arguments of the previous four sections?

What is Quine’s explanation of the Aufbau failure? How does Quine see radical reductionism surviving, and on what basis does he reject it?

3. Quine claims that the two dogmas are at root the same, explain what he means.

Why does he see contextual definition as an advance over term by term definition? Why does he expand this conception to the whole of science?

4. How is it that everything (including the laws of logic) is revisable? Is everything equally likely to be revised? Compare this view Duhem’s.

5. How is our science, our talk of physical objects, like Homeric myths? How different? What is the point?

What happens to metaphysics/ontology and pragmatism, now that Quine has rejected the analytic/synthetic distinction? Also, what happens to the distinction between language and theory?