Two dogmas of empiricism

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Abstract

Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Kant’s cleavage between analytic and synthetic truths was foreshadowed in Hume’s distinction between relations of ideas and matters of fact, and in Leibniz’s distinction between truths of reason and truths of fact. A natural suggestion, deserving close examination, is that the synonymy of two linguistic forms consists simply in their inter-changeability in all contexts without change of truth value interchangeability, in Leibniz’s phrase, salva veritate. The dogma of reductionism survives in the supposition that each statement, taken in isolation from its fellows, can admit of confirmation or infirmation at all.

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Quine, W. V. O. (2016). Two dogmas of empiricism. In Clarity is not Enough: Essays in Criticism of Linguistic Philosophy (pp. 110–132). Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315534732-4

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