Two Dogmas of Empiricism
1951 — against analytic/synthetic and reductionism
Work
Classic paper attacking the analytic/synthetic distinction and radical reduction of meaning to experience.
Primary publication. Quine, W. V. O. (1951). Two dogmas of empiricism. The Philosophical Review, 60(1), 20–43. DOI: 10.2307/2181906
Note. Revised version in Quine, From a Logical Point of View (1953; 2nd ed. 1961), Harvard University Press — text differs slightly from the 1951 journal version.
What Quine argued
- Reject a strict analytic/synthetic boundary.
- Confirmation holism: empirical content is distributed across a web of belief; no isolated statement bears all empirical import alone.
What we take from it (partial)
- Do not architect observation and theory as sealed silos — dependencies between claims, tier-one captures, and Real must be traceable (provenance graph).
- Reject a strict analytic/synthetic line as the foundation of our tier vocabulary.
What we do not take
- Web-of-belief holism as the author’s metaphysics — revision rippling everywhere with no principled entity boundaries.
- Quine’s broader naturalism or scepticism about modality as doctrine.
The author’s positive stance is emergent physicalism, non-reductive physicalism, and emergent entities — see Philosophical stance. This is the only source entry that records the Quine partial-adoption detail for the corpus.