Essay Database

In his Two Dogmas of Empiricism, Quine addresses what he views as problematic claims made by Carnap. The first problem Quine has with Carnap's epistemology is about his definition of state-descriptions. The problem is in two parts: first Quine says that Carnap's version of analyticity is conditional, because it requires atomic sentences in a language to be mutually independent. The second part of the problem is that, Carnap's attempt to explore analyticity by way of …

…more thorough pragmatism"(207). Quine feels that the division between synthetic and analytic has been too hastily assumed, and that a more thorough approach to the relationship would be helpful. He believes that the boundary between analytic and synthetic is too harshly drawn, and that the difference is only in degrees. He asks Carnap to suppress his foundations in our traditional scientific method and suggests that sometimes it is not always pragmatism that shapes our perception.