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ONT Quine -- Two Dogmas Of Empiricism




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TDOE.  Note 1

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| Two Dogmas of Empiricism
|
| 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.  Both dogmas, I shall argue, are
| ill-founded.  One effect of abandoning them
| is, as we shall see, a blurring of the
| supposed boundary between speculative
| metaphysics and natural science.
| Another effect is a shift
| toward pragmatism.
|
| Quine, "Two Dogmas", p. 20.
|
| W.V. Quine,
|"Two Dogmas of Empiricism", 'Philosophical Review', January 1951.
| Reprinted as pages 20-46 in 'From a Logical Point of View',
| 2nd edition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1980.

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