ONT Re: Quine -- Two Dogmas Of Empiricism
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TDOE. Note 16
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| 3. Interchangeability (concl.)
|
| The effort to explain cognitive synonymy first, for the sake
| of deriving analyticity from it afterward as in Section 1, is
| perhaps the wrong approach. Instead we might try explaining
| analyticity somehow without appeal to cognitive synonymy.
| Afterward we could doubtless derive cognitive synonymy from
| analyticity satisfactorily enough if desired. We have seen
| that cognitive synonymy of "bachelor" and "unmarried man" can
| be explained as analyticity of (3). The same explanation works
| for any pair of one-place predicates, of course, and it can
| be extended in obvious fashion to many-place predicates.
| Other syntactical categories can also be accommodated in
| fairly parallel fashion. Singular terms may be said to be
| cognitively synonymous when the statement of identity formed
| by putting "=" between them is analytic. Statements may be said
| simply to be cognitively synonymous when their biconditional (the
| result of joining them by "if and only if") is analytic. If we
| care to lump all categories into a single formulation, at the
| expense of assuming again the notion of "word" which was
| appealed to early in this section, we can describe any two
| linguistic forms as cognitively synonymous when the two forms
| are interchangeable (apart from occurrences within "words")
| 'salva' (no longer 'veritate' but) 'analyticitate'. Certain
| technical questions arise, indeed, over cases of ambiguity
| or homonymy; let us not pause for them, however, for we
| are already digressing. Let us rather turn our backs
| on the problem of synonymy and address ourselves
| anew to that of analyticity.
|
| Quine, "Two Dogmas", pp. 31-32.
|
| 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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