Meaning, Translation and Ontology

Abstract

W. V. Quine’s ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’1 is generally admitted to be one of the most important philosophical articles published this century. It is nominally, as the title suggests, an attack on empiricism. The ‘two dogmas’ which the paper attacks are, first, reductionism: ‘the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construction upon terms which refer to immediate experience’;2 and, secondly the belief that there is a clear distinction to be drawn between analytic truths, which are true in virtue of the meanings of the expressions employed in stating them, and synthetic truths, which are true, if at all, because some matter of fact is the case. But the hostility to empiricism is more apparent than real. Elsewhere Quine speaks of ‘two cardinal tenets of empiricism’ as remaining ‘unassailable… to this day’.3 The two cardinal tenets, as distinct from the two dogmas, are (1) that ‘whatever evidence there is for science is sensory evidence’,4 and (2) that ‘all inculcation of meanings of words must rest ultimately on sensory evidence’.5