• The heart of Quine's argument against the analytic/synthetic distinction lies in an attack on the verification theory of meaning that occupies the bulk of §5.

• On pp. 35f, he presents the theory as he sees it (remember you have already seen it described in Bloomberg and Feigl's paper) and shows how, if sustainable, it would support the analytic/synthetic distinction.

• Quine's main target is a strong form of the verification theory which he calls "radical reductionism." He describes and attacks this on pp. 36-38. Quine's references to Carnap's Aufbau (his Der logische Aufbau der Welt, or Logical Construction of the World) are rather sketchy but they are important. Notice especially the reference to maximizing or minimizing "certain over-all features" (at the bottom of p. 37). Here think about the idea of achieving the "laziest world compatible with our experience" mentioned above it on p. 37, something that you should connect with Russell's talk of finding the "simplest" hypothesis to explain a cat's apparent behavior.

• Someone holding the verification theory need not be committed to radical reductionism and Quine indicates a less ambitious alternative beginning on p. 38. His argument against this "attenuated form" follows the same lines as his argument against the stronger version though it is necessarily less conclusive. He states it in the third full paragraph of p. 38.

• Quine's later added a footnote to this paragraph in which he referred to the physicist, philosopher, and historian of science Pierre Duhem, who was active around the beginning of the 20th century. Quine refers to an argument of Duhem's against the idea that experimental evidence could ever force anyone to reject a hypothesis. The reason Duhem denied this possibility was that further auxiliary assumptions are always required to tie a hypothesis to experimental tests--if only to predict the operation of experimental apparatus. And this means that, if the predicted result of an experiment fails, the hypothesis being tested can be retained if blame is cast on one of these other assumptions. Notice that this would mean that a hypothesis could not be tested by itself but only as a part of a "corporate body" including the further assumptions. Quine strengthens Duhem's claim, suggesting that Duhem's point applies to all empirical statements and that no boundary can be drawn around the corporate body of assumptions relevant to any one of them.

• Beginning at the end of p. 38, Quine turns his arguments against the verification theory into an argument against the analytic/synthetic distinction. His argument goes roughly as follows: anyone who maintains the analytic/synthetic distinction is committed to a distinction between a factual and linguistic components of truth and, if an empiricist, to the verification theory as an account of the factual component--but this theory has been shown to fail as an account of a separable component of meaning.

Quine's concluding comment in this section--that the smallest meaningful unit is "the whole of science" (p. 39)--can be seen as his topic in the final section of the paper.

• Quine's alternative to the two "dogmas" that he has criticized centers on two ideas, each taking up about half of §6.

• The first is the comparison of our beliefs to a field of force underdetermined by its boundary conditions in experience (pp. 39-41). A standard concrete image for a field with boundary conditions is a flexible sheet (for a drumhead perhaps) being pulled at its edges. The field would be undetermined if the forces at its edges did not uniquely determine the positions of interior points--for an extreme case of this, imagine the sheet is made of bubble gum.

• Quine's second way of filling out his alternative to the dogmas (pp. 41-43) lies in his idea of "posits" and his claim that various such posits—e.g., "brick houses on Elm Street" (pp. 40, 43)—differ from centaurs or Homer's gods "only in degree and not in kind" (p. 41).