Quine’s topic in the second of the two papers by him we will discuss this week is the rejection of analytic truth. The first paper indicates part of the significance of that rejection by exhibiting the place of the idea of analytic truth in Carnap’s linguistic frameworks.
• Quine will comment on analytic truth towards the end of this paper. His initial focus is on his views on the nature of “ontological commitment.” He introduces the term in the second paragraph and presents his ideas about it on pp. 65-67. These ideas are somewhat in the spirit of Russell’s view that ordinary proper names are not really names but disguised definite descriptions (and thus really rest on the use of logical expressions like “there is” and “all,” what Quine refers to as “quantification”). There is a relation also to Wittgenstein’s idea that the world consists of facts, not things; for Quine’s views suggest that what is fundamental is not the things we name but the facts that make our claims of existence true.
• Quine’s critical aim is to attack Carnap’s distinction between external and internal questions of existence and the related distinction between “category” and “subclass” questions (see p. 69). The latter terms are Quine’s, not Carnap’s, but they usefully suggest connections between Carnap’s views and ways of thinking about ontology that go back to Aristotle. You don’t need to worry about the details of Quine’s “logical digression” regarding the foundations of set theory, which occupies the whole of p. 70. His point is that it is always possible to get by with one sort of variable (or one sort of pronoun) and that Carnap’s distinction must rest not on syntax but on a distinction between the analytic and synthetic. The quotation from Carnap on p. 71 not only attests to his agreement about what was at issue between him and Quine but also provides a useful way of thinking about Quine’s position.
Quine’s ultimate aim in “Two Dogmas” is to argue against the analytic/synthetic distinction, and the real heart of his argument against the distinction comes only in the last two sections of the paper. That will be the focus of our discussion on Fri.; but you will need to have some familiarity with the first part of the paper, where Quine ties the idea of analyticity to a variety of other concepts, so I’ve also assigned sections I and IV for discussion today. As you read them, you should ask yourself what it would be like to abandon the distinctions and the other concepts that Quine links to the idea of analyticity (a number of these distinctions and concepts are marked by italics below).
• In §I, Quine considers three fairly direct ways of defining analytic truth—as truth in all possible worlds (20), as truth in virtue of meaning (21), and as any result of substituting synonyms for synonyms in a logical truth (23). His discussion of the distinction between intension and extension and of essence (21f) is less directly tied to his argument but it will be important for us since it is relevant to issues raised in the last week of the course. (The final discussion of Carnap’s state descriptions (23f) is a historical artifact; as Quine notes, Carnap’s idea was not intended as a general account of analyticity; but it might have been thought to provide such an account by someone who read this paper when it was first published.)
• In §IV, doubts about analyticity are connected with doubts about the idea of semantical rules (31). Although the discussion will often seem to turn on technical issues, this section is broad in its import because Quine is in effect questioning the very notion of meaning. He questions it in a way which recalls earlier work in which he had cast doubt on the idea of truth by convention, and his doubts about analyticity can be seen to at least run parallel to broad doubts about that idea. The full implications of Quine’s doubts about analyticity start to be indicated in the last paragraph of §IV (34f), where he casts doubt on the distinction between matters of language and matters of fact.