Two Dogmas of Empiricism: Gary Gutting Questions The Paper's Status

On The Very Idea - A Philosophy Podcast

In this third and final installment on WVO Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism, I look at Gary Gutting's examination of the paper in his 2009 book What Philosophers Know. Gutting argues that although analytic philosophers pride themselves on the rigor of their argumentation and Two Dogmas is seen as one of the most important papers of 20th century analytic philosophy, Quine offers few actual arguments in favor of rejecting the analytic/synthetic distinction. Rather he relies on a sympathetic audience perhaps exhausted with logical positivism to appeal on pragmatic and even somewhat minimalist aesthetic sensibilities to abandon the analytic-synthetic distinction in favor of a behaviorist and radically empirical approach to questions of meaning. Perhaps the analytic-synthetic distinction is not robust enough to do the heavy lifting that the logical positivists require of it, but, it is still a relevant and very clear distinction. Or so argued Gutting.