Rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction
In the 1930s and 40s, discussions with Carnap,
Nelson Goodman and
Alfred Tarski, among others, led Quine to doubt the tenability of the distinction between "analytic" statements — those true simply by virtue of the meanings of their words, such as "All bachelors are unmarried" — and "synthetic" statements, those true or false by virtue of facts about the world, such as "There is a cat on the mat." This distinction was central to
logical positivism, the "empiricism" of his famous paper,
Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Quine's criticisms played a major role in the decline of logical positivism although he remained a
verificationist, to the point of invoking verificationism to undermine the analytic-synthetic distinction.
Like other
analytic philosophers before him, Quine accepted the
definition of "analytic" as "true in virtue of meaning alone". Unlike them, however, he concluded that ultimately the definition was
circular. In colloquial terms, Quine accepted that analytic statements are those that are true by definition, then argued that the notion of truth by definition was unsatisfactory.
Quine's chief objection to analyticity is with the notion of
synonymy (sameness of meaning), a sentence being analytic just in case it is synonymous with "All black things are black" (or any other
logical truth). The objection to synonymy hinges upon the problem of collateral information. We intuitively feel that there is a distinction between "All unmarried men are bachelors" and "There have been black dogs", but a competent English speaker will assent to both sentences under all conditions since such speakers also have access to
collateral information bearing on the historical existence of black dogs. Quine maintains that there is no distinction between universally known collateral information and conceptual or analytic truths. However, Quine's philosophy does not provide another plausible explanation of why some sentences spark the intuition of "analyticity" and not others.
Another approach to Quine's objection to analyticity and synonymy emerges from the modal notion of
logical possibility. A traditional
Wittgensteinian view of meaning held that each meaningful sentence was associated with a region in the space of possible worlds. Quine finds the notion of such a space problematic, arguing that there is no distinction between those truths which are universally and confidently believed and those which are necessarily true.
