San Francisco Philosophy Reading Group

For this session, we will be reading W.V.O. Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism". Considered one of the most important papers in 20th century philosophy, "Two Dogmas" attacks two of the central aspects of logical positivism: the analytic/synthetic distinction and reductionism (the thesis that each meaningful statement can be individually verified by experience).

Quine argues that every proposed definition of "analytic" is circular—synonymy presupposes analyticity, definition merely reports usage, semantic rules reduce to "analytic-for-L" without ever explaining analyticity itself. Against reductionism, he proposes confirmation holism: "Our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body." This "web of belief" metaphor suggests that any statement can be held true if we make sufficient adjustments elsewhere—even logical laws.