Grazer Philosophische Studien 66 (2003), 7–12.

TWO DOGMAS OF EMPIRICISM. FIFTY YEARS AFTER

Herbert SCHNÄDELBACH Humboldt-Universität Berlin

Summary Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, a short paper which appeared 50 years ago in the Philosophical Review, was a milestone within the development of analytic philosophy. It was more important than many big volumes before and after. This might strike someone not familiar with the analytic tradition as a bit unusual; such impact one might expect from whole books like the Critique of Pure Reason or the Tractatus, but not from a 16 page paper. In these remarks, which opened a conference on Quine’s seminal paper, I would like to indicate why “Two Dogmas” was and still is so important, not only as a standard topic of modern philosophical teaching and as a provocative treatment of the evergreen problem of analyticity, but also as one of the most challenging answers to the question what role philosophy can play in an age of science.

Donald Davidson says somewhere: “In my view, erasing the line between the analytic and synthetic saved philosophy of language as a serious subject”. This seems to me to apply to analytic philosophy in general: erasing the line between the analytic and the synthetic saved analytic philosophy as a serious subject. (The question to what extent other types of philosophy can be regarded as serious disciplines should be left open at the moment.) Why would the line between the analytic and the synthetic threaten philosophy in the analytic tradition? In this tradition, science and philosophy were conceived of as complementary, a view shared by German Neokantianism and Husserl’s phenomenol- ogy. Due to its empiricist origins, early analytic philosophy held that there are no synthetic statements a priori. All synthetic statements a posteriori, however, belong to the empirical sciences. Philosophy not being an empirical science, it thus would seem confi ned to analytic state- ments which were thought of as a priori by defi nition. But at the same time, following Frege and Russell, analytic statements were normally held to exist only within logic and mathematics. But then, what was left for philosophers to do — except logic and mathematics? The answer was: “applied logic”. But, applied to what? Since the world had been ceded to the empirical sciences the only thing left that philosophers could apply logic to seemed to be scientifi c language. “Logische Analyse der Wissenschaftssprache” (Carnap) thus came to be the new password for scientifi c philosophy, and it was used as the leading slogan in the battle against metaphysics and other symptoms of modern irrationalism. Philosophical analysis, on this reading of ‘analysis’, was understood as a critical enterprise. Its method consisted in syntactic transformation of allegedly scientifi c statements into the language of Principia Mathematica in order to fi nd out whether they were even candidates for having empirical meaning. Their empirical meaning itself, if any, had then to be determined in accordance with the verifi cation principle after fi rst reducing the statements in question to atomic statements. Both kinds of analysis, syntactic transformation and logical reduction, were supposed to operate within the limits of the analytic. There was a problem, however, a problem fi rst exposed by G. E. Moore and thereafter extensively discussed from the thirties onwards: the so-called paradox of analysis. This paradox results from supposing that any correct philosophical analysis consists of nothing but analytic statements. For analytic statements can be transformed into logical truths. Logical truths, however, were supposed to be tautologies and tautologies are trivial. So philosophical analysis is correct only if its results are trivial. Thus, rather ironically, it was just within the analytic tradition of philosophy inspired by Russell and Moore that analysis itself came to seem questionable as the very method of philosophy — as witnessed by the title of John Wisdom’s famous 1934 paper “Is Analysis a Useful Method in Philosophy?” This seems very doubtful if philoso- phy is supposed to be nothing but logical calculation trying to reduce everything to logical truths. Analysis does not seem very useful if it reduces philosophical wisdom to insights like ‘All bachelors are unmar- ried men’ while all other kinds of knowledge are relegated to science and common sense. Quine’s “Two Dogmas” provided the most effective means of getting rid of the paradox of analysis. Erasing the borderline between the ana-

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