Two Dogmas of Empiricism

作者：W. V. Quine · 发表于：Sententiae · 年份：1976 · DOI：10.1007/978-94-010-1863-0_2 · 被引用次数：2693 · 研究领域：Philosophy and History of Science、Philosophy, Science, and History、Science and Climate Studies

Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which aresynthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill-founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism.