ABSTRACT
Quine rejected the analytic-synthetic distinction in nearly all of its traditional forms. We concluded the last chapter with the observation that this rejection was an important element in his vision of naturalized philosophy, and consequently of his re-conception of the business of philosophy. Yet Quine’s discontent with the analytic-synthetic distinction took many years to reach its full expression. By Quine’s own telling, the seeds of his ‘apostasy’ appeared in his 1936 paper ‘Truth by Convention,’ and the arguments of that paper formed the basis of one of Quine’s later criticisms of analyticity (Quine 1986, 16). By 1951, after discussions with Carnap, Alonzo Church, Nelson Goodman, Alfred Tarski, and Morton White (Quine 1953a, xii), Quine composed his most direct attack on the notion of analyticity with ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism.’ The impact of this ‘apostasy’ is both widely recognized and yet diffi cult to explain. Why did so much appear to hang on this one distinction? Why did the dispute over the distinction exercise so many analytic philosophers for so long?
