ABSTRACT
In the following, I want to revisit the criticism of the analytic–synthetic distinction brought forth in Putnam's “The Analytic and the Synthetic” and later writings and compare it with Quine's familiar attack on the same distinction in the last two sections of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” My purpose in this comparison will be to find the features of Putnam's argument that prepare the ground for his increasingly explicit acknowledgment of the utility of a successor distinction, which sharply separates his pragmatic, induction-based epistemological commitments from Quine's naturalistic rejection of any such project. The following brief review of some doctrinal agreements vis-à-vis logical empiricism will set the stage for specifying the issue between Putnam and Quine regarding the epistemic analytic–synthetic distinction.
