ABSTRACT
This chapter examines W.V.O. Quine’s critique of the positivist account of logic in particular, for analytic truths do not just express conventionally established relationships between the meanings of empirical concepts, but are meant to explain a priority generally, including logical truths. The positivists, in making logical truths analytic, offer a conventionalist account of logical truth. If analytic truths, generally, express conventionally determined relations between the meanings of our words, then logical truths will express the conventionally determined conceptual relations between the meaning of logical words, e.g., ‘and’, ‘not’, ‘or’, etc. That is, logical truths express the conventionally determined relations between the logical concepts of negation, conjunction, and disjunction. Thus, for positivism, the basis of logical truth is conventional agreement: all logical truths express linguistic conventions and are true in virtue of the linguistic conventions they express. This is the thesis of conventionalism that Quine criticizes.
