“Two Dogmas of Empiricism” is W.V.O. Quine’s 1951 essay that mounted a devastating critique of logical positivism’s core assumptions. The paper challenged two fundamental commitments of empiricist philosophy and reshaped the landscape of post-war analytic thought.
The first dogma: the analytic/synthetic distinction
Quine attacks the assumption that a clear distinction exists between:
- Analytic truths: Statements true by virtue of meaning alone (e.g., “All bachelors are unmarried”)
- Synthetic truths: Statements true by virtue of how the world is (e.g., “Snow is white”)
Logical positivists relied on this distinction to separate logical/mathematical knowledge from empirical science whilst dismissing metaphysics as meaningless. Quine argues that all traditional attempts to define analyticity fail:
- Definition: Definitions themselves come from dictionaries and linguistic practice—they’re empirical, not purely logical
- Synonymy: We can’t define analyticity via synonymy without presupposing what counts as sameness of meaning
- Semantic rules: Appealing to “semantic rules” just pushes the problem back—what makes something a semantic rather than factual rule?
Quine contends that from a genuinely empiricist standpoint, there’s no principled way to distinguish meaning-based from fact-based truths. Both are answerable to experience.
The second dogma: reductionism
The second dogma is reductionist empiricism: the view that each meaningful statement can be reduced to statements about immediate experience, with each statement verified or falsified individually.
Quine argues this atomistic picture is wrong. Our beliefs form a web or field that faces experience holistically:
- No individual statement faces the “tribunal of experience” alone
- Statements connect to experience only through their relationships to other statements
- When experience conflicts with our expectations, we can revise any part of the web
- Even logical and mathematical beliefs can be revised if doing so best accommodates recalcitrant experience
This holism means:
- “Analytic” truths are just those we’re most reluctant to revise (they’re near the centre of the web)
- “Empirical” truths are more peripheral and readily revised
- But there’s no difference in kind, only in degree of centrality
Political and institutional context
Quine’s challenge arrived just as analytic philosophy was securing institutional dominance in American universities. The critique destabilised logical positivism’s core assumptions at the very moment the movement appeared to have triumphed.
Rather than weakening analytic philosophy, this internal crisis fostered a shift toward new forms of rigour. In the politically charged atmosphere of Cold War America—where McCarthyism was disciplining academic discourse and RAND-style technocracy was reshaping intellectual culture—analytic philosophy responded by emphasising formalisation, technical precision, and political neutrality.
These were not merely intellectual preferences but conditions of survival in an environment where overt political critique was treated as suspicion-worthy. The collapse of positivism coincided with the professionalisation of philosophy departments and the consolidation of an image of philosophy as apolitical, scientific, and insulated from ideological commitments.
Operating within capitalist realism
Significantly, Quine’s critique—though philosophically radical—posed no challenge to the institutional, economic, or political structures supporting philosophical work. The debate remained safely within epistemology and philosophy of language, never examining:
- Why universities were organised as they were
- Who funded philosophical research and to what ends
- What political interests were served by “neutral” philosophical expertise
- How philosophical method itself might encode particular class interests or ideological commitments
This made “Two Dogmas” exemplary of a certain kind of acceptable radicalism: one could fundamentally challenge the field’s technical foundations whilst leaving its political economy entirely untouched. The paper thus demonstrates how even internal critique operates within capitalist realism, unable to imagine alternatives to the basic institutional and economic arrangements sustaining academic philosophy.
Quine himself worked directly for RAND Corporation, contributing to Cold War military-funded research whilst developing his philosophical naturalism. This biographical fact isn’t incidental—it illustrates how post-positivist analytic philosophy could maintain direct ties to capitalist and military institutions whilst presenting itself as engaged in purely intellectual, politically neutral inquiry.
Influence and legacy
Together with Sellars’s demolition of the “myth of the given” (1956), “Two Dogmas” marked the end of logical positivism as a unified programme. Yet Quine’s naturalism, holism, and scientific orientation influenced subsequent analytic philosophy profoundly:
- Holism about meaning and confirmation became widely accepted
- Naturalism (treating philosophy as continuous with science) gained prominence
- Scepticism about sharp distinctions (analytic/synthetic, theory/observation) became commonplace
- Pragmatist themes about revisability and utility re-entered analytic discourse
The essay is often read as a purely technical philosophical intervention. But understanding its impact requires recognising how it intersected with the political reorganisation of American philosophy during the Cold War—helping reshape what counted as legitimate philosophical work in ways that aligned with institutional and political pressures of the era.
Further reading
Read Quine - 1951 - Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism for the original text.