Abstract
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.
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© 1976 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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van Orman Quine, W. (1976). Two Dogmas of Empiricism. In: Harding, S.G. (eds) Can Theories be Refuted?. Synthese Library, vol 81. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1863-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1863-0_2
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