Quotations

from the Writings of

Willard Van Orman Quine

On the Analytic/Synthetic dichotomy
On the Definition of Logic

On the Analytic/Synthetic dichotomy

It is obvious that truth in general depends on both language and extra-linguistic fact. The statement 'Brutus killed Caesar' would be false if the world had been different in certain ways, but it would also be false if the word 'killed' happened rather to have the sense of 'begat'. Thus one is tempted to suppose in general that the truth of a statement is somehow analysable into a linguistic component and a factual component.

Given this supposition it next seems reasonable that in some statements the factual component should be null; and that these are the analytic statements. But for all its a priori reasonableness, a boundary between the analytic and synthetic statements simply has not been drawn. That there is such a distinction to be drawn at all is an unempirical dogma of empiricists, a metaphysical article of faith.

Two Dogmas of Empiricism [Quine53a]

On the Definition of Logic

If pressed to supplement Tweedledee's ostensive definition of logic with a discursive definition of the same subject, I would say that logic is the systematic study of the logical truths. Pressed further, I would say that a sentence is logically true if all sentences with its grammatical structure are true. Pressed further still, I would say to read this book.

Philosophy of logic, xi [Quine70]