IGWEBUIKE: African Journal of Arts and Humanities

The empirical task carried out by Hume, Kant and the Viennese empiricists, set a new foundation and outlook for philosophy with a positivist outlook. The strength of this philosophy arguably rests on two dogmas as W. V. O. Quine expresses in his paper, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism". The dogmas are that there is the fundamental cleavage between analytic and synthetic statements (dogma 1) and that each meaningful statements are equivalent to statements about sense experience (dogma 2). Quine opines that these are logically unfounded dogmas in view of philosophical extrapolations. Thus, to base claims on logically unviable claims is defeatist, hence, he advanced a positive picture of "empiricism without the dogmas"; a form of epistemological holism to understand the nature of meaningfulness. This critique far from being a mere revision is a critique of the whole metaphysics of empiricism. Several attacks of this defence have been advanced and formidable amongst these, is Paul Grice and P. F. Strawson's "In defense of a Dogma". This reply only festered the sore of this debate. This paper sets to examine the main thrust of these two major papers which have shaped the analytic and post-analytic traditions in philosophy.

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