The Opposition of Theory and Experience

Abstract

As is commonly known, W. V. Quine, in debating with the classical version of logical positivism proceeding from the work of philosophers of the Vienna School, distinguished two fundamental—in his opinion—premises of the epistemological orientation they represented. He endeavoured to show that these premises are dogmas accepted without basis and that therefore the entire system of theses based on them shares in their dubious nature as well. The first of these dogmas assumes that the entirety of our knowledge is divisible into two distinct classes of statements. The first class includes what are known as analytic statements and the second includes synthetic ones. The next dogma, the ‘dogma of reductionism’ declares that ‘to each...synthetic statement, there is associated a unique range of possible sensory events such that the occurrence of any of them would add to the likelihood of truth of the statement, and that there is associated also another unique range of possible sensory events whose occurrence would detract from that likelihood’¹.