PUTNAM VERSUS QUINE ON REVISABILITY AND THE ANALYTIC – SYNTHETIC DISTINCTION 1 Axel Mueller

In the following, I want to revisit the criticism of the analytic–synthetic distinction brought forth in Putnam’s “The Analytic and the Synthetic” and later writings and compare it with Quine’s familiar attack on the same distinction in the last two sections of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”. My purpose in this comparison will be to find the features of Putnam’s argument that prepare the ground for his increasingly explicit acknowledgment of the utility of a successor distinction, which sharply separates his pragmatic, induction-based epistemological commitments from Quine’s naturalistic rejection of any such project. The following brief review of some doctrinal agreements vis-à-vis logical empiricism will set the stage for specifying the issue between Putnam and Quine regarding the epistemic analytic–synthetic distinction. Following Quine, Putnam’s early writings on the analytic–synthetic distinction criticize the attempt undertaken by logical empiricism (especially Carnap and Ayer) to use a precise and general distinction between analytic and synthetic statements for empirically contentful systems of statements for the purpose of giving a ‘demystified’ account of the special status, interpretation, empirical meaningfulness and justifiability of statements (such as the laws of logic and mathematical truths, statements of semantics, and theoretical statements in scientific theories) that had traditionally resisted – since supposedly independent of experience in content and justification – ready integration into a broadly empiricist methodological outlook. The key to solving all three of the mentioned problems was to first identify apriority, necessity and analyticity, interpret the latter as ‘truth in virtue of meaning’, and then to specify for any empirically contentful language a