In Defense of a Dogma  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop

Featured:

"In Defense of a Dogma" (1956) is an article by Paul Grice and P. F. Strawson criticizing "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" by Willard Van Orman Quine. Among other things, they argue that Quine's skepticism about synonyms leads to a skepticism about meaning. If statements can have meanings, then it would make sense to ask "What does it mean?". If it makes sense to ask "What does it mean?", then synonymy can be defined as follows: Two sentences are synonymous if and only if the true answer of the question "What does it mean?" asked of one of them is the true answer to the same question asked of the other. They also draw the conclusion that discussion about correct or incorrect translations would be impossible given Quine's argument.

Four years after Grice and Strawson published their paper, Quine's book Word and Object was released. In the book Quine presented his theory of indeterminacy of translation.


Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "In Defense of a Dogma" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Retrieved from "http://artandpopularculture.com/In_Defense_of_a_Dogma"
Personal tools
Metas