Analytical Philosophy

The other main criticism of logical empiricism came from the American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine (1908–2000), who argued that the logical empiricists had been mistaken in regarding logic as "analytic"—that is, true by definition. Quine argued that logic is of the same type as other beliefs: it is an element of the web of belief through which we make sense of our experience as experience of an objective world. Hence logic is not analytic, since it concerns the world, and it is not a priori, since it is revisable in the light of experience. Quine's arguments remain disputed, but his work has certainly helped to encourage philosophers to address broader disputes in the natural sciences and other areas. There is no enclosed domain for a priori logical and conceptual analysis. Some critics, most notably Richard Rorty, argue that it follows that there is now nothing worth calling "analytical philosophy." But these claims are exaggerated. Although Quine was a critic of the analyticity of logic, he was a distinguished logician and used logical analysis throughout his philosophy; so his practice shows that analytical philosophy does not depend on the analyticity of logic. Second, although Quine's arguments call into question the "linguistic" conception of the a priori as analyticity it is widely accepted that some distinction between the a priori and the empirical has to be made if we are to be able to reason coherently; and as long as that distinction is in place, analytical philosophers can draw on it to characterize the significance of their conclusions. Analytical philosophy today, therefore, continues the tradition captured by Russell and Wittgenstein at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is not "a body of doctrine," it is a "method," typically "logical-analytic," but often informal, of using reasoning to capture and criticize conceptual structures. As such one finds it regularly employed across the whole spectrum of contemporary philosophical debate, by feminists and political philosophers as much as by metaphysicians and epistemologists.