PEIRCE TO STRAWSON professional life with the exception of years of war service in the navy His most important books were From a Logical Point of View (1953), which contained two famous essays, ‘On What there Is’ and ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, and Word and Object (1960), which was a magisterial exposition of his system, later supplemented by a number of less influential studies Quine’s aim in philosophy was to provide a framework for a naturalistic explanation of the world in the terms of science and especially physical science He offered to so by an analysis of language that is both empiricist and behaviourist All the theories by which we explain the world (whether informal or scientific) are based on the input to our sense-receptors All the terms and sentences occurring in the theories are to be defined in terms of the behaviour of the speakers and hearers who use them The basic form of the meaning of an utterance is stimulus meaning: the class of all stimulations that would prompt a language-user to assent to the utterance In spite of his pursuit of a radically empiricist programme, Quine made his first major impact on philosophy with ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (written in 1951) He stated in the following terms the two targets of his attack: One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience (FLPV 20) Quine did not deny that there are logically true statements, statements that remain true under any interpretation of their non-logical terms—e.g ‘No unmarried man is married’ But we cannot move from such a logically true statement to the allegedly analytic statement ‘No bachelor is married’ because that depends on taking ‘unmarried man’ and ‘bachelor’ as synonymous But what is synonymy? Shall we say that two expressions are synonymous if one can be substituted for the other in a sentence without affecting its truth-value? But ‘creature with a heart’ and ‘creature with a kidney’ are interchangeable in that manner, but no one supposes that ‘All creatures who have hearts have kidneys’ is analytic Nor can we appeal to any notion of necessity in order to define analyticity; the explanation must go the other way round 65