Analyticity and Translation

Abstract

Quine’s negative theses about meaning and analyticity are well known, but he also defends a positive account of these notions. I explain what his nega-tive and positive views are, and argue that Quine’s positive account of meaning entails that two of his most famous doctrines, namely the claim that there are no analytic statements and the indeterminacy of translation thesis, are false. But I show that the falsity of these doctrines doesn’t affect his criti-cisms of traditional conceptions of meaning. This is because the class of ana-lytic statements that his account of meaning enables us to isolate is of no phi-losophical interest, and because we can hold that translation is determined without admitting that meaning is.