Doubting Philosophical Distinctions

This series looks at whether the necessary vs contingent, analytic vs synthetic, and a priori vs a posteriori distinctions actually can map onto each other and if they are even useful with the arguments of Immanuel Kant, W. V. O Quine, and Saul Kripke.

Special thanks to Thorin Isaiah Malmgren for funding this series!

Sponsors: João Costa Neto, Dakota Jones, Thorin Isaiah Malmgren, Prince Otchere, Mike Samuel, Daniel Helland, Mohammad Azmi Banibaker, Dennis Sexton, kdkdk, Yu Saburi, Mauricino Andrade, Diéssica, Will Roberts, Greg Gauthier, Christian Bay, Joao Sa, Richard Seaton, Edward Jacobson, isenshi, and √2. Thanks for your support!

Information for this video gathered from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy and more! (#Distinction #Language)

[EngGear]

Thanks a lot, Thorin Isaiah Malmgren. And thanks to Carneades channel.

[cubefox]

To clarify:

Quine did _not_ just argue against the analytic/synthetic distinction but also against the a priori / a posteriori distinction, arguing that everything should be regarded as a posteriori. It's astonishing that most people don't get this when they read "two dogmas".

Also, in later works Quine said that the only notion of necessity which had any plausibility was actually some version of analyticity. He was actually _more_ critical of necessity than of of analyticity, he just didn't mention necessity in "Two Dogmas" because he took analyticity to be it's most compelling definition, far better than defining necessity by "possible worlds" (See his late paper "Two Dogmas in Retrospect").

It's a bad misrepresentation of Quine to think that his primary target was the analytic/synthetic distinction.