Quine on analytic statements

To begin to understand the limitations of analytic philosophy, one needs to begin with Quine's position as stated in his "Two Dogmas of Empiricism." In science, Quine thought that testing and meaning were holistic in nature. That is, you can't test ideas in isolation. When you test an idea, a whole nest of assumptions surface that are connected to it. The first dogma involves the analytic/synthetic distinction as simplly untestable. He argued that there is no scientific way to prove that there is a distinction between the two types of statements, that is analytic and synthetic. So an analytic statement such as "All parallel lines do not cross" is supposed to be immune from testing by definition. But taking non-Euclidean geometry into consideration, parallel lines theoretically do cross when warped in space passing a black hole.

Quick note: (referencing our other exchange in the discussion on A. J. Ayer and analytic philosophy) -- One of my professors, way back in the 1950s, teaching then at the University of Florida in the Philosophy department, was Dr. James W. Oliver, mentioned in the Acknowledgements of W. V. O. Quine's Methods of Logic (Revised Version). Small world, as they say -- if one goes back far enough, that is. Cheers. ;- )

Perhaps the degrees of separation are not that distant after all. As an undergraduate, I read Quine's Word and Object and at first was completely baffled by it. How could the bulk of our lexicon simply be the result of convention? True, any utterance can be assigned to refer to objects in the world, but the transference of "meaning" to figurative language and the syntactic arrangement of words underlying languages are the research areas--I believe--philosophy must explore. Wittgenstein certainly recognized this important point. To pick up the thread, Quine believed that analytic statements were "true by definition," but this was inadequate as a measure of truth.

I would think that Quine was on the same parallel road with nihilism; however, this would be a gross misinterpretation. Although language itself is established through conventions, this does not assert that the utterances are meaningless.