A Comparative and Contrastive Study between Hempel and Quine’s Criticism of Empiricism

Jianjiang Wang

Hebei University School of Politics and Law, Baoding, 071002, China

Abstract: Meaning theory, as an important part of language philosophy, is a philosophical theory that determines the true ｏｒ false of the sentences through the study of the sentence meanings. Logical empiricists will reject metaphysics as their philosophical mission and task, and have the opinion that metaphysical sentences are meaningless. The empiricists divide the meaning of the sentence into pure logical meaning and empirical meaning, and then form the empiricist dogma of sentence analysis and comprehensive analysis. Hempel and Quine are famous American philosophers and logicians, who are also typical representatives of logical empiricism. They used the method of logical analysis to criticize the empiricist dogma from the internal of logical empiricist theory. This paper attempts to compare the similarities and differences between Hempel and Quine's critique of logical empiricism and explains the theoretical significance of their criticism of empiricist

dogma.

Keywords: Hempel; Quine; Empiricist Dogma; Criticism