- Analytic-synthetic distinction(as the philosophical concept Quine attacks)
- A traditional divide between two types of statements: analytic ones that are true by definition alone (like 'bachelors are unmarried') and synthetic ones that require observation of the world to verify (like 'snow is white').
- Non-empirical knowledge(as contrasted with knowledge gained through experience)
- Understanding that doesn't come from direct observation or experience, but from pure reasoning or intuition.
- Quine(as a proper name referring to the philosopher whose theory is being discussed)
- Willard Van Orman Quine was a 20th-century American philosopher who wrote about how we know things and how language works. In this statement, we're discussing one of his specific ideas about observation.
- epistemology(Contrasted with purely descriptive scientific inquiry)
- A normative enterprise that tells us how we ought to reason from evidence and how we ought to justify our beliefs, as distinct from merely describing how we do reason or justify beliefs
- knowledge(Distinguished from mere true belief, which may be the product of indoctrination and need not exercise deliberative capacities.)
- Justified true belief — true belief that has been arrived at through the exercise of deliberative capacities, including comparison of and deliberation among alternatives.
- naturalized epistemology(Contrasted with traditional epistemology's project of answering the global skeptic)
- An approach to epistemology that operates within science, presupposing that we already have some knowledge rather than attempting to justify knowledge from a neutral starting point
- necessary truths(Leibniz's argument for God's existence from eternal truths)
- Truths that hold independently of whether any finite minds exist to think them