Expanded Horizons: Two Dogmas Of Sabermetrics

In 1951, W.V.O. Quine published his landmark paper, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” His goal was to disprove a certain type of empiricism that was trendy among analytic philosophers in the early 20th century. That set of beliefs—logical positivism—sought to deny that any statement that was not empirically verifiable had any meaning whatsoever. What Quine showed was that the two eponymous beliefs, which he derisively called dogmas, were necessary to logical positivism but also false. That paper remains one of the most important works of 20th -century philosophy because it demonstrated the limits of a system of knowledge based only in observable fact and logic.

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