 The picture presented in this last and many similar passages expresses a tremendously influential view of Quine’s that led several generations of philosophers to despair not only of the analytic-synthetic distinction, but of the category of a priori knowledge entirely. The view has come to be called “confirmation holism,” and Quine had expressed it more shortly a few years earlier, in his widely read article, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1953 [1980a]):