 Neopositivism became mostly maligned, while credit for its fall generally has gone to W V O Quine and to Thomas S Kuhn, although its "murder" had been prematurely confessed to by Karl R Popper in the 1930s.Willard Van Orman Quine's 1951 paper "Two dogmas of empiricism"—explaining semantic holism, whereby any term's meaning draws from the speaker's beliefs about the whole world—cast Hume's fork, which posed the analytic/synthetic division as unbridgeable, as itself untenable.Among verificationism's greatest internal critics, Carl Hempel had recently concluded that the verifiability criterion, too, is untenable, a it would cast not only religious assertions and metaphysical statements, but even scientific laws of universal type as cognitively meaningless.