Two Dogmas of Empiricism

"In “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951), Quine focuses on the notion of meaning. In keeping with his small-ontology philosophy (and an affection for behaviorism), he doesn’t like the division that thinkers since Kant had made between claims whose truth or falsity is a matter of the state of the world (“all bachelors are tidy”), and those made true (or not) by virtue of the meanings of words (“all bachelors are unmarried”); this is also known as the analytic/synthetic distinction. Quine thinks defining “analytic” is problematic: we can try to define it in terms of synonymy (words with the same meaning), but end up in a circle. Instead, Quine thinks that supposedly analytic claims really can be (rationally) changed in light of experience, and conversely that any claim can be held even in the face of counter-evidence. This is because our beliefs are a web, with some of them closer to the data of particular experiences and some of them (like the laws of logic, basic laws of science, and our definitions) closer to the center of that web.

The second “dogma” has to do with the behaviorist attempt to define meaning in terms of behavior, i.e. we can tell what a word means by how it is used, like what perceptual experiences it goes with. Despite his behaviorist suspicion of terms like “meaning” (which connotes some entity that he doesn’t want in his ontology, while “significance,” he thinks does not), he doesn’t think that this kind of reduction works, even in principle."

from the 'partially examined life': 
http://www.partiallyexaminedlife.com/2012/10/17/topic-for-66-quine-on-language-logic-and-science/