#analyticity

Abstract:

In his article Two Dogmas of Empiricsm, and book Word and Object, W. E. V. Quine wages war with a centuries-old doctrine that is essential to Kant’s (and others’) metaphysics: Analyticity. The epistemological divisions between synthetic and analytic truths, he argues, and the fanatic insistence upon reductionism in contemporary science, are ill founded. It is not that the line…

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This entry deals with WVO Quine's and Noam Chomsky's differing views on analyticity and the analytic/synthetic-distinction. Whereas Quine rejects the distinction based on several problems he sees with the notion of analyticity and the various difficulties we face when trying to define what analyticity is even supposed to be, Chomsky attempts to ground an idea of analyticity in linguistic concepts innate to the human mind - Chomsky argues that "since the experiments show that people intuitively distinguish between analytic and synthetic sentences, [..] we need to explain this fact".

The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction The analytic/synthetic distinction has been explicated in numerous ways and while some have deemed it fundamentally misguided (e.g., Quine 1961), it is still employed by a number of philosophers today. One standard way of marking the distinction, which has its origin in Kant (1781), turns on the notion of conceptual containment. By this account, a proposition is analytic if the predicate concept of the proposition is contained within the subject concept. The claim that all bachelors are unmarried, for instance, is analytic because the concept of being unmarried is included within the concept of a bachelor. [ΑΝΑΛΥΣΗ ΣΥΝΘΕΤΗΣ ΕΝΝΟΙΑΣ] By contrast, in synthetic propositions, the predicate concept “amplifies” or adds to the subject concept. [ΠΑΡΑΔΕΙΓΜΑΤΑ] The claim, for example, that the sun is approximately 93 million miles from the earth is synthetic because the concept of being located a certain distance from the earth goes beyond or adds to the concept of the sun itself. [ΑΣΥΝΑΦΕΙΣ ΠΡΟΣΔΙΟΡΙΣΜΟΙ ΕΝΟΣ ΑΝΤΙΚΕΙΜΕΝΟΥ] [[[FN, ??? A related way of drawing the distinction is to say that a proposition is analytic if its truth depends entirely on the definition of its terms (that is, it is true by definition), while the truth of a synthetic proposition depends not on mere linguistic convention, but on how the world actually is in some respect. The claim that all bachelors are unmarried is true simply by the definition of “bachelor,” while the truth of the claim about the distance between the earth and the sun depends, not merely on the meaning of the term “sun,” but on what this distance actually is. ]]] ------------------

Some philosophers have equated the analytic with the a priori and the synthetic with the a posteriori. There is, to be sure, a close connection between the concepts. For instance, if the truth of a certain proposition is, say, strictly a matter of the definition of its terms, knowledge of this proposition is unlikely to require experience (rational reflection alone will likely suffice). On the other hand, if the truth of a proposition depends on how the world actually is in some respect, then knowledge of it would seem to require empirical investigation. Despite this close connection, the two distinctions are not identical. First, the a priori/a posteriori distinction is epistemological: it concerns how, or on what basis, a proposition might be known or justifiably believed. The analytic/synthetic distinction, by contrast, is logical or semantical: it refers to what makes a given proposition true, or to certain intentional relations that obtain between concepts that constitute a proposition. .... This raises the question of the sense in which a claim must be knowable if it is to qualify as either a priori or a posteriori. For whom must such a claim be knowable? Any rational being? Any or most rational human beings? God alone? There may be no entirely nonarbitrary way to provide a very precise answer to this question.

Post-Quinean Strategies There has been a wide variety of responses to Quine's attack. Some, for example, Davidson (1980), Stich (1983) and Dennett (1987), seem simply to accept it and try to account for our practice of meaning ascription within its “non-factual” bounds. Since they follow Quine in at least claiming to forswear the analytic, we will not consider their views further here. Others, who might be (loosely) called “neo-Cartesians,” reject Quine's attack as simply so much prejudice of the empiricism and naturalism which they take to be his own uncritical dogmas (§4.1 in what follows). Still others hope simply to find a way to break out of the “intentional circle,” and provide an account of at least what it means for one thing (a state of the brain, for example) to mean (or “carry the information about”) another external phenomenon in the world (§4.2). Perhaps the most trenchant reaction has been that of empirically oriented linguists and philosophers, who look to a specific explanatory role the analytic may play in an account of thought and talk (§4.3). This role is currently being explored in considerable detail in the now various areas of research inspired by the revolutionary linguistic theories of Chomsky (§4.4).

Quine on Meaning in Linguistics Quine's discussion of the role of convention in science seems right; but how about the role of meaning in ordinary natural language? Is it really true that in the “pale grey lore” of all the sentences we accept, there aren't some that are “white” somehow “by virtue of the very meanings of their words”? What about our examples in our earlier set II? What about sentences that merely link patent synonyms, as in “Lawyers are attorneys,” or “A fortnight is a period of fourteen days”? As Grice and Strawson (1956) and Putnam (1962) pointed out, it is unlikely that so intuitively plausible a distinction should turn out to have no basis at all in fact. Quine addresses this issue, first, in his (1953/80, chs. 1 and 3), and then in a much larger way in chapter 2 of his (1960) and many subsequent writings. ... Quine (1960) further supported his case by sketching a full-fledged theory of language that does without any theory of determinate meaning. Indeed, a consequence of his theory is that translation (i.e., the identification of two expressions from different languages as having the same meaning) is “indeterminate”; there is “no fact of the matter” about whether two expressions do or do not have the same meaning (see Indeterminacy of Translation). And it's a consequence of this view that there are pretty much no facts of the matter about people's mental lives at all! For, if there is no fact of the matter about whether two people mean the same thing by their words, then there is no fact of the matter about whether they ever have mental states with the same content; and consequently no fact of the matter about what anyone ever thinks. Quine himself took this consequence in stride –he was, after all, a behaviorist– regarding it as “of a piece” with Brentano's thesis of the irreducibility of the intentional; it's just that for him, unlike for Brentano, it simply showed the “baselessness of intentional idioms and the emptiness of a science of intention” (1960, p. 221). Needless to say, many subsequent philosophers have not been happy with this view, and have wondered where Quine's argument has gone wrong.