Analyticity
The idea of "analyticity"—or truth by virtue of meaning—can be understood in two different ways. On the one hand, it might stand for an epistemic notion, for the idea that mere grasp of the meaning of a sentence suffices for knowledge that it is true. On the other hand, it might stand for a metaphysical notion, for the idea that a statement owes its truth value completely to its meaning, and not at all to "the facts." We may call the first notion "epistemic analyticity" and the second "metaphysical analyticity." On the face of it, these are distinct notions that subserve distinct philosophical programs. Willard Van Orman Quine, whose writings are largely responsible for the contemporary rejection of analyticity, failed to distinguish between them; as a result, many philosophers came to assume that the two notions stand or fall together. However, it is the moral of recent work in this area that this assumption is mistaken: epistemic analyticity can be defended even while its metaphysical cousin is rejected.
The metaphysical concept of analyticity is presupposed by the logical positivist program of reducing all necessity to linguistic necessity. Guided by both the fear that objective, language-independent necessary connections would be metaphysically odd, and that no empiricist epistemology could explain our knowledge of them, philosophers like Rudolf Carnap (1947) and A.
This is a free page. This page contains 201 words. This
article contains 2,223 words (approx. 7 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our Analyticity Access Pass.
