Jerrold Jacob Katz (14 July 1932 – 7 February 2002) was an American philosopher and linguist.
After receiving a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University in 1960, Katz became a research associate in linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961.
From 1975 until his death, he was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Linguistics at the City University of New York.
[2] Katz was a staunch defender of rationalism (although not in a Cartesian/Fregean sense) and the metaphysical import of "essences".
Katz also argued, against W. V. O. Quine, that the analytic–synthetic distinction could be founded on syntactical features of sentences.