Analytic–synthetic distinction

[1] While the distinction was first proposed by Immanuel Kant, it was revised considerably over time, and different philosophers have used the terms in very different ways.

[2] The philosopher Immanuel Kant uses the terms "analytic" and "synthetic" to divide propositions into two types.

Ruling it out, he discusses only the remaining three types as components of his epistemological framework—each, for brevity's sake, becoming, respectively, "analytic", "synthetic a priori", and "empirical" or "a posteriori" propositions.

Part of Kant's argument in the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason involves arguing that there is no problem figuring out how knowledge of analytic propositions is possible.

It follows, second: There is no problem understanding how we can know analytic propositions; we can know them because we only need to consult our concepts in order to determine that they are true.

This question is exceedingly important, Kant maintains, because all scientific knowledge (for him Newtonian physics and mathematics) is made up of synthetic a priori propositions.

The remainder of the Critique of Pure Reason is devoted to examining whether and how knowledge of synthetic a priori propositions is possible.

[3] Over a hundred years later, a group of philosophers took interest in Kant and his distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions: the logical positivists.

Although not strictly speaking a logical positivist, Gottlob Frege's notion of analyticity influenced them greatly.

It included a number of logical properties and relations beyond containment: symmetry, transitivity, antonymy, or negation and so on.

Hence logical empiricists are not subject to Kant's criticism of Hume for throwing out mathematics along with metaphysics.

However, they did not believe that any complex metaphysics, such as the type Kant supplied, are necessary to explain our knowledge of mathematical truths.

Our solution, based upon Wittgenstein's conception, consisted in asserting the thesis of empiricism only for factual truth.

It is intended to resolve a puzzle that has plagued philosophy for some time, namely: How is it possible to discover empirically that a necessary truth is true?

Two-dimensionalism provides an analysis of the semantics of words and sentences that makes sense of this possibility.

The theory was first developed by Robert Stalnaker, but it has been advocated by numerous philosophers since, including David Chalmers and Berit Brogaard.

[8] The primary intension of a word or sentence is its sense, i.e., is the idea or method by which we find its referent.

[13] In 1951, Willard Van Orman Quine published the essay "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" in which he argued that the analytic–synthetic distinction is untenable.

However, some (for example, Paul Boghossian)[16] argue that Quine's rejection of the distinction is still widely accepted among philosophers, even if for poor reasons.

", then synonymy can be defined as follows: Two sentences are synonymous if and only if the true answer of the question "What does it mean?"

Four years after Grice and Strawson published their paper, Quine's book Word and Object was released.

In Speech Acts, John Searle argues that from the difficulties encountered in trying to explicate analyticity by appeal to specific criteria, it does not follow that the notion itself is void.

In "'Two Dogmas' Revisited", Hilary Putnam argues that Quine is attacking two different notions:[19] It seems to me there is as gross a distinction between 'All bachelors are unmarried' and 'There is a book on this table' as between any two things in this world, or at any rate, between any two linguistic expressions in the world;[20]Analytic truth defined as a true statement derivable from a tautology by putting synonyms for synonyms is near Kant's account of analytic truth as a truth whose negation is a contradiction.

[21] Jerrold Katz, a one-time associate of Noam Chomsky, countered the arguments of "Two Dogmas" directly by trying to define analyticity non-circularly on the syntactical features of sentences.

"[26] This distinction was imported from philosophy into theology, with Albrecht Ritschl attempting to demonstrate that Kant's epistemology was compatible with Lutheranism.