Infamous Analytic-Synthetic Distinction

Hey, everyone. I’m new here, but what I’ve read from some posters, there seems to be a lot of substance, and that’s nice.

To the chase:

In my earliest experiences in philosophy, I was convinced by Ayer that the analytic-synthetic distinction was not only tenable but essential for philosophical analysis. As Carnap put it, I’m paraphrasing, the distinction enabled empiricist-minded philosophers to account for both logical (mathematical) knowledge, on the one hand, and scientific knowledge, on the other.

When I was finishing up my first semester, a postmodernist recommended me to read Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, as he saw it as analytic philosophy beginning to bite back at itself. I read it. Didn’t understand it, haha. But, over time, and REALLY getting into the literature on the analytic-synthetic distinction, I got it–but felt threatened. Quine’s pragmatism is, to my mind, pretty radical and seems to be a knee-jerky, extreme reaction.

I won’t go into why I think the distinction is still tenable, but does anyone share my sympathy for the distinction, viz. the distinction between sentences true in virtue of the meanings of their constituent signs and those which require empirical investigation? I feel uneasy saying “Oh, that’s analytic” – everyone seems to take Quine as gospel and the pragmatists eat it up, too.

Analytic-synthetic distinction – yay or nay?

You are quite right to question Quine’s attack on the distinction. Your thoughts are much ni alignment with the argument from Grice and Strawson’ ‘In defence of a Dogma’- it seems true that a distinction can be made and therefore the distinction exists. Quine’s argument was indeed quite poor. It went something like:

  1. There is no way to define the analytic/synthetic distinction
  2. Therefore the distinction doesn’t exist.

But this is not a good argument form. The premise simple does not entail the conclcusion. At any rate - Quine’s central argument was that analycity, necessity and a-priority can only be defined in terms of each other. This is largely rejected now - seperate and indidpendent defintions of a-priority and necessity exist, thus ending the problem of circular definitions that Quine outlined.

As go my thoughts - I side with the argument that Quine’s argument against synonomy leads to meaning-skepticsm. After all it seems that if words have meanings, then it is at least possible that two words can have the same meanings. So synonomy is simply when two words both have the same meaning. How we define or discover this is a different issue (and this is what Quine argues is impossible).

The ‘important’ part of the Two Dogmas is Quine’s statement of Holism found in the 5th section. Quine argues for it on the basis of the rejection of the analytic and synthetic distinction - but there are more reliable ways of supporting it. This is an incredibly influential and important doctrine in modern philosophy- all people interested in philosophy should read about it. There is a brilliant discussion of Quine’s holism (and indeed on the way in which Quine reasoned from the first half of the Dogmas to the second) in Holism: A shopper’s Guide by Fodor and Lepore.

May I ask who your postmodernist is? :slight_smile: