Analyticity, or the 'analytic/synthetic' distinction is one of the most important and controversial problems in contemporary philosophy. It is also essential to understanding many developments in logic, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics. In this outstanding introduction to analyticity Cory Juhl and Eric Loomis cover the following key topics: The origins of analyticity in the philosophy of Hume and Kant Carnap's arguments concerning analyticity in the early twentieth century Quine's famous objections to analyticity in his classic 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' (...) essay The relationship between analyticity and central issues in metaphysics, such as ontology The relationship between analyticity and epistemology Analyticity in the context of the current debates in philosophy, including mathematics and ontology Throughout the book the authors show how many philosophical controversies hinge on the problem of analyticity. Additional features include chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary of technical terms making the book ideal to those coming to the problem for the first time. (shrink)

Alexander George has put forward a novel interpretation of the Quine-Carnap debate over analyticity. George argues that Carnap's claim that there exists an analytic-synthetic distinction was held by Carnap to be empty of empirical consequences. As a result, Carnap understood his position to be empirically indistinguishable from Quine's. Although George defends his interpretation only briefly, I show that it withstands further examination and ought to be accepted. The consequences of accepting it undermine a common understanding of Quine's criticism of Carnap, (...) and I argue that it is difficult to find a perspective from which Quine can criticize Carnap in a non-question-begging way. (shrink)

This article critically examines Saul Kripke's (1972) argument for the separability of necessary truths from truths known a priori, focusing on his criticism of the standard meter case presented by Wittgenstein (1968). It attempts to show that Kripke's argument is unworkable on any of several readings. Wittgenstein's own broadly conventionalist account of necessary truth is then considered in the light of the standard meter example.

The nature of necessary truth was a central concern of Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was present in his early reflections on logic, a core motif of the Tractatus, and a topic he returned to over and again in his reflections on language, logic, and mathematics. This chapter explores the aspects of Wittgenstein's account of necessity and apriority, beginning with the Tractatus, where many of his core insights received their first expression. It discusses two more contemporary accounts of these topics: conceptual role (...) semantic theories of the a priori, and the arguments for divorcing apriority from necessity. Necessity in the Tractatus appears at two locations. One is at the level of individual elementary propositions. The other is at the level of the inferential connections between propositions. The chapter looks at the Tractatus theory of the proposition. Wittgenstein saw an important difference between the formulations of the rules of grammar and descriptions of states of affairs. (shrink)

Within the epistemology of the sciences, conventionalism has been the subject of regular criticism for over six decades. Critics such as W. V. Quine and Morton White, and more recently Nathan Salmon (1992), and Paul Boghossian (1996), have attacked even the most basic tenet of conventionalism, namely its claim that the truth of certain statements is fixed not by stipulation-independent facts, but by the conventions governing the meaning of those statements and their constituents.

Wittgenstein's Tractatus carefully distinguished the concept all from\nthe notion of a truth-function, and thereby from the quantifiers.\nI argue that Wittgenstein's rationale for this distinction is lost\nunless propositional functions are understood within the context\nof his picture theory of the proposition. Using a model Tractatus\nlanguage, I show how there are two distinct forms of generality implicit\nin quantified Tractatus propositions. Although the explanation given\nin the Tractatus for this distinction is ultimately flawed, the distinction\nitself is a genuine one, and the forms of generality that (...) Wittgenstein\nindicated can be seen in the quantified sentences of contemporary\nlogic. (shrink)

Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language was one of the first philosophical applications of the results in logical metatheory that appeared in the early 1930s. In using these results, Carnap claimed that he stood in general agreement with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, but had overcome the limits on the scope of logic that Wittgenstein believed he had found. I argue that Carnap had in fact presupposed a conception of linguistic meaning fundamentally at odds with that presented in the Tractatus, and that he had (...) no non-questioning-begging way of defending this presupposition. As a result Carnap had not so much extended the conception of language and logic present in the Tractatus as he had fundamentally reoriented it, and this reorientation continued with Carnap’s later move to semantics. (shrink)