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Truth in Virtue of Meaning - A Defence of the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction (Paperback)
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Truth in Virtue of Meaning - A Defence of the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction (Paperback)
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The analytic/synthetic distinction looks simple. It is a
distinction between two different kinds of sentence. Synthetic
sentences are true in part because of the way the world is, and in
part because of what they mean. Analytic sentences--like all
bachelors are unmarried and triangles have three sides--are
different. They are true in virtue of meaning, so no matter what
the world is like, as long as the sentence means what it does, it
will be true.
This distinction seems powerful because analytic sentences seem to
be knowable in a special way. One can know that all bachelors are
unmarried, for example, just by thinking about what it means. But
many twentieth-century philosophers, with Quine in the lead, argued
that there were no analytic sentences, that the idea of analyticity
didn't even make sense, and that the analytic/synthetic distinction
was therefore an illusion. Others couldn't see how there could fail
to be a distinction, however ingenious the arguments of Quine and
his supporters.
But since the heyday of the debate, things have changed in the
philosophy of language. Tools have been refined, confusions cleared
up, and most significantly, many philosophers now accept a view of
language--semantic externalism--on which it is possible to see how
the distinction could fail. One might be tempted to think that
ultimately the distinction has fallen for reasons other than those
proposed in the original debate.
In Truth in Virtue of Meaning, Gillian Russell argues that it
hasn't. Using the tools of contemporary philosophy of language, she
outlines a view of analytic sentences which is compatible with
semantic externalism and defends that view against the old Quinean
arguments. She then goes on to draw out the surprising
epistemological consequences of her approach.
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