ONT Re: Quine -- Two Dogmas Of Empiricism
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TDOE. Note 6
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| 1. Background for Analyticity (concl.)
|
| In recent years Carnap has tended to explain analyticity by appeal to
| what he calls state-descriptions. A state-description is any exhaustive
| assignment of truth values to the atomic, or noncompound, statements of
| the language. All other statements of the language are, Carnap assumes,
| built up of their component clauses by means of familiar logical devices,
| in such a way that the truth value of any complex statement is fixed for
| each state-description by specifiable logical laws. A statement is then
| explained as analytic when it comes out true under every state-description.
| This account is an adaptation of Leibniz's "true in all possible worlds".
| But note that this version of analyticity serves its purpose only if the
| atomic statements of the language are, unlike "John is a bachelor" and
| "John is married", mutually independent. Otherwise there would be a
| state-description which assigned truth to "John is a bachelor" and to
| "John is married", and consequently "No bachelors are married" would
| turn out synthetic rather than analytic under the proposed criterion.
| Thus the criterion of analyticity in terms of state-descriptions
| serves only for languages devoid of extralogical synonym-pairs,
| such as "bachelor" and "unmarried man" -- synonym-pairs of the
| type which give rise to the "second class" of analytic statements.
| The criterion in terms of state-descriptions is a reconstruction
| at best of logical truth, not of analyticity.
|
| I do not mean to suggest that Carnap is under any illusions on this
| point. His simplified model language with its state-descriptions
| is aimed primarily not at the general problem of analyticity but
| at another purpose, the clarification of probability and induction.
| Our problem, however, is analyticity; and here the major difficulty
| lies not in the first class of analytic statements, the logical truths,
| but rather in the second class, which depends on the notion of synonymy.
|
| Quine, "Two Dogmas", pp. 23-24.
|
| W.V. Quine,
|"Two Dogmas of Empiricism", 'Philosophical Review', January 1951.
| Reprinted as pages 20-46 in 'From a Logical Point of View',
| 2nd edition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1980.
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