“The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction” — Dr. Cory Juhl LIVE!
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Welcome to SADHO’s second guest expert event on Analytic philosophy!
This week we are hosting a very special event. The Associate Chair of the University of Texas Philosophy Department will be leading a discussion on the analytic/synthetic distinction.
The nature and status of this distinction is one of the most important “disputed questions” in all of Analytic philosophy.
The history of Analytic philosophy divides into two phases:
- a classical period from 1880 – 1950, and
- a post-classical period from 1950 – today.
What separates the two is Quine’s famous essay on the notion of analyticity, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951). This article is frequently dubbed the most important essay in all of twentieth-century philosophy.
The two dogmas are (1) the analytic/synthetic distinction, and (2) reduction of meaning finally traces back to sense data. Quine claims that both are ill-founded.
Analyticity is the core concept of Analytic philosophy. Without an in-depth understanding of its significance and importance, Analytic philosophy itself cannot be understood.
Before TDE, the analytic/synthetic distinction was something that everybody just unproblematically assumed. Analytic truths, such as “All bachelors are unmarried,” were seen as inviolable avatars of necessity and a priori knowability. Leibniz called then “truths of reason”; Hume, “relations of ideas.”
According to Quine, analytic truths appear to be unshakeable because (we say) they rest on something independent of facts—namely, the meaning of their terms. These contrast with synthetic truths, which rest on sensory data and experience. Analytic truths come in two types: (a) those whose truth rests on logical operators, and (b) those whose truth rests on synonymy.
Quine shows that both synonymy and the belief in self-standing statements are illusions. The reverberations of this have shaped the whole of Anglophone philosophy for the last 70 years.
The famous reply to TDE is Grice and Strawson’s “In Defence of a Dogma” (1956). Grice-Strawson defend the analytic-synthetic distinction by arguing that analyticity is built into our ordinary discourse about meaning, about necessary truth based on conceptual relations, and so on. If there is such a thing as meaning, or any kind of semantics, or even uninterpreted identity relations in symbolic logic, analyticity is required. In fact, the status of logic itself stands on analyticity.
Our Guest Expert
Our guest expert this week is Professor Cory Juhl (PhD, Pittsburgh), Associate Chair of the Philosophy Department at UT Austin, and UT Expert in philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind.
Dr. Juhl is a leading authority on both analyticity and Quine, and literally wrote the book on the subject. His Analyticity (2009) is the standard textbook on the analytic-synthetic distinction and presents an exhaustive survey of its pivotal role in nearly every facet of metaphysics and epistemology. It also includes an awesome history of the various conceptions of analytic truth, that traces it from its birthplace in Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1740) down through the controversies surrounding it today.
Dr. Juhl’s presentation will walk us through the issues and then focus on Quine.
Homework
To prepare for the event, skim any two of the following three papers:
- Quine. (1951) “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”
- Grice and Strawson. (1956) “In Defense of a Dogma.”
- Harman. (1967) “Quine on Meaning and Existence, I. The Death of Meaning”
BONUS: Dr. Juhl just now gave me permission to include Chapter 1 from his book, Analyticity, which I highly recommend.
All four readings can be downloaded HERE.
A Transformational Experience
Whether you’re a mystic, psychonaut, Ch’an practitioner, Heraclitean processualist, term logician, Pittsburgh School enthusiast, or anomological Kuhnian-Foucauldian social constructivist, you are certain to gain great benefit from working your way through this exalted and arduous subject matter.
So put on your thinking caps and have an extra cup of coffee so you can turn your logical, semantic, and phenomenological sensitivity all the way up to 11. And prepare to make contact with the deepest recesses of your very logico-ontological core, as we plumb the depths of identity, certainty, and necessity with the dexterous Dr. Juhl.