Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Personally I confess that I have no deep convictions over whether, for example, the statement A football player ought not touch the ball with his hands (or, for that matter, Football has such and such rules) can, without a residuum, be translated into a non-normative claim couched in the naturalistic idiom.

If, e.g., A is green, whereas B is blue, then S1 can put forward the statement 'N is green'; S2 will disagree, and S1 and S2 then have to conclude that they use 'N' in different ways (presupposing that neither of them is colour-blind).

However this statement may be misleading: it seems to suggest that there is a direct, noncompositional characterization of truth which we would compositionalize positing meanings.

The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience.

Kant conceived of an analytic statement as one that attributes to its subject no more than is already conceptually contained in the subject.

But Kant's intent, evident more from the use he makes of the notion of analyticity than from his definition of it, can be restated thus: a statement is analytic when it is true by virtue of meanings and independently of fact.

But the meanings must be treated as distinct, since the identity 'Evening Star = Morning Star' is a statement of fact established by astronomical observation.

The characteristic of such a statement is that it can be turned into a logical truth by putting synonyms for synonyms; thus (2) can be turned into (1) by putting 'unmarried man' for its synonym 'bachelor.'

All other statements of the language are, Carnap assumes, built up of their component clauses by means of the 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.