Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Derivatively, afterward, analyticity can be demarcated thus: a statement is analytic if it is (not merely true but) true according to the semantical rule.

Not every true statement which says that the statements of some class are true can count as a semantical rule -- otherwise all truths would be "analytic" in the sense of being true according to semantical rules.

We can say indeed that a statement is analytic-for-L0 if and only if it is true according to such and such specifically appended "semantical rules," but then we find ourselves back at essentially the same case which was originally discussed: 'S is analytic-for-L0 if and only if.

Once we seek to explain 'S is analytic for L' generally for variable 'L' ( even allowing limitation of 'L' to artificial languages ), the explanation 'true according to the semantical rules of L' is unavailing; for the relative term 'semantical rule of' is as much in need of clarification, at least, as 'analytic for.'

But given simply a notation, mathematical or otherwise, and indeed as thoroughly understood a notation as you please in point of the translation or truth conditions of its statements, who can say which of its true statements rank as postulates?

Any finite (or effectively specifiable infinite) selection of statements (preferably true ones, perhaps) is as much a set of postulates as any other.

Now the notion of semantical rule is as sensible and meaningful as that of postulate, if conceived in a similarly relative spirit -- relative, this time, to one or another particular enterprise of schooling unconversant persons in sufficient conditions for truth of statements of some natural or artificial language L. But from this point of view no one signalization of a subclass of the truths of L is intrinsically more a semantical rule than another; and, if 'analytic' means 'true by semantical rules', no one truth of L is analytic to the exclusion of another.

For a statement may be described as analytic simply when it is synonymous with a logically true statement.

Every meaningful statement is held to be translatable into a statement (true or false) about immediate experience.

In the extreme case where the linguistic component is all that matters, a true statement is analytic.