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May 13, 2008
Previous attempts to Define Analyticity
From Nathan Salmon's "Analyticity and A priority" (J-store access required for the link):
A number of definitions or explications of analyticity have been proposed. My favourite is a proposal by Hilary Putnam. In an exposition of W. V. Quine's famous (if little understood) attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction, Putnam suggests that a sentence may be termed 'analytic' if it is deducible from the sentences in a finite list at the top of which someone who bears the ancestral of the graduate-student relation to Carnap has printed the words 'Meaning Postulate'. This definition not only acknowledges the central importance of Carnap's contribution to the role of the analytic-synthetic distinction in analytic philosophy, but it has the additional virtue that it accords to those few among us who bear this special relationship to Carnap and authority that strikes me as only fitting.
Who'd have thought that an additional virtue of Josh Dever's Philosophical Family Tree is that it can help one to determine the extension of the word 'analytic'?
Posted by logican at May 13, 2008 01:43 PM
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