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explicated in terms of linguistic frameworks. And if this appears worryingly circular already, this is explained shortly.
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Where there are no extensional qualifications (i.e. referents) of what a term means, meaning is determined by other terms and their definitions. Such as when ‘good’ means ‘a property of a morally right action’, where a property of a morally right action’ means ‘good’. Such explications of the meanings of terms yield tautologies. And this is an awkwardness, according to Quine, which results in the inability to identify an empirically significant set of sentences which are ‘analytic’. There are no empirical grounds by which it is possible to distinguish analytic sentences from others for saying that they are definitions or conventions. This, however, cannot suffice for a commitment to such a class of sentences since the classification is then arbitrary and artificial.
Definitions are not to be recognized by any intrinsic quality of definitionness simply because they are the very embodiment of linguistic convention. Ultimately (i.e. when a language is formalized) they can be identified only through the fact of their having been explicitly enumerated under this heading. This sort of answer has seemed to some a confession of meaninglessness. (Bohnert, 1963, p. 417)
How does Bohnert resist this attack by Quine? Firstly, to give Quine a fair representation, we draw a distinction between the definability of the concept of ‘analytic’ (which is where Quine focusses his attention) and the definability of other concepts which are considered to be analytic (which is not explicitly Quine’s famous focus, but, in the end, fall prey to the implication of rendering ‘analytic’
circular). Starting with concepts which are analytic; Bohnert explains that analytic concepts for Carnap must have as a property that they are circular. So, it is not only not a problem that they are circular, it is a requirement. Concepts which are defined analytically are defined by the use of “recursive definitions”
(Bohnert, 1963, pp. 411, 415). This, very summarily, means that analytic concepts are defined by other specific, already defined, terms and that part of that definition is also an explicit specification of how the definiendum is conceptually and semantically related to other already defined terms, which together act as the definiens. There is no need for extension here. There is, in fact, an explicit avoidance of it.
But what happens when none of the concepts which constitute the definiens are empirical or
extensional in any way? Surely, some part of even a recursive definition should somehow ‘make contact’
with the world? No, says Carnap. The point about such definitions is that they are perfectly suited to
“classifications” which are “arbitrary” and “non-natural” (Bohnert, 1963, p. 411). This means that some concepts must be defined without any available extensional property. It cannot be stressed enough that concepts which are thus defined are expected to be defined in a manner which requires no mention of empirical matters of fact.
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So, applied then to the actual concept, ‘analytic’, Carnap regards ‘analytic’ to be itself an analytic concept in the above mentioned manner. It is defined by appeal to other concepts such as ‘necessity’
and ‘definition’ which have also been defined recursively. The definition of ‘analytic’ then entails making explicit what the relationship of ‘analytic’ is to the non-extensional concepts ‘necessity’ and ‘definition’.
So, that ‘analytic’ can only be defined according to other similarly “problematic” (for Quine) concepts and that no extension is determined for ‘analytic’ is not only a not a problem for analyticity, but it is exactly what is seminal to its character. Quine’s requirements are, therefore, inadvertently, a
confirmation of exactly what it is that Carnap thinks is analytic about ‘analytic’.26 That analytically true sentences are comprised of ‘analytic concepts’ is a function of these concepts being entirely defined by the constructed linguistic system of which they are part. This means the truth of the sentence is logically determinate; it is determined by the relationships of entailment which exist between the meanings of its constituent terms, irrespective of what the world looks like.
Now the point of these remarks is that this is precisely what Carnap does. And he does it in just such a way that the sentences above, or reasonable facsimiles, are obtainable by applying definitions. The fact that the sentences to which the term is to apply are in fact spelled out by recursive procedures is necessary to the concept’s being logically determinate, which, in turn, is one of the characteristics we expect. (Bohnert, 1963, p. 415) [Bohnert refers to examples of sentences which are analytic to Carnap.]
If Bohnert is right about what features Carnap expects analytic sentences have then Quine’s rejection of analytic truth (i.e. the truth of analytic sentences) does not have the teeth it is so readily assumed to have. At least not for the reasons he gives in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ (Quine, 1963). For Carnap there is a difference between how analytic concepts are defined and analytic sentences are true and how empirical concepts are defined and empirical (synthetic) sentences are true. And analytic sentences are circular and that is part of how we identify them.
What are the “fundamental” (Bohnert, 1963) features (i.e. inherent) of analytic sentences which ensure that they are circular in the way Carnap requires them to be? Carnap agrees that there are no
“fundamental” features of analytic sentences. He posits that most sentences (which are merely observable grammatical structures) are prima facie incapable of being recognised as either analytic or
26 Ebbs (2011) argues that, contrary to the received view about the Carnap-Quine disagreement about logical truth, Quine did not take himself to have undermined Carnap in the way most followers of Quine think that he has. If Ebbs is right then, perhaps, Quine’s rejection of non-extensional definitions was not, to him, the death knell to Carnap’s account of analytic truth. ‘Inadvertently’ here therefore is used assuming the received view: that Quine and his followers thought they had had the last word, but perhaps had completely misunderstood what Carnap thought was seminal to logical truth; that it is tautological. This making the accusation of tautology irrelevant.
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synthetic. The reason for this is because there is nothing which, at first glance, means a sentence can be recognised as either analytic or synthetic. And this is because there is nothing about the grammatical structure, the syntactic ‘shape’, of a sentence which indicates whether it is “in the system or about the system”, as Frege would say.
Kant’s description of subject-predicate sentences illustrates this to some extent: both analytic and synthetic sentences have grammatical structures involving subjects and predicates and so on. In Kant’s world, it is the relationship between the subject and predicates or the implied relationship between the words and world denoted by those words which indicates either an analytic or synthetic ‘judgement’. A sentence such as “All bachelors are unmarried men” might be informative, or say something about empirical reality, or it might offer us no factual information at all, despite still having some sort of recognisable meaning to us. It might do both. And this means that if we want to think of a sentence as either analytic or synthetic we must look elsewhere for the deciding criteria.
The reason why the syntactical form of a sentence does not make it either analytic or synthetic is because there is nothing “essentially” or “absolutely” (Bohnert, 1963) either logical or factual about a sentence. Whether it is either logical or factual is decided when it is decided how that sentence is to be constructed and what justification it is given. And, as explained above, where this is decided is within the metalanguage which defines the sentence in question. So it is decided according to a convention or rule
“about the system”. For Carnap, it is a convention because there are no knowable further facts about what to decide to do about the construction of a sentence. For to claim that there are requires an empirical justification of these, and since there is none, we should assume nothing about their existence. To do so would be to make a synthetic a priori claim.
The construction of a linguistic framework or system is a function of choosing and adopting which rules are applied. The choice that Carnap thinks is most relevant to deciding whether a sentence is either analytic or synthetic is a choice about how we use the sentence and what attitude we have towards it. If the sentence is used as a fully referring or representational sentence it is synthetic, either true or false, and if it is used as a statement about the meaning of a term, or terms, it is analytic (Bohnert, 1963, pp.
423 - 425).
There seems no good reason, however, to suppose that the appellations singling out the various kinds point to differences of a logical nature. It seems sufficient to suppose that they refer only to differences in use and attitude. A single definition, e.g. of “aspirin” as acetyl salicylic acid, may be reportive for the
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lexicographer and abbreviational for the chemist; it may constitute an explanative definition for the student and may not “serve as a definition” at all for the child. If there appear to be changes in analytic- synthetic status among these various contexts, it seems more reasonable to suppose that they inhere in statements about these uses and attitudes rather than that they simultaneously apply to the single definition in question. (Bohnert, 1963, p. 424)
So, Quine’s worry about there being no ‘natural kind’ that can be called ‘analytic sentence’ is of no concern to the Carnapian account of analytic truth. It is not an objection, it is simply a description of something Carnap would happily concede.