The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction
“Analytic” sentences, such as “Pediatricians are doctors,” have historically been characterized as ones that are true by virtue of the meanings of their words alone and/or can be known to be so solely by knowing those meanings. They are contrasted with more usual “synthetic” sentences, such as “Pediatricians are rich,” (knowledge of) whose truth depends also upon (knowledge of) the worldly fortunes of pediatricians. Beginning with Frege, many philosophers hoped to show that the truths of logic and mathematics and other apparently a priori domains, such as much of philosophy and the foundations of science, could be shown to be analytic by careful “conceptual analysis” of the meanings of crucial words. Analyses of philosophically important terms and concepts, such as “material object,” “cause,” “freedom,” or “knowledge” turned out, however, to be far more problematic than philosophers had anticipated, and some, particularly Quine and his followers, began to doubt the reality of the distinction. This in turn led him and others to doubt the factual determinacy of claims of meaning and translation in general, as well as, ultimately, the reality and determinacy of mental states. There have been a number of interesting reactions to this scepticism, in philosophy and linguistics (this latter to be treated in the supplement, Analyticity and Chomskyan Linguistics); but, while the reality of mental states might be saved, it has yet to be shown that appeals to the analytic will ever be able to ground “analysis” and the a priori in quite the way that philosophers had hoped.
Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/analytic-synthetic/
AI
The analytic/synthetic distinction is a distinction between two kinds of truths, introduced in a clear form by Kant.
Analytic judgments are true by virtue of meaning alone. The predicate is already contained in the subject. Example: “All bachelors are unmarried.” Denying it leads to a contradiction once you understand the terms. Analytic truths are typically a priori: you don’t need experience to know them.
Synthetic judgments are true (if they are true) because of how the world is. The predicate adds something not contained in the subject. Example: “The bachelor is unhappy” or “Water boils at 100°C.” These usually require empirical evidence and are a posteriori.
Kant’s key move was to claim that some judgments are synthetic a priori. Examples are basic statements of mathematics and fundamental principles of natural science, such as “7 + 5 = 12” or “Every event has a cause.” They are not true by definition, yet they are not learned from experience either. Kant thought these judgments structure experience itself.
In the 20th century, the distinction became central to analytic philosophy. Logical positivists treated analytic truths as tautologies grounded in language, and synthetic truths as empirical. This view was famously attacked by Quine in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Quine argued that there is no clear, non-circular way to define “analytic,” and that our statements face experience as a whole rather than one by one. If Quine is right, the analytic/synthetic distinction collapses or at least loses its sharpness.
Today, the distinction is still used, but cautiously. Many philosophers accept it as a rough heuristic about meaning and justification, not as a deep metaphysical divide.
Wikipedia
The analytic–synthetic distinction is a semantic distinction used primarily in philosophy to distinguish between propositions (in particular, statements that are affirmative subject–predicate judgments) that are of two types: analytic propositions and synthetic propositions. Analytic propositions are true or not true solely by virtue of their meaning, whereas synthetic propositions’ truth, if any, derives from how their meaning relates to the world.
While the distinction was first proposed by Immanuel Kant, it was revised considerably over time, and different philosophers have used the terms in very different ways. Furthermore, some philosophers (starting with Willard Van Orman Quine) have questioned whether there is even a clear distinction to be made between propositions which are analytically true and propositions which are synthetically true.[2] Debates regarding the nature and usefulness of the distinction continue to this day in contemporary philosophy of language.
Read the rest here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic%E2%80%93synthetic_distinction
Nochrisis 