Analytic-Synthetic Distinction: The Issues of Logic, Language and Meaning in Kant and Quine’S Philosophy

Abstract

The analytic-synthetic1 distinction is one of the controversial and also essential issues to understand many developments in logic, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics in contemporary philosophy. This paper examines the discussion on analytic-synthetic distinction in Kant and Quine’s philosophy with the aim of placing exactly what is at stake. In the course of this discussion, I will try to make analyse their arguments that what exactly analytic-synthetic distinction claims and by doing so assess the so-called alikenesses between them. In the Critique of Pure Reason2 Kant says the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements in three distinct ways: analytic judgements are those (1) ‘in which [...] the predicate B belongs to the subject A, as something which is (covertly) contained in this concept A’, instantly pursuing this we are acquainted that analytic judgements are those (2) ‘in which the connection of predicate with the subject is thought through identity’, the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements can be added by the concept that (3) ‘[Analytic judgements], adding nothing through the predicate to the concept of the subject […] can also be entitled explicative. From another point of view in the synthetic judgements, the predicate lies outside the subject concept. It adds something new to the subject concept. It gives new information about the subject term’. Quine appraises Kant as the one who first amply showed the importance of the analytic-synthetic distinction and engaged with the predicaments in Kant’s position to re-conceptualise the whole relationship between logic, language and meaning. His famous objections to analyticity in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ 3 asserts that a “fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings, independently of matters of fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact,” is an essential dogma of modem empiricism. After examining the presumptions, the paper concludes that the disagreement between Kant and Quine’s different approaches on the notion of analyticity-synthetic distinction is rooted against the traditional philosophy. In Kant’s philosophy the distinction between analytic-synthetic is not only important for the renunciation of traditional approaches of the so-called dogmatic, metaphysics, but it is also important in his inquiry into the possibility of metaphysics as a rational science. Quine accepted a radical naturalization of philosophy, such that philosophy would be continuous with empirical science, as its slightly more abstract and reflective branch. His attack on analytic-synthetic distinction and conceptual analysis has also had an inadvertent, and somewhat ironic and opened the door to a new wave of metaphysical theorizing by opposing the stand of Logical Positivism, which considered metaphysical inquiries as nonsensical. But as we will see, the way the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments operates within these worthy forms out to differ substantially between Kant and Quine.