Russell The Analytic Synthetic Distinction

Philosophy Compass 2/5 (2007): 712–729, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00093.
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Analytic/Synthetic
Analytic Synthetic Language
Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Distinction
Distinction
The Analytic /Synthetic Distinction

Gillian Russell*
Washington University in St Louis
Abstract
The distinction between analytic and synthetic truths has played a major role in
the history of philosophy, but it was challenged by Quine and others in the 20th
century, and the distinction’s coherence and importance is now controversial.
This article traces the distinction’s historical development and summarises the
major arguments against it. Some post-Quinian accounts are discussed, and the
article closes with a list of five challenges which any contemporary account of
the distinction ought to meet.
The analytic/synthetic distinction is a distinction between two different

kinds of truth. Consider:
(1) All bachelors are less than 3 meters tall. (synthetic)
(2) All bachelors are unmarried. (analytic)
Both (1) and (2) are true, but, intuitively, the explanation of the truth-
value is different in the two cases, and they differ in their modal and
epistemic properties. (1) is true in part because of the way the world is –
it is a world in which all the bachelors are less than 3 meters tall – and
in part because of what it means – if it had meant that 2 + 2 = 5, then
it would have been false instead. On the other hand, (2) might be thought
to have a meaning which is sufficient to guarantee its truth all on its own.
There also seem to be modal differences between the two truths – what
(1) claims is contingent, whereas what (2) claims is necessary – and
epistemic differences – to know, or be justified in believing, that (1) is true
we need access to empirical data about bachelors and their heights. But
with (2) we need only reflect that in order for something to count as a
bachelor, it has to be unmarried. The intuition that there are analytic
truths is the intuition that there is some feature of the meaning of truths
like (2) which explains their truth and perhaps these distinctive modal and
epistemic properties as well. On its simplest and strongest conception
then, analyticity is a semantic property of truth-bearers which explains
their truth, necessity and a priority. Weaker conceptions of the notion
may aim at explaining only a subset of these properties, or weaker versions
of the properties, i.e. a writer might claim that the analyticity of a claim
© 2007 The Author
Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
The Analytic/ Synthetic Distinction 713
explains why speakers are always prima facie justified in holding it to be

true, or why speakers have the intuition that the claim is a priori. In
general, the weaker the conception of analyticity, the harder it is to argue
that analyticity is philosophically interesting, and the stronger the con-
ception of analyticity, the harder it is to argue that such a property really
exists.
History
Historically, analyticity has been defined in different ways, depending on
which modal and epistemic features philosophers wanted to account for,
on the claims they hoped would turn out to be analytic, on what they
thought it was acceptable to presuppose and on what objects they tended
to think of as the bearers of truth. Kant characterised analyticity in three
different ways,1 in the Jäsche Logic (36, 606), in the Critique of Pure Reason
(A7/B11), and as follows in the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics:
‘Analytic judgements say nothing in the predicate except what was actu-
ally thought already in the concept of the subject, though not so clearly
nor with the same consciousness’ (§2, p. 16).
Since on this conception an analytic judgement says nothing more in
the predicate than what has already been said, the negation of an analytic
judgement is self-contradictory. From this it follows that analytic judge-
ments are necessary, and also that they are a priori:
I have only to extract from it [the analytic judgement], in accordance with the
principle of contradiction, the required predicate, and in so doing can become
conscious of the necessity of the judgement. (Critique of Pure Reason B12)
But note two things: first, the Kantian mechanism assumes – and hence
does not explain – the necessity and a priority of the principle of non-
contradiction. And second, Kant holds that we have much synthetic a
priori knowledge, including our knowledge of the truths of arithmetic
and geometry.
Frege’s stated aim in defining analyticity in the Grundlagen is ‘not to
assign a new sense [to “analytic”] but only to state more accurately what
earlier writers, Kant in particular, have meant by [it]’ (p. 3e fn). He criticises
Kant’s definition on the grounds that it is restricted to claims of universal
affirmative subject-predicate form (Frege §88; Katz, ‘Analyticity’; Hale
and Wright, Reason’s Proper Study 12–13), and that it employs too sim-
plistic a conception of meaning (Frege §88). His own definition replaces
Kant’s psychological talk of concepts and containment relations with talk
of proof on the basis of definitions and general logical laws:
The problem [of distinguishing analytic from synthetic truths] becomes, in fact,
that of finding the proof of the proposition, and of following it up right back
to the primitive truths. If, in carrying out the process, we come only on
general logical laws and on definitions, then the truth is an analytic one,
© 2007 The Author Philosophy Compass 2/5 (2007): 712–729, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00093.x

714 The Analytic /Synthetic Distinction
bearing in mind that we must take account also of all propositions upon which
the admissibility of any of the definitions depends. If, however, is is impossible
to give the proof without making use of truths which are not of a general
logical nature, but belong to the sphere of some special sciences, then the
proposition is a synthetic one. (§3)
Frege wants his notion of analyticity to apply to arithmetical statements
and to thereby to explain the a priority of arithmetic:
I hope . . . to have made it probable that arithmetic laws are analytic judge-
ments, and therefore a priori . . . I see a great service in Kant’s having distin-
guished between synthetic and analytic judgements. In terming geometric
truths synthetic and a priori, he uncovered their true essence . . . if Kant erred
with respect to arithmetic, this does not detract essentially, I think, from his
merit. (§89)
Yet in other respects Frege’s conception of analyticity is weaker than that
of Kant’s, since it assumes more: Frege-style analyticity could never explain
the a priority of general logical laws, since to say that a truth is analytic
on Frege’s account is just to say that there is a proof of it based on general
logical laws and definitions. Trivially this is so for any general logical law,
but demonstrating that a truth is Frege-analytic will only establish that it
is a priori on the assumption that the general logical laws are a priori –
it doesn’t establish that assumption.2
Though Frege was no logical empiricist himself, many logical empiri-
cists – including Carnap, Hempel and Ayer – were suspicious of Kant’s
category of synthetic a priori truths, and in sympathy with Frege’s project
to show that arithmetic was analytic (Hempel, ‘Empiricist’; ‘On the
Nature of Mathematical Truth’; Ayer; Benacerraf). Even so, the logical
empiricist’s goals for analyticity were goals that Frege’s, and even Kant’s,
notions of analyticity could never achieve. The logical empiricists wanted
an explanation for necessity and a priority in general, one which would
account for the mysterious epistemology and modal status of the truths
of mathematics, logic and philosophy.
Carnap’s early definitions of analyticity in The Logical Syntax of Language
are in terms of his syntactically specified notion of L-consequence. How-
ever, Carnap was influenced by Tarski’s seminal work on logical conse-
quence, and by the time of Meaning and Necessity in 1947, he characterises
analyticity semantically as L-truth, which is in turn defined in terms of
state descriptions (Feferman and Feferman; Carnap, Meaning and Necessity).
A state description for a language ᑦ is an assignment of truth to every
atomic sentence in ᑦ, or its negation, but not both, and to no other
sentence (a little like a row of a reference column on a truth-table, except
that truth-values may be assigned to all literals, and not just to the atomic
sentences.) The truth-values of the remaining sentences of ᑦ are deter-
mined from the literals using the language’s ‘semantical rules’ which might
look like this:

SR1 ⎡¬S⎤ holds in a given state-description iff S does not hold in it.
SR2 ⎡S1 ∨ S2⎤ holds in a given state-system iff either S1 holds in it or S2 holds
in it. etc . . . (Carnap, Meaning and Necessity 9]
Determining the values of the non-atomic sentences is thus a bit like
filling in the rest of the row on a truth-table based on the values given
for the atomic sentences in the reference column, except that there will
also be clauses for the quantifiers, e.g.:
SR5 ⎡(x)P (x)⎤ holds in a given state-system iff all substitution instances of its scope
(⎡Pa⎤, ⎡Pb⎤, ⎡Pc⎤ etc. . . . ) hold in it. etc. . . .
Now we define a sentence as L-true (or analytic) in a language ᑦ just
in case it is true in all state-descriptions. Carnap’s definition of analyticity
during this period looks a lot like a definition of logical truth.
Carnap explains his philosophical views on analyticity further in Empir-
icism, Semantics and Ontology. Which semantic rules one is using will
depend on which language one is using, and which language one uses is
a matter of convention. Recognising this, Carnap thought that which
sentences were analytic was also a matter of convention. Even so, he held
that these conventions provided the needed explanation of the necessity
and a priority of the truths of mathematics and logic, and justified our
talk of abstract entities like numbers and propositions. He writes that
when we wish to begin speaking about a new kind of object, we have to
introduce a linguistic framework. To introduce such a framework, one might
introduce names for the new entities, and predicates expressing their
properties, but neither of these steps is essential:
the two essential steps are rather the following. First, the introduction of a
general term, a predicate of higher level, for the new kind of entities, permit-
ting us to say of any particular entity that it belongs to this kind (e.g. ‘Red is
a property’, ‘Five is a number’). Second, the introduction of variables of the new
type. The new entities are the values of these variables; the constants (and the
closed expressions, if any) are substitutable for the variables. With the help of
the variables, general sentences concerning the new entities can be formulated.
(Carnap, Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology, 213–14)
Carnap holds that frameworks in current use include the thing framework
(for talking about ordinary physical objects), the number framework, the
proposition framework and the property framework. The thing and
property frameworks are empirical, the proposition and number frame-
works are logical. The difference between the two kinds of framework
is the way in which we answer questions about the objects involved. In
the physical object framework, questions (such as ‘do tables exist’?) are
answered by examining the objects or the world around them using our
senses, whereas in the case of questions in the number framework (‘is 5 a
prime number?’) all questions are answered by applying the rules of the
linguistic framework: ‘Here . . . the answers are found, not by empirical
investigation, but by logical analysis based on the rules for the new expres-
sions. Therefore the answers are here analytic, i.e. logically true’ (Carnap,
Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology 209).
Questions about the existence of the objects posited by the frameworks
are ambiguous between questions that are internal to the framework and
questions that are external to it. If one asks whether the number 5 exists,
one might simply mean, can the sentence ‘5 exists’ be established according
to the rules of the framework? The Carnapian answer to this internal
question is ‘yes’. ‘5 = 5’ can be established using the rules of the number-
framework, and from this the sentence ‘5 exists’ follows trivially. Since it
follows from the rules of the framework, the answer is analytically true,
but as our framework is conventional, that analytic truth is merely a matter
of convention.
However, when one asks whether 5 exists, one might also be asking a
question external to the number framework, i.e. whether we ought to
adopt a linguistic framework within which we can prove ‘5 exists’. If so,
then the question is a practical one; it is a question about what we ought
to do, disguised as a question about what there is. Carnap noted that philos-
ophers often act as though the question ‘does 5 exist?’ expresses something
other than these two questions, but he held that since there is no question
other than these two to be asked, such philosophers were confused.
Ten Arguments against Analyticity

The logical empiricists expected analyticity to solve more philosophical
problems than Kant and Frege did, based on fewer assumptions, and their
conventionalist view of the truths of mathematics and arithmetic tended
to undermine the work of the mathematicians and logicians they admired.
Perhaps it should not surprise us then, that it was their use of analyticity
which precipitated the 20th century’s skeptical backlash, although in
practice attacks were often aimed at analyticity in general – including
traditional Kantian and Fregean conceptions of analyticity – as well as at
the conceptions of the logical empiricists. Here are ten of the most
important:
1. Quine’s ‘Truth by Convention’ (1935) questions the notion that
definitions can explain truth, and a fortiori, explain necessary or a priori
truth. Definitions, Quine maintains, are conventions of notational abbreviation.
Stipulatively defining ‘Ha’ as shorthand for ‘Fa ∧ Ga’ will indeed have the
consequence that ‘Ha ↔ Fa ∧ Ga’ is true (and, some might say, necessary
and a priori), but it does not follow that the sentence is true in virtue of
meaning in any interesting sense. The definition has merely allowed us to
rewrite a pre-existing truth, namely ‘Fa ∧ Ga ↔ Fa ∧ Ga’. Whatever
explained the truth of that original sentence explains the truth of the
second sentence as well, and the original sentence was true before the
advent of the definition.
2. In the same paper Quine also presents his Regress Argument against
the view that the basic truths of logic are true because they provide implicit
definitions of the logical constants contained in them. The use of implicit
definition in attempts to explain analyticity – especially analyticity in logic
– can be traced back at least as far as Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language
and has recently been defended by Boghossian (‘Analyticity Reconsid-
ered’). The core idea is that we can confer meaning on a sub-sentential
expression by stipulating that it means whatever it needs to mean in order
for the sentence in which it occurs to be true. For example, I might
stipulate a meaning for the expression ‘bachelar’ by stipulating that the
sentence ‘all and only bachelars are unmarried female adults’ is true. This
core idea generalises along two dimensions. We might implicitly define one
or more expressions in a theory by stipulating that the whole theory is to
come out true (so that the meanings of the expressions are constrained by
the condition that the theory come out true), and we might stipulate that
an argument or set of arguments is truth-preserving, so that the meaning of
the new expression is constrained by the condition that the conclusion has
to be true if the premises are (Lewis, ‘How to Define Theoretical Terms’).
In application to logic, one version of this idea goes as follows: we can
arrange our logic so that some logical truths (or rules of implication) are
basic, and others are derived from the more basic ones. In the case of an
axiomatic system we would call the basic logical truths ‘axioms’ and the
derived logical truths ‘theorems’. There seems to be little difficulty with
how we know the derived logical truths (if we know the basic ones) for
we learn them by deriving them from the basic ones. But how do we
know the basic ones? One suggestion is that we know that they have to
be true because they provide implicit definitions of the logical constants
contained in them. For example, ‘∧’ means whatever it needs to for a
collection of schemata including, say, ((A ∧ B) → A) to be true.3 Since we
know that ((A ∧ B) → A) is one of the collection of schemata that implic-
itly define ‘∧’, (it is claimed) we know that it must be true.
Quine’s regress argument is directed at just this kind of view. He argues
that since there are really an infinite number of truths of any one logical
form, any definition used to give meaning to a logical constant would need
to proceed by use of schemata, and stipulate that any sentence which was an
instance of one of the schemata was true. But if this is how we proceed then
the justification of any such instance is problematic. For we must recognise
it as an instance of the schema, and then reason something like this:
Sentence T is an instance of schema C.
For all sentences s, if s is an instance of schema C, then s is true.
Therefore sentence T is true.
In performing this reasoning we use and hence assume the truth of, logic
(e.g. in this case the rule of universal instantiation.) Yet it is illegitimate

to assume the truth of logic to justify the basic logical truths. Since
implicit definition requires some logic to ‘already be true’, the most basic
logical truths cannot be made true by implicit definition. This argument
may also be framed in terms of truth-preserving implication rules (Quine,
‘Truth by Convention’; Carroll).
3. In ‘Carnap and Logical Truth’ (1954) Quine presents a dilemma for
truth in virtue of meaning. There are two ways in which a true sentence
might be true in virtue of meaning. It might be that the truth of the
sentence is partly determined by its meaning, but if this is what it means
the notion is trivial: all sentences are true in part because of their mean-
ings. Alternatively, it might be that the truth of the sentence is entirely
determined by its meaning. But against this Quine asks us to consider our
best examples of analytic truths, e.g. ‘everything is self identical’ or ‘all
bachelors are unmarried’. Even in these cases, he argues, we may as well
say that part of what makes the sentence true is the facts, or the way the
world is: all bachelors really are unmarried, and all the things there are,
as a matter of fact, self-identical. In this there seems to be no difference
between such sentences and the ones we call ‘synthetic’. So on this second
interpretation the notion of ‘true in virtue of meaning’ is empty. But the
defender of analyticity intends the notion to be neither trivial nor empty
(Quine, ‘Carnap and Logical Truth’).
4. According to the famously puzzling Circularity Argument (Quine,
‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’; Grice and Strawson), the expression ‘ana-
lytic’ cannot be satisfactorily clarified or defined, and hence ought to be
abandoned. Though ‘analytic’ might be defined in terms of synonymy –
were that notion sufficiently understood – and synonymy might be
defined in terms of intersubstitutability salve veritate in necessity-style
contexts4 – were such contexts sufficiently understood – given that the only
hope for explaining necessity in empirically respectable terms is by explaining it in
terms of analyticity, any such explanation of analyticity must be circular
(Soames 360–1). The circularity argument is widely ridiculed and
challenged (Grice and Strawson; Sober; Boghossian, ‘Analyticity’), but
one way to see its force is to see Quine as assuming (as many semantic
externalists would no longer assume) that in order to understand an
expression, a speaker has to know how its extension is determined, for
example, by a rule for deciding which objects (in this case which sen-
tences) the expression applies to. In some cases such a rule may be
expressed using other expressions (e.g. ‘synonymy’), but if it is, the speaker
will have to know the rules which determine which objects (or pairs of
objects) these expressions apply to. There has to be an end to the chain
somewhere, otherwise the extension of the first term will not be deter-
mined at all. Different philosophers will have different views about what
kinds of conditions the most basic rules may specify (at times Quine
writes as if those conditions will have to be specified in behaviouristically
acceptable terms [‘Translation and Meaning’]), but if the chain of rules
contains a circle – so that our rule for determining the extension of

‘analytic’ presupposes that we already have a rule for determining the
extension of ‘analytic’, then no-one, no matter what they think the basic
rules may look like, should think that the extension of that expression is
determinate.
5. The same paper also contains Quine’s Argument from Confirmation
Holism, in which he argues that if we identify the meaning of a linguistic
form with sets of observations that would confirm or disconfirm it (as
many of Quine’s contemporaries were tempted to do), then sentences in
general are not meaning bearers, since an observation will only confirm
or disconfirm a sentence relative to a set of background assumptions.
Many commentators respond to this argument by declining to identify
the meaning of a linguistic form with the set of observations that would
confirm or disconfirm it, but see also Sober’s article, which challenges
Quine’s conception of confirmation.
6. A phalanx of Quinean arguments take on the view that sentences
can be made analytic by stipulative definition. For example, Quine some-
times admits that a new expression may be made synonymous with an old
though a stipulative definition (often to the puzzlement or delight of his
commentators), and hence that the result might be called ‘analytic’, but
he denies that definitions can ground the kind of analyticity which his
opponents require for their epistemological and metaphysical projects.
Rather, he holds that definitions are ephemeral, independent of meaning and
that being a definition is a property of utterances not of sentences (Quine,
‘Carnap and Logical Truth’; ‘Truth by Convention’). Suppose, for exam-
ple, that a scientist within a linguistic community develops litmus paper
as a way of testing the acidity or alkalinity of a solution and the test
becomes so popular that the entire community, standardising their
language, adopts the following stipulative definition of ‘acid’: something
is an acid iff it turns litmus paper red. This is rather an idealised view of
the language of science, but if it happened like this, then we might say
that ‘acid’ is synonymous with ‘substance that turns litmus paper red’ and
that the sentence ‘all acids turn litmus paper red’ is analytic. But suppose
it then happens that a new kind of litmus paper is developed along similar
lines, and acids turn it blue (and alkaline liquids turn it red). This new
kind of paper is more durable and quickly replaces the old. The sentence
‘all acids turn litmus paper red’ is now false. Thus Quine holds that the
property of being a legislative definition is an ephemeral property of a
sentence and this means that it is no use for the projects that supporters
of analyticity intended it for. It is no use saying that its being used to give
meaning to ‘acid’ explains the truth of the sentence ‘something is an acid
iff it turns litmus paper red’, since the sentence need not be true at all.
Similarly, it is no use saying that fact explains our knowledge that acids
turn litmus paper red; we do not know that acids turn litmus paper red
– after the new wave of litmus paper it isn’t even true. Quine claims that
all this kind of thing can (and does) happen without the word in question
changing its meaning and hence that definition is independent of meaning
and that this means that being a legislative definition not a property of
sentences simpliciter, but only of utterances.
7. Putnam’s Robot Cat argument exploits the modal properties which
analyticity is meant to entail. He argues that the sentence ‘all cats are
animals’ does not, contrary to appearances, express a necessary proposi-
tion, since we can describe situations in which we would say that it was
false. For example, we might discover that cats did not evolve on this
planet, but have always been cleverly disguised robots, constructed by the
Martians for spying on us. If the analyticity of a sentence entails the
necessity of the proposition which it expresses then it would seem to
follow from Putnam’s conclusion that ‘all cats are animals’ is not analytic
(‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’).
It might seem strange that the failure of one particular sentence to be
analytic should be taken to undermine the analytic/synthetic distinction
in general, but the thought is this: ‘all cats are animals’ appears to be
analytic, but Putnam has shown that it is not. That means that something
other than analyticity (say, centrality in a Quinean web of belief, or our
failure of imagination) can explain the appearance of analyticity. And if
something other than analyticity can explain the appearance of analyticity
in this case, perhaps that is the cause of the appearance of analyticity in
all other cases too (Harman, ‘Analyticity Regained?’; ‘Death of Meaning’;
Margolis and Laurence, ‘Should We Trust our Intuitions?’).
8. A related form of argument appeals to the fact that ordinary speakers
dissent from putatively analytic sentences or obvious consequences of those
sentences, (e.g. ‘The pope is a bachelor’) or assent to sentences which
ought to be false if other supposedly analytic sentences are true, (e.g. the
Olympic committee agreeing to the sentence ‘some women are not
female’) (Harman, ‘Death of Meaning’; ‘Analyticity Regained?’). Winograd
and Flores interpret such data as showing that philosophers usually deal
with over-simplistic conceptions of meaning, though one possible
response to these examples is to argue that which sentences speakers are
willing to assent to or dissent from is influenced by more than just the
truth-value of the proposition semantically expressed by the sentence. For
example, speakers may be unwilling to assent to ‘the pope is a bachelor’
because they are concerned about implicating something false, namely
that the pope is an eligible bachelor (Winograd and Flores; Katz, ‘Where
Things Now Stand’).
9. Another reason philosophers avoid appealing to the analytic/synthetic
distinction stems from considerations connected to semantic externalism.
Many semantic externalists hold that it is possible to use an expression
competently without knowing how the reference or denotation of the
expression would be determined. For example, Burge’s character can
wonder whether he has arthritis in his thigh, even though he is mistaken
about the properties an ailment would have to have to count as arthritis

(e.g. being a disease of the joints) (Burge, ‘Individualism and the Mental’;
‘Individualism and Psychology’). Similarly, in Kripke’s Gödel/Schmidt
thought experiment, our utterances of the name ‘Gödel’ refer to Gödel,
even though we believe that only someone who discovered the incom-
pleteness of arithmetic can count as being Gödel (and in the thought
experiment Gödel has stolen the result from Schmidt). This undermines
one traditional way of thinking about analyticity, according to which what
is epistemically special about analytic sentences is that anyone who under-
stands one can come to know that it is true by deriving it from what they
know as competent speakers. The less the speakers have to know to count
as competent – and the less determinate what they have to know is – the
more that route to knowledge is undercut. Chapter 4 of Williamson’s
forthcoming book The Philosophy of Philosophy argues against the episte-
mological import of analyticity on these kinds of grounds.
10. Finally, some philosophers take the phenomenon of widespread
vagueness in natural language to undermine analyticity. Donnellan, for
example, argues that the linguistic rules governing expressions like ‘fish’
do not legislate for all possible cases. For example, if we were to discover
creatures otherwise very like fish which absorbed oxygen through their
skins, Donnellan thinks that current linguistic usage doesn’t legislate on
whether the word ‘fish’ applies to such creatures. In such a situation we
should be free to draw the extension of ‘fish’ as we wish, either so that
‘all fish have gills’ is false, or so that the creatures did not count as fish,
leaving ‘all fish have gills’ true. Neither usage would contradict current
practice, since current practice is simply silent about so unexpected a
situation. Given this, we cannot now claim that the sentence expresses a
necessary truth, and so, given that analytic truths are necessary, we cannot
say that it is analytic either. Since the phenomenon of intensional vague-
ness is widespread in natural languages, many of the sentences traditionally
given as examples of analytic truths are not really analytic.
More Recent Developments

Carnap and Quine disagreed over the analytic/synthetic distinction, but
they also shared some fundamental commitments: a respect for the empir-
ical and formal sciences and a suspicion of metaphysics which cast a
shadow on value, de re and de dicto necessity, numbers, sets, universals
and intensional meanings. Such ‘metaphysical’ things were to be reduced
to something more respectable (for example, de dicto necessity might be
reduced to analyticity, itself to be firmly grounded in verificationism about
meaning) or dropped entirely.
In spite of widespread rejection of verificationism about meaning,
subsequent events have conspired independently to make some of those
things more widely accepted, and there have been new proposals to define
analyticity in terms of them. Here I highlight the improved fortunes of

three – intensional meanings, necessity and essence – and their uses in
relation to analyticity.
The rapid development of the science of linguistics has led some, fore-
most amongst them Jerrold Katz, to argue that our best scientific theories
postulate the existence of intensional meanings (Katz, ‘Some Remarks on
Quine’; ‘Where Things Now Stand’; ‘Analyticity’; ‘Analyticity, Neces-
sity’). Katz argues that analyticity should be defined in terms of inclusion
relations between senses, where senses are postulates of our best linguistic
theory for explaining speaker intuitions about sentences and parts of
sentences. The main role of analyticity, on this conception, is to explain
speakers’ linguistic intuitions. With echoes of the Quine/Carnap debate
over the testability of theories of meaning (Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism;
‘Translation and Meaning’; Carnap, Meaning and Synonymy), the legiti-
macy of this part of linguistics and the need for such theories has been
challenged by Harman (‘Katz Credo’) and more recently by Margolis and
Laurence (‘Should We Trust our Intuitions?’). Katz’s original position was
also in tension with semantic externalism, and he attempts to revise his
position to deal with such problems in ‘Analyticity, Necessity’.
At least three developments have contributed to the rehabilitation of
necessity in analytic philosophy: first, the development of probabilistic
theories in physics, coupled with the belief that probabilities should be
understood in modal terms, has made some philosophers of science more
sympathetic to modality (Sober). Second, some philosophers see the exist-
ence of a sound and complete semantics for first order modal logic as
contributing to the clarity of modal claims (Kripke; Fitting and Mendelsohn).
And third, David Lewis has provided a distinctively Quinean argument for
the acceptance of possible worlds by demonstrating their utility in analysing
other notions, such as meaning and causation. Lewis’s ‘General Semantics’
criticises Katz’ approach to meaning for being uninformative, and suggests
that we regard the meanings of expressions as being, or at least determin-
ing, functions from indices to extensions, and the meanings of sentences
in particular as determining (though they are not normally identical
with) functions from indices to truth values.5 Lewis’s indices are n-tuples
‘of the various items other than meaning that may enter into determining
extensions’ and they include a possible worlds coordinate, as well as con-
textual coordinates providing parameters such as time, place and speaker.
He provides two distinct notions of analyticity in terms of such functions:
Lewis 1 A sentence meaning is analytic iff it (determines a function which) is
true at every index.
Lewis 2 A sentence meaning is analytic on a given occasion iff it (determines
a function which) is true at every index i having as its time, place, speaker,
audience, indicated-objects and previous-discourse coordinates respectively the
time, the place the speaker, the audience, the set of objects pointed to, and the
previous discourse on that occasion (17).

Though it may not be immediately apparent, Lewis’s definitions might

be regarded as linguistically sophisticated descendants of Carnap’s defini-
tion in terms of truth in all state descriptions. If we take the possible
world coordinate to play the role of Carnap’s state descriptions, then the
first definition might be glossed as ‘truth in all state descriptions with
respect to all contexts’ and the second as ‘truth in all state descriptions
with respect to this context’.
Lastly – and perhaps most inimical to the austerities of early 20th-
century empiricism – Kit Fine has argued for a realism about essential
properties that is distinct from realism about necessary properties, and this
has led him to suggest that analyticity simpliciter can be made sense of
and also that we can make sense of a kind of relativised analyticity, in
addition to the ordinary kind. According to Fine (‘Essence and Modality’,
Philosophers’ Annual; ‘Senses of Essence’) ‘as essence is to necessity, so
meaning is to analyticity’. How is essence to necessity? On Fine’s view,
an essential property of an object is one which is had in virtue of the object’s
nature. It is part of the nature of Singleton Socrates to have Socrates as a
member, and this explains why it is necessary that Singleton Socrates has
Socrates as a member. But it is no part of Socrates’ nature to be the
member of a set – even though Socrates has the property of being a
member of Singleton Socrates necessarily. Fine develops his views of
analyticity by analogy. A sentence is analytic if it is true in virtue of the
meanings of the words – that is, all the words contained in the sentence.
But if that makes sense, Fine thinks we can also make sense of a sentence
being true because of the meaning of just one of the words in the
sentence. For example, we might say that ‘all bachelors are unmarried’ is
true in virtue of the meaning of ‘bachelor’, though not in virtue of the
meaning of ‘unmarried’ (or equivalently, that it is analytic relative to
‘bachelor’ but not relative to ‘unmarried’).
We therefore have a direct analogy with the relativised form of necessity. Just
as a necessary truth may be true in virtue of the identity of certain objects as
opposed to others, so an analytic truth may be true in virtue of the meanings
of certain terms as opposed to others. (Fine, ‘Essence and Modality’, Philosophical
Perpectives 10)
Not every recent writer has approach analyticity through a post-positivistic
liberalism about metaphysics, however. Boghossian argues that writers on
analyticity have often confused two different conceptions of analyticity:
epistemic analyticity and metaphysical analyticity (‘Analyticity Reconsid-
ered’). A sentence is epistemically analytic just in case grasp of the sentence’s
meaning alone is sufficient for a speaker to be justified in holding it to be
true. A sentence is metaphysically analytic just in case it owes its truth value
completely to its meaning. Boghossian argues that Quine’s arguments
against the metaphysical notion are successful – a view that is challenged
by Russell – but defends a version of epistemological analyticity. That

defence is challenged by Harman (‘Analyticity Regained?’) and Margolis

and Laurence (‘Boghossian on Analyticity’).
The Way Forward

New developments in logic, the philosophy of language and linguistics
towards the end of the 20th century have provided new motivation, new
puzzles and new data points which any adequate theory of analyticity
ought to take into account. Here are five challenges which I believe any
contemporary attempt at defining analyticity ought to take on:
1. The Objects of Analyticity: A contemporary theory of analyticity
should make it clear what kinds of things can be analytic. Propositions?
Sentence-types? Utterances? Characters? Can rules of implication be
analytic? Much of the debate over analyticity took place in environ-
ments in which it was not common to be so particular, but the
distinctions can have important consequences. For example, it is one thing
to claim that the sentence ‘all bachelors are unmarried’ is true in virtue
of the conventions governing the English words it contains, but it seems
crazy to maintain that the proposition the sentence expresses is true in
virtue of any conventions governing English words; the proposition is
expressible in French, Farsi and Mandarin as well, so it would be odd to
think that it is the meaning of the English words that made the proposition
true. (Sober imagines the reaction of the French bachelors when they
learn that the English think that it is the meaning of their words that
makes it the case that all French bachelors are unmarried: ‘Quelle
impertinence’!)
2. Non-emptiness and Non-triviality: Since the dilemma Quine
presented in ‘Carnap and Logical Truth’ there has been some skeptical
consensus that the notion of truth in virtue of meaning must be either
empty or trivial (Boghossian, Analyticity Reconsidered’). A new theory of
analyticity should resolve this dilemma; whether or not logic, arithmetic
and individual sentences like ‘all cats are animals’ are analytic may be up
for grabs, but however the terrain is cut, if analyticity is to do any work,
some but not all sentences should turn out to be analytic.
3. Explanatory role: Not just any old non-trivial, non-empty binary
distinction on the set of truth-bearers deserves the name of the analytic/
synthetic distinction. For example, it would not do to characterise analytic
truths as sentences containing more than 30 characters (counting spaces
and punctuation), and synthetic truths as all the other sentences. Similarly,
it won’t be sufficient simply to latch on to some property which explains
speakers’ intuitions about analyticity; Quine identifies properties that
do that – including centrality in the web of belief and obviousness – but
neither of those properties are analyticity. Historically, analyticity has been
regarded as a semantic property of truths which explains the truth, and
distinctive modal and epistemic properties of their bearers. Perhaps the
epistemic property in question is not all-out a priority; maybe analytic

sentences merely allow for an interesting stripe of a posteriori justification,
which previous writers have mistaken for a priority. And perhaps the
modal properties it entails are not necessity exactly, but rather something
interestingly related – such as Kaplan’s truth in all contexts. But in
order to count as analyticity, a property will have to explain some kind of
distinctive modal and epistemic properties.
4. The Contingent Analytic: Kaplan’s Demonstratives argues that
there are sentences which are analytic, and yet which express contingent
propositions. The most discussed example is ‘I am here now’ and there is
a clear intuitive sense in which ‘I am here’ has its truth guaranteed by its
meaning, even though the proposition it expresses could have been false;
I didn’t have to be here now – I might have been elsewhere.
Kaplan’s discovery is important for two reasons. The first is that it
presents a new piece of data that any good theory of analyticity ought to
be able to explain. The second is that it provides intuitive support for the
idea that there is a solution to the Quinean dilemma presented in the
second point above. There is a sense in which this sentence has its truth-
value guaranteed by its meaning, and moreover, this seems to happen in
a special way; not every sentence is true in virtue of meaning in the way
in which ‘I am here now’ is, and so whatever that sense of ‘truth in virtue
of meaning’ is, it is not a trivial one. But – since ‘I am here now’ is an
example – nor is it empty.
5. A Different Kind of Semantic Guarantee: Finally, the account
should legislate sensibly about a kind of sentence which might be said to
be true in virtue of meaning, but which does not seem to be analytic:
(3) Hesperus is Phosphorus.
(4) a = b (e.g. in some geometric example)
(5) Cicero is Tully.
If these are understood to be true identity sentences between names,
where the names are directly referential (so that the meaning of the name
is its referent), then their truth is – in one sense – semantically guaranteed:
given what the sentences mean, they cannot but be true and this is
reflected in their distinctive modal status: such sentences are necessary if
true. Yet there are four reasons to think that they should not be classified
as analytic.
First, they don’t seem to be analytic.
Second, analyticity has a strong intuitive connection with logical truth.
Indeed, it often seems natural to think about analyticity as a kind of
naturally occurring analogue to artificially created logical truth and logi-
cians often think of the decision to treat certain expressions (e.g. ‘∀’, ‘=’,
‘ⵧ’, ‘K ’, ‘I’) as logical constants as a practical decision about which analytic
truths (e.g. ‘∀x(x = x)’, ‘ⵧ(A → A)’, ‘Kp → p’, ‘Here(I )’) to recognise
formally as logical truths within their system. The problem here is that

‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’, as an instance of the schema ‘a = b’, is not on

the list of sentences that are even in the running for formal cannonisation
as logical truths. It is plausible that even if we were being maximally
explicit about logical structure, ‘a = b’ would not be a theorem.
Third, these sentences do not seem to have the special epistemic properties
that analytic sentences are supposed to have. I cannot learn that Hesperus
is Phosphorus just by thinking about the meaning of the expressions
‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ (Burgess).
Finally, though ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ does have the modal property
we usually expect analytic sentences to have – that is, it expresses a
necessary truth – the explanation of why it does this cannot be the one
we normally expect for analytic truths. Consider ‘All bachelors are
unmarried’. About this a defender of analyticity might say: the proper
parts of the sentence have meanings, and in virtue of the meanings they
have (along with the way the world is), they have certain extensions. But
even before it is settled what the world is like, and so even before it is
settled what those extensions are, we can see that the meaning of ‘bach-
elors’ has to determine an extension which is a subset of the extension of
‘unmarried men’. As a result, no matter what the world is like, the whole
sentence will be true. But the explanation of the necessity of ‘Hesperus
is Phosphorus’ has to be different. The proper parts of the sentence have
meanings, but, since the two names are directly referential, in their case
those meanings are determined by their extensions. So it cannot be true that
before it is even settled what the extensions of those names are, the
meanings of the names guarantee that the extension of ‘Hesperus’ must
be appropriately related to (in this case identical with) the extension of
‘Phosphorus’.
I think that progress in the philosophy of language in the later part of
the 20th century left defenders of analyticity with more work to do than
is usually recognised.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank José Bermúdez, Jan Plate and an anonymous referee
at Philosophy Compass for comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
Short Biography
Gillian Russell’s main research interests are in the philosophy of language
and logic. She has written articles on dialetheism, Hume’s Law and
interest relative invariantism in epistemology, and her new book Truth in
Virtue of Meaning (forthcoming with Oxford) is a contemporary account
and defence of the analytic-synthetic distinction. Originally from the UK,
Russell has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Queensland,
Melbourne and Monash in Australia, was a Killam Postdoc at the
University of Alberta in Canada, and currently works as an assistant

professor at Washington University in St Louis. She holds an M.A. in
Philosophy and German from the University of St Andrews, and M.A.
and Ph.D. from the philosophy department at Princeton University.
Notes
* Correspondences address: Department of Philosophy, One Brookings Drive, Washington
University, St Louis, MO 63130. Email: grussell@artsci.wustl.edu.
1
Precursors of the Kantian distinction may be found in Arnauld; Locke; von Leibniz 33; Hume.
2
Contemporary logicists, including Crispin Wright and Bob Hale, have been attempting to
revive Frege’s project, and in doing so have considered the expedient of altering Frege’s con-
ception of analyticity (Reason’s Proper Study).
3
Here I assume that a schema is true just in case all its instances are.
4
By a ‘necessity-style context’ I mean here contexts such as ‘necessarily . . .’ or ‘it is necessary
that . . .’.
5
Strictly speaking, Lewis’s semantics also provides some ‘non-Carnapian’ intensions that are not
functions from indices to truth-values.
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Russell The Analytic Synthetic Distinction

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Philosophy Compass 2/5 (2007): 712–729, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00093.

The Analytic /Synthetic Distinction

The analytic/synthetic distinction is a distinction between two different

explains why speakers are always prima facie justified in holding it to be

© 2007 The Author Philosophy Compass 2/5 (2007): 712–729, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00093.x

© 2007 The Author Philosophy Compass 2/5 (2007): 712–729, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00093.x

Ten Arguments against Analyticity

© 2007 The Author Philosophy Compass 2/5 (2007): 712–729, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00093.x

contains a circle – so that our rule for determining the extension of

about the properties an ailment would have to have to count as arthritis

More Recent Developments

analyticity in terms of them. Here I highlight the improved fortunes of

© 2007 The Author Philosophy Compass 2/5 (2007): 712–729, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00093.x

Though it may not be immediately apparent, Lewis’s definitions might

© 2007 The Author Philosophy Compass 2/5 (2007): 712–729, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00093.x

defence is challenged by Harman (‘Analyticity Regained?’) and Margolis

The Way Forward

epistemic property in question is not all-out a priority; maybe analytic

© 2007 The Author Philosophy Compass 2/5 (2007): 712–729, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00093.x

‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’, as an instance of the schema ‘a = b’, is not on

University of Alberta in Canada, and currently works as an assistant

© 2007 The Author Philosophy Compass 2/5 (2007): 712–729, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00093.x

© 2007 The Author Philosophy Compass 2/5 (2007): 712–729, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00093.x

© 2007 The Author Philosophy Compass 2/5 (2007): 712–729, 10.1111/j.1747-9991.2007.00093.x

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