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If a concept has an analysis, then a statement connecting the two will be analytically true—it will be true just in virtue of the correctness of the analysis. If there are correct conceptual analyses, then there are analytically true statements—and there are correct conceptual analyses. Thus there is an analytic-synthetic distinction. If there is no analytic-synthetic distinction, then there are no analyses: no concept breaks down into constituents, with the accompanying necessary and sufficient conditions. All concepts (“meanings”) turn out to be primitive, or there are no concepts (“meanings”): some adopt the former view; Quine adopted the latter. Both views seem utterly extraordinary to the naïve viewpoint—like being told that all linguistic expressions (including phrases and sentences) are primitive or that there are no linguistic expressions. To hold that there is no analytic-synthetic distinction is apt to strike the traditional philosopher as like holding that there is no subject-predicate distinction or no true-false distinction. He or she will want to hear a pretty convincing argument before going down that path. This chapter considers whether there is such an argument.

This chapter introduces and motivates study of the analytic/synthetic distinction, and provides a brief history of that distinction. It also contains some preliminaries which will be of use in the rest of the book.

The traditional account of the analytic/synthetic distinction is based on a naive folk theory of language. This chapter explains how that folk theory supported a particular version of the analytic/synthetic distinction. It then provides alternatives to the folk picture and argues that we should distinguish four different kinds of meaning: character, content, reference determiner, and referent. This more fine-grained picture allows us to reconstruct analyticity as truth in virtue of reference determiner, which is more easily defended against the old arguments against analyticity. This move also solves the worry about equating analytic sentences with those that express necessary truths, and allows us to account for the status of the contingent analytic and the necessary a posteriori.

This chapter re-examines the much maligned notion of analyticity. It suggests that a major reason why various philosophers have had trouble applying the analytic-synthetic distinction is that they have been affected by an unarticulated dogma. It contends that once this dogma is challenged and its contradictory asserted, light can be shed once again and the equilibrium of analytic empiricism can be restored.

This chapter examines Quine’s evolving views on the analytic-synthetic distinction. Following Quine’s two-tiered argument in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” it answers three questions: (1) When did Quine start demanding a behavioristically acceptable definition of analyticity? (2) When did he stop searching for such a definition? and (3) When did he reject the dogma of reductionism, concluding that there is no need for an analytic-synthetic distinction in the first place? This chapter argues that it is impossible to identify a specific moment at which Quine definitively rejected the analytic-synthetic distinction; from a developmental perspective, all three questions require an independent answer. The second part of this chapter reconstructs Quine’s evolving views on the analytic-synthetic distinction after 1951 and challenges the common misconception that he changed his mind about logic, holism, and analyticity in the later stages of his career.

Davidson attacks the intelligibility of conceptual relativism, i.e. of truth relative to a conceptual scheme. He defines the notion of a conceptual scheme as something ordering, organizing, and rendering intelligible empirical content, and calls the position that employs both notions scheme‐content dualism. He argues that such dualism (the ‘third, and perhaps, last dogma of empiricism’) is untenable since: (1) not only can we not parcel out empirical content sentence per sentence (as Quine's rejection of the analytic‐synthetic distinction had shown) but also (2) the notion of uninterpreted content to which several schemes are relative, and the related notion of a theory ‘fitting the evidence’, can be shown to lack intelligibility too. Davidson argues further that belief in incommensurable schemes or non‐intertranslatable languages is possible only on violating a correct understanding of interpretability (developed in Essays 9 and 10): if we succeed in interpreting someone else then we have shown there is no need to speak of two conceptual schemes, while if we fail ‘there is no ground for speaking of two.’

The chapter is divided into two parts. The first part further elaborates some of the differences between Quine’s model and the present model; the second part shows that, and explains why, the present model is immune to major criticisms of Quine’s model. The first part centers on (i) differences in their stance toward empiricism and the role of intellect in knowledge, (ii) differences in their grounds for rejecting the analytic-synthetic dichotomy, and (iii) differences in their approach to abstract knowledge—in particular to logical, mathematical, and theoretical scientific knowledge. The second part deals with criticisms of Quine’s model, showing that most criticisms target Quinean views, arguments, or motivations that are not shared by the present model. Three criticisms, due to Grice and Strawson, Grünbaum, and Friedman, receive special attention.

Deals with the project of demonstrating the possibility of conclusions with a distinctive metaphysical status, both in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which for its success depends on the analytic‐synthetic distinction, and analogously in Strawson's Kantian project that does not appeal to transcendental idealism but which nevertheless exploits the notion of a priori knowledge. Stroud identifies two conditions for the possibility of propositions with a distinctive metaphysical status: first, necessary conditions between the possession of certain concepts or conceptual capacities and others can be discovered; and secondly, certain conceptual capacities can be shown to be required for the possibility of any thought or experience at all. The distinctive status of these propositions, Stroud argues, can be described without any appeal to the analytic‐synthetic distinction and without supposing that if we know them, we know them a priori.

This chapter offers an interpretation of Kant’s claim that hypothetical imperatives are analytic and categorical imperatives are synthetic. This distinction applies comfortably to propositions having subject/predicate form, but imperatives do not have that form. So in what sense can the distinction apply? The key to an answer is Kant’s notion of practical necessitation that is unpacked by reference to full rational agency. The chapter explains how the proposed interpretation of imperatives bears on the question of the justification of Kant’s fundamental moral principle, the categorical imperative that is featured in Section III of his 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, where it is important to distinguish epistemological questions about the truth, scope, and authority of practical statements.

Names become attached to individuals, real kinds, properties, and so forth through conventions, that is, through the setting and following of precedents, patterns that continue to be reproduced because they serve communicative functions. Each precedent follower repeats what was done before, but “what was done before” can be interpreted in different ways. Stabilizing these precedents are the real kinds and property peaks in the natural world that make cognition possible. Names are not tethered to any necessary properties or descriptions but to property peaks and to the clusters that are real kinds as wholes. They are directly referential, providing no foundation for an analytic/synthetic distinction. The understanding that language imparts to an interpreter is idiosyncratic, depending on the interpreter’s prior knowledge of the world itself. Words do not create boundaries where there were none before but exploit the clumpy though often unclear structure that the world presents.