universally quantified biconditional of the substituted terms. By hypothesis, that biconditional will in fact express a necessary truth in every context; the problem merely shifts to how such truths can be known, just as in the case of modal-analyticity. If that problem were already solved, there would be little to gain from appealing to quasi-Frege-analyticity in order to explain how core philosophical truths can be known.
Even if many philosophical truths are quasi-Frege-analytic, it does not follow that we can gain cognitive access to them simply on the basis of our logical and linguistic competence.
Yet another proposal is to consider as (metaphysically) analytic just the logical consequences of true (or good) semantic theories. It is presumably in the spirit of this proposal to interpret semantic theories not as stating straightforwardly contingent, a posteriori facts about how people use words but as somehow articulating the essential structure of semantically individuated languages; in this sense, the word “green” could not have meant anything but green in English. Even so, the definition does nothing to trace any special cognitive access that speakers have to semantic facts about their own language to any special metaphysical status enjoyed by those facts. It also counts every logical truth as analytic, since a logical truth is a logical consequence of anything, without illuminating any special cognitive access we may have to logical truths. Of course, if someone knows the relevant semantic truths about their own language and is logically proficient, then they are also in a position to know the analytic truths as so defined. But, on this definition, we do nothing to explain how the semantics and logic are known in the first place by saying that they are analytic. As in previous cases, the account of analyticity merely shifts the burden from explaining knowledge of analytic truths to explaining knowledge of some base class of necessary or logical or semantic or other truths. Once the analyticity card has been played to effect this shift of the explanatory burden, it cannot be played again to explain knowledge of the base truths, by saying that they are analytic, for they count as analytic simply because they belong to the relevant base class, and the question remains how we know truths in the base class.
5
Unless one is a skeptic about meaning or modality, one can define several notions of analyticity in semantic and modal terms, but none of them provides any reason to regard the truths to which it applies as somehow insubstantial, or as posing no significant cognitive challenge. That upshot may seem puzzling. Surely we sometimes make a sentence true by stipulative definition. For example, I might introduce the term “zzz” (pronounced as a buzz) by saying “A zzz is a short sleep” and thereby make “A zzz is a short sleep” true. What prevents us from using such cases as paradigms to fix a semantic notion of analyticity on which analytic truths are insubstantial?
We can see the problems for the proposal more clearly by distinguishing the semantic from the metasemantic. Semantics facts are facts of the kind we attempt to systematize in giving a systematic compositional semantic theory for a language, facts as to what its expressions mean. Metasemantic facts are the nonsemantic facts on which the semantic facts supervene. The distinction is rough but clear enough to be workable. Thus the fact that “horse” applies to horses is semantic, not metasemantic; the fact that utterances of “horse” are often caused by horses is metasemantic, not semantic.24 Similarly, the fact that “zzz” means a short sleep is semantic, while the fact that it was introduced by someone saying “A zzz is a short sleep” is metasemantic. The semantic theory takes no notice of the act of stipulation, only of its outcome – that a given expression has a given meaning. The act of stipulation makes the sentence true by making it have a meaning on which it is, in the quite ordinary way, true. My saying “A zzz is a short sleep” did not make a zzz be a short sleep, because that would be to make a short sleep be a short sleep, and my saying “A zzz is a short sleep” certainly did not make a short sleep be a short sleep. In particular, since there were many short sleeps before I was born, there were many zzzes before I was born, independently of my later actions. At best, my saying “A zzz is a short sleep” made “zzz” mean a short sleep, and therefore “A zzz is a short sleep” mean that a short sleep is a short sleep. This is simply the standard semantic contribution of meaning to truth, just as for synthetic truths. The peculiarity of the case is all at the metasemantic level; the use of stipulative definitions as paradigms does not yield a semantic notion of analyticity. Making “zzz” mean a short sleep helps make “A zzz is a short sleep” true only because a short sleep is a short sleep. “A short sleep is a short sleep” is a logical truth, but we have still been given no reason to regard logical truths as somehow insubstantial. The use of stipulative definitions as paradigms of analyticity does not justify the idea that analytic truths are in any way insubstantial.
My stipulation may smooth my path from knowing the logical truth “A short sleep is a short sleep” to knowing the Frege-analytic truth “A zzz is a short sleep,” but of course that does not explain how I know “A short sleep is a short sleep” in the first place.
The metaphysics and semantics of analytic truths are no substitute for their epistemology. If their epistemology is as distinctive as is often supposed, that is not the outcome of a corresponding distinctiveness in their metaphysics or semantics. It can only be captured by confronting their epistemology directly. We therefore turn to epistemological accounts of analyticity.
Notes
1 1 To give just one example, even Jack Smart, whose work robustly engages the nature of the non-linguistic, non-conceptual world and who described metaphysics as “a search for the most plausible theory of the whole universe, as it is considered in the light of total science” (1984: 138), could also write that philosophy is “in some sense a conceptual inquiry, and so a science can be thought of as bordering on philosophy to the extent to which it raises within itself problems of a conceptual nature” (1987: 25), although he admits that he “cannot give a clear account of what I have meant when earlier in this essay I have said that some subjects are more concerned with “conceptual matters” than are others” (1987: 32).
2 2 The overall criticism of Quine’s procedure goes back to Grice and Strawson (1956). Sober (2000) argues that Quine violates his own methodological naturalism in criticizing semantic notions on foundational grounds without considering their use in science.
3 3 Given Kripke’s arguments, defining “analytic” as the conjunction of “a priori” and “necessary” does not yield a natural notion, since a disjunction of an a priori contingency with an unrelated a posteriori necessity will then count as analytic: it is a priori because its first disjunct is and necessary because its second disjunct is. One does somewhat better by defining “analytic” as “a priori necessary,” which excludes that example, although the point of such a combination of epistemological and metphysical elements remains to be explained. The arguments below apply to this notion too. Of course, Kripke’s main concern is the difference between the a priori / a posteriori and the necessary/contingent distinctions; he clarifies their differences from the analytic/synthetic distinction in passing. Nevertheless, the differentiation between the first two distinctions forces the demotion of the third from that of trying to play both the first role and the second.
4 4 See Boghossian (1997) for the distinction between metaphysical and epistemological accounts of analyticity, and Tappenden (1993: 240) for a somewhat similar distinction.
5 5 Etchemendy (1990: 107–24) contrasts “substantive” generalizations with logical ones. The idea is widespread. It occurs in different forms in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and in Locke’s “Of
