Friedrich Waismann by Dejan Makovec & Stewart Shapiro

Author:Dejan Makovec & Stewart Shapiro
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030250089
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

He says his view will allow us to see why we don’t always find out that a sentence is analytic, but:...more often precisify the use of language, chart the logical force of an expression, by declaring such-and-such a statement to be analytic. (139)

He does, as we’ll see, argue that we can draw the boundaries of analyticity in a number of different places, according to different approaches we might take to classifying statements as definitions. But he goes on immediately (without breaking the paragraph) to suggest that this should not be our real concern (153). That is with some troubling statements—such as time is measurable—with respect to which we are tempted to say both that they are analytic, and that they are not. He argues that this is the case, and then barely mentions analyticity again in the remaining 3 papers. (56 out of 86 pages total.) Instead, he argues in Paper 4 that statements like these incline us to say both that they are contingent and necessary, that they are empirical (and hence presumably a posteriori) and a priori (166) and factual and not (170–171). Then in 5 and 6, he surveys some ways in which language may vary—over time, and between cultures—and argues that philosophers and scientists and, indeed, poets and other creative writers—often need to extend or infringe the rules of ordinary language. This observation is taken to go against the spirit of Ordinary Language Philosophy. But in papers 5 and 6, the word ‘analytic’ is used only once (172) and then in a way which does nothing to further our understanding of the property.8 If we want more explicitness regarding Waismann’s view of analyticity—especially an account that underwrites the explicit claims anticipated above—we will need to dig it out for ourselves.

This will be my aim here. Waismann has given us a lot of suggestive resources to work with and I will begin in Sect. 1 by examining why it is he thinks we should define analyticity in terms of definitions and logical truth. Then in Sect. 2, I will introduce the two other concepts that he uses in his definition: logical and idiomatic operators. In Sect. 3, I draw out the resulting account of analyticity. And then in the final section I outline two important consequences of Waismann’s approach: first, his account cannot be used to give an epistemology of logic, or explain logic’s necessity, and second—given that many of Waismann’s readers will have hoped to use analyticity to ground necessity and a priority—it has serious consequences for those properties too.

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