Not really, anyway. It's just an apology for the third consecutive week of not being great with the schedule and mostly posting things that are a bit slim on actual content when I do update, and a promise that the regular schedule will resume next week. I'll be at the Eastern APA, so I probably won't post anything too long and involved, but there should be at least somewhat substantive posts on both Monday and Wednesday.
Meanwhile, Merry Christmas, a (belated) Happy Hannukah, and, of course, a Joyous Smugmas*!
*Smugmas is the winter holiday I celebrate. It's all about sitting around the fireplace with your grad school friends, sipping a glass of good single malt and reminding each other of all the reasons why all the traditional defenses against the problem of evil fail, occasionally pausing to exchange high-fives or fist bumps.** Also, of course, occasionally gathering around the piano to sing old Smugmas favorites like "The Twelve Days Of Demonstrating The Incoherence Of Theism," "Rudolf The Red-Nosed Carnap," and "We're Smarter Than Everyone Else, Give Us Presents."
**The occasional grinch will ruin the general atmosphere of holiday cheer for everyone else by pointing out that the zombie theodicy actually holds up pretty well.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Monday, December 21, 2009
He'll Lure You In...
This is just awesome.
I mean, I disagree about analyticity, obviously, but I still love it.
The song is from The (21st Century) Mondads. Here's a bunch of their other stuff. They also provide the complete lyrics to the Quine song:
He’ll play upon
Your naturalistic intuitions
He’ll lure you in
With the promise of positions that you love
Like realism about numbers and sets
And the view that philosophy’s continuous with science.
And then you’re caught in the web
No support from the a priori
All aboard Neurath’s ship
It will all be fine
But you’re tied to the mast
It’s all a posteriori
Here on in; have a blast
With Willard Van Orman Quine.
He looks so good
Next to Carnap, Ayer and Chisholm
And there’s nothing wrong
With confirmational holism;
It’s quite nice as an account of how theories face the tribunal of
experience.
Mmm yeah.
But step away when he starts
Talking about the analytic.
Meaning’s not that strange in being tricky to define.
And it comes in small bits;
Not all holism’s terrific.
Keep your head; keep your wits
Round Willard Van Orman Quine.
I mean, I disagree about analyticity, obviously, but I still love it.
The song is from The (21st Century) Mondads. Here's a bunch of their other stuff. They also provide the complete lyrics to the Quine song:
He’ll play upon
Your naturalistic intuitions
He’ll lure you in
With the promise of positions that you love
Like realism about numbers and sets
And the view that philosophy’s continuous with science.
And then you’re caught in the web
No support from the a priori
All aboard Neurath’s ship
It will all be fine
But you’re tied to the mast
It’s all a posteriori
Here on in; have a blast
With Willard Van Orman Quine.
He looks so good
Next to Carnap, Ayer and Chisholm
And there’s nothing wrong
With confirmational holism;
It’s quite nice as an account of how theories face the tribunal of
experience.
Mmm yeah.
But step away when he starts
Talking about the analytic.
Meaning’s not that strange in being tricky to define.
And it comes in small bits;
Not all holism’s terrific.
Keep your head; keep your wits
Round Willard Van Orman Quine.
Monday, December 14, 2009
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Language and Time (and Space)
Sorry about the delay. I've been pretty good about maintaining the every-Monday-and-Wednesday schedule since early October, but what with the end of the semester, grading, packing for an extended trip back to Michigan before the Eastern APA, etc., etc., etc., these things happen. Better late than never, though, so here's a post....
In Quentin Smith's book Language and Time, he argues for a moderate version of the A-Theory. Some background:
The B-Theory of Time holds that "now" is an indexical like "here," serving only to locate the speaker in time. The A-Theory is all about "the reality of temporal becoming," which basically means that there's a fact of the matter about which moment uniquely counts as "the present." The best argument for the B-Theory is that it's hard to square the admittedly compelling, common-sensical intuitions about time encoded in the A-Theory with the empirical deliverances of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (STR). The best argument for the A-Theory (beyond whatever immediate intuitive pull it might have) is that ordinary language sentences are tensed--that is to say, they seem to more or less constantly refer to properties of pastness, presentness and futurity--and that if we don't believe in the real objective existence of those properties, we have to either say that all tensed sentences of English and other languages are false (including, for example, the sentences physicists use to express the STR) or we have to come up with a way to paraphrase the sentences (or at least the ones we take to be true) in such a way that they no longer refer to pastness, presentness and futurity.
As it turns out, the project of coming up with such tenseless paraphrases is pretty hard. Smith is an A-Theorist, and he has a lot of fun pointing out the holes in various extant proposals to do this sort of thing. For example, the tenseless date theory says that we can translate "the meeting starts now," tokened at three o'clock as "the start of the meeting (is) at three o'clock." (The parentheses indicate that the (is) is tenseless.) So far, so good. But what, he asks, about "it is now three o'clock"? Apply the tenseless date theory, and we get "it (is) three o'clock at three o'clock." No good. For one thing, "it (is) three o'clock at three o'clock" is a tautology, and "it is now three o'clock" really really shouldn't come out that way. You need to check your cell phone* to see if "it is now three o'clock" is true, but you can be justifiably confident about "it (is) three o'clock at three o'clock" even if you just woke up in a doorless, windowless room with no memory of how you got there and your phone is out of power.
The tenseless token-reflexive theory does better with this example. It says that we should interpret "the meeting starts now" as "the start of the meeting (is) simultaneous with this utterance," which works just as well for sentences like "it is now three o'clock."
Smith, however, thinks that his counter-examples to this are just as good. For example, consider "it is true that it was true that the era devoid of linguistic utterances is present." Isn't this true? I mean, surely, there is language now, and there wasn't in the past. It isn't true now that there isn't any language, but it used to be. Right?
Well....one issue is that part of what's traditionally at stake between A-Theorists and B-Theorists is that the former take propositions to change truth-values over time (this is the point of developing tense logics) whereas the latter take them to have eternal unchanging truth-values, so Smith is at the very least dancing on the edge of begging the question here.**
Another issue comes to the fore when we start think about what the "it" is that was supposed to be once true and now false. It's certainly not a linguistic utterance like a sentence, since if so it--i.e. a sentence declaring the absence of sentences from the world--would never have been true, since such a sentence could never have been true, for obvious reasons. In fact, it looks like "it" has to be a proposition, and in fact a proposition that existed despite the non-existence of sentences. That is to say, Smith's move here strongly suggests a fairly extreme version of the proposition theory of truth-bearers, whereby we believe not only in the propositions expressed by sentences, but a sort of Platonic realm of un-instantiated propositions as well.
Now, there may be a lot to be said in favor of proposition theory--see the discussion with Emil on this blog a while back--but there's surely a lot to be said against it as well (e.g. if propositions are abstract objects we can't causally interact with, how would we ever find out that they existed?), and if the price of the best philosophical account of how to make sense of the picture of reality suggested by taking our best current science seriously is that we have to abandon belief in propositions, that strikes me as a price worth paying. But someone who starts from a posture more sympathetic to propositions, presentism or both than mine might not be convinced by this. As such, I'll take a stab at pointing out the problem that originally sparked my own slow move away from the A-Theory when I was an MA student at Western Michigan (where I took several classes from Smith, and spent a lot of time thinking about these issues):
On p. 129 of "Language and Time," Smith says that it would be an "interesting task" to provide an account of indexical terms like "I" and "here" in light of his account of "now," but that "this task falls beyond the purview of the present treatise."
Even when I was an A-Theorist***, this passage always struck me as extremely unsatisfying. The more I thought about it, the more dissatisfied I was. Note, for example, that Smith's criticisms of the date theory all go through just as well for what we can call the "place theory" of spatial indexicals. Imagine the following fairly banal conversation:
P1: "I just got here?"
P2: "Where's 'here'?"
P1: "Oh, sorry, 'here' is Miami."
We might be tempted to translate "I just got here," tokened in Miami, to "I just got to Miami." That's pretty clearly not going to work for reasons that exactly parallel the problem with temporal indexicals. "Miami is here" is only true when tokened in Miami but "Miami is in Miami" is true even if tokened in Hong Kong. The best way to go here looks very much like a token-reflexive view where "Miami is here" means "Miami is co-located with the person saying this" or something roughly along those lines. I feel absolutely no inclination to beieve that claims change their truth-value from location to location. Moreover, I feel even less inclination to think that there's some sort of property of "hereness" independently objectively existing in places where no speaker is located. As such, consideration of the sentence "it is true on Mars that 'Mars is here'" gives me no reason whatsoever to believe in propositions that have a special truth-value on Mars that they don't have on Earth, or to give up on the token-reflexive view for the sake of such strange Martian propositions.
Why, exactly, should "nowness" be any different in this respect? If it feels different, is there anything motivating that feeling other than residual folk belief in the claim that there is an ontologically privileged present moment, which is, after all, precisely the bone of contention here? If so, I'm having troubling seeing what.
*Ten years ago, you would have checked whatever those things were that people used to wear on their wrists. I forget.
**I'm putting things in terms of propositions here because that's the traditional way to frame it, not because I necessarily believe in propositions.
***We all get to have a few youthful indiscretions. Hell, just between you and me, there was even a time in my life when I was a libertarian about free will. Don't judge me. I was just a kid, and everyone else was doing it.
In Quentin Smith's book Language and Time, he argues for a moderate version of the A-Theory. Some background:
The B-Theory of Time holds that "now" is an indexical like "here," serving only to locate the speaker in time. The A-Theory is all about "the reality of temporal becoming," which basically means that there's a fact of the matter about which moment uniquely counts as "the present." The best argument for the B-Theory is that it's hard to square the admittedly compelling, common-sensical intuitions about time encoded in the A-Theory with the empirical deliverances of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity (STR). The best argument for the A-Theory (beyond whatever immediate intuitive pull it might have) is that ordinary language sentences are tensed--that is to say, they seem to more or less constantly refer to properties of pastness, presentness and futurity--and that if we don't believe in the real objective existence of those properties, we have to either say that all tensed sentences of English and other languages are false (including, for example, the sentences physicists use to express the STR) or we have to come up with a way to paraphrase the sentences (or at least the ones we take to be true) in such a way that they no longer refer to pastness, presentness and futurity.
As it turns out, the project of coming up with such tenseless paraphrases is pretty hard. Smith is an A-Theorist, and he has a lot of fun pointing out the holes in various extant proposals to do this sort of thing. For example, the tenseless date theory says that we can translate "the meeting starts now," tokened at three o'clock as "the start of the meeting (is) at three o'clock." (The parentheses indicate that the (is) is tenseless.) So far, so good. But what, he asks, about "it is now three o'clock"? Apply the tenseless date theory, and we get "it (is) three o'clock at three o'clock." No good. For one thing, "it (is) three o'clock at three o'clock" is a tautology, and "it is now three o'clock" really really shouldn't come out that way. You need to check your cell phone* to see if "it is now three o'clock" is true, but you can be justifiably confident about "it (is) three o'clock at three o'clock" even if you just woke up in a doorless, windowless room with no memory of how you got there and your phone is out of power.
The tenseless token-reflexive theory does better with this example. It says that we should interpret "the meeting starts now" as "the start of the meeting (is) simultaneous with this utterance," which works just as well for sentences like "it is now three o'clock."
Smith, however, thinks that his counter-examples to this are just as good. For example, consider "it is true that it was true that the era devoid of linguistic utterances is present." Isn't this true? I mean, surely, there is language now, and there wasn't in the past. It isn't true now that there isn't any language, but it used to be. Right?
Well....one issue is that part of what's traditionally at stake between A-Theorists and B-Theorists is that the former take propositions to change truth-values over time (this is the point of developing tense logics) whereas the latter take them to have eternal unchanging truth-values, so Smith is at the very least dancing on the edge of begging the question here.**
Another issue comes to the fore when we start think about what the "it" is that was supposed to be once true and now false. It's certainly not a linguistic utterance like a sentence, since if so it--i.e. a sentence declaring the absence of sentences from the world--would never have been true, since such a sentence could never have been true, for obvious reasons. In fact, it looks like "it" has to be a proposition, and in fact a proposition that existed despite the non-existence of sentences. That is to say, Smith's move here strongly suggests a fairly extreme version of the proposition theory of truth-bearers, whereby we believe not only in the propositions expressed by sentences, but a sort of Platonic realm of un-instantiated propositions as well.
Now, there may be a lot to be said in favor of proposition theory--see the discussion with Emil on this blog a while back--but there's surely a lot to be said against it as well (e.g. if propositions are abstract objects we can't causally interact with, how would we ever find out that they existed?), and if the price of the best philosophical account of how to make sense of the picture of reality suggested by taking our best current science seriously is that we have to abandon belief in propositions, that strikes me as a price worth paying. But someone who starts from a posture more sympathetic to propositions, presentism or both than mine might not be convinced by this. As such, I'll take a stab at pointing out the problem that originally sparked my own slow move away from the A-Theory when I was an MA student at Western Michigan (where I took several classes from Smith, and spent a lot of time thinking about these issues):
On p. 129 of "Language and Time," Smith says that it would be an "interesting task" to provide an account of indexical terms like "I" and "here" in light of his account of "now," but that "this task falls beyond the purview of the present treatise."
Even when I was an A-Theorist***, this passage always struck me as extremely unsatisfying. The more I thought about it, the more dissatisfied I was. Note, for example, that Smith's criticisms of the date theory all go through just as well for what we can call the "place theory" of spatial indexicals. Imagine the following fairly banal conversation:
P1: "I just got here?"
P2: "Where's 'here'?"
P1: "Oh, sorry, 'here' is Miami."
We might be tempted to translate "I just got here," tokened in Miami, to "I just got to Miami." That's pretty clearly not going to work for reasons that exactly parallel the problem with temporal indexicals. "Miami is here" is only true when tokened in Miami but "Miami is in Miami" is true even if tokened in Hong Kong. The best way to go here looks very much like a token-reflexive view where "Miami is here" means "Miami is co-located with the person saying this" or something roughly along those lines. I feel absolutely no inclination to beieve that claims change their truth-value from location to location. Moreover, I feel even less inclination to think that there's some sort of property of "hereness" independently objectively existing in places where no speaker is located. As such, consideration of the sentence "it is true on Mars that 'Mars is here'" gives me no reason whatsoever to believe in propositions that have a special truth-value on Mars that they don't have on Earth, or to give up on the token-reflexive view for the sake of such strange Martian propositions.
Why, exactly, should "nowness" be any different in this respect? If it feels different, is there anything motivating that feeling other than residual folk belief in the claim that there is an ontologically privileged present moment, which is, after all, precisely the bone of contention here? If so, I'm having troubling seeing what.
*Ten years ago, you would have checked whatever those things were that people used to wear on their wrists. I forget.
**I'm putting things in terms of propositions here because that's the traditional way to frame it, not because I necessarily believe in propositions.
***We all get to have a few youthful indiscretions. Hell, just between you and me, there was even a time in my life when I was a libertarian about free will. Don't judge me. I was just a kid, and everyone else was doing it.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Quote of the Day
So, re-reading one of my favorite novels, I found this surprising foray into technical philosophy buried in a discussion of Wagner and Christianity....
"Parsifal is one of those corkscrew artifacts of culture in which you get the subjective sense that you've learned something from it, something valuable or even priceless; but on closer inspection you suddenly begin to scratch your head and say, 'Wait a minute. This makes no sense.' I can see Richard Wagner standing at the gates of heaven. 'You have to let me in,' he says, 'I wrote Parsifal. It has to do with the Grail, Christ, suffering, pity and healing. Right?' And they answer, 'Well, we read it and it makes no sense.' SLAM. Wagner is right and so are they. It's another Chinese finger trap.
"Or perhaps I'm missing the point. What we have here is a Zen paradox. That which makes no sense makes the most sense. I am being caught in a sin of the highest magnitude: using Aristotelian two-value logic. 'A thing is either A or not-A.' (The Law of the Excluded Middle.) Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked."
--VALIS by Philip K. Dick, pp. 132-133
....to which I say....
"Huh."
"Parsifal is one of those corkscrew artifacts of culture in which you get the subjective sense that you've learned something from it, something valuable or even priceless; but on closer inspection you suddenly begin to scratch your head and say, 'Wait a minute. This makes no sense.' I can see Richard Wagner standing at the gates of heaven. 'You have to let me in,' he says, 'I wrote Parsifal. It has to do with the Grail, Christ, suffering, pity and healing. Right?' And they answer, 'Well, we read it and it makes no sense.' SLAM. Wagner is right and so are they. It's another Chinese finger trap.
"Or perhaps I'm missing the point. What we have here is a Zen paradox. That which makes no sense makes the most sense. I am being caught in a sin of the highest magnitude: using Aristotelian two-value logic. 'A thing is either A or not-A.' (The Law of the Excluded Middle.) Everybody knows that Aristotelian two-value logic is fucked."
--VALIS by Philip K. Dick, pp. 132-133
....to which I say....
"Huh."
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
The problem is U trying to fit set theory into ur mathematical box.
Naive set theory says that for every property, there's a set of things that have that property. Bertrand Russell asked, "what about the property of being a set that's not a member of itself?"
This is, traditionally, seen as a bit of a problem for naive set theory.
Classical theism says that an entity exists who can perform any action. Many people have asked, "what about the action of creating a stone so heavy that he himself can't lift it?"
This sort of thing used to be a bit of a problem for classical theism.
That was before Rick Warren solved all of these problems forever.
Check it out.
This is, traditionally, seen as a bit of a problem for naive set theory.
Classical theism says that an entity exists who can perform any action. Many people have asked, "what about the action of creating a stone so heavy that he himself can't lift it?"
This sort of thing used to be a bit of a problem for classical theism.
That was before Rick Warren solved all of these problems forever.
Check it out.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Why Truth-Functionality and the (Non-Epistemic) Analytic/Synthetic Distinction Make Strange Bedfellows
Discussions of "the" analytic/synthetic distinction tend to confuse things by using that definite article, but several distinct distinctions have been proposed using those terms. As far as I can tell, most of them are, in one form or another, epistemic distinctions--for example, we can be absolutely certain about analytic truths, whereas even the best-established synthetic truths are still known only in a fallible, probabilistic way (this is the sort of thing that seems to be built into standard Bayesian epistemology), or synthetic truths have to be discovered empirically while analytic truths are ones that we have epistemic access to merely by virtue of knowing the meanings of all of the terms involved (this seems to be about what Boghossian is getting at in his defense of the distinction), or analytic and synthetic statements are (rationally) revised away in different ways, such that synthetic claims can be empirically refuted, but belief-change about analytic matters has to be a change-of-meaning issue (this is the version of the distinction that Grice and Strawsson stamp their feet and insist on in what I can't help but think of as their very aptly-titled article "In Defense Of A Dogma"). Some of these epistemic formulations of the distinction are such that I think even the hard-core Quinean has relatively little quarrel with them, and others are, I think, deeply misguided and can lead to a dogmatic and undeserved sense of certainty about matters logical and mathematical. None of that, however, is anything that I'm going to get into right now.
What I'm interested on touching on instead is the more robust, more-than-just-epistemic sense of analyticity held by those who take the distinction to be about truth-making.* This is the strongest (but most famous) sense of the distinction, where synthetic statements are "made true by virtue of the way the world is," whereas analytic statements are "made true by virtue of the meanings of the terms involved." How to understand the second option is a complicated and confusing issue, and if my personal feeling is that the most sophisticated-sounding explications of it tend to devolve into hand-waving and places where "here a miracle occurs" is written on the conceptual chalkboard, I can happily accept for my present purposes that people who talk that way are talking sense, even if it is a deep and subtle sort of sense that I have troubling grasping.** At the moment, at any rate, I won't be arguing against the details of any such proposal for understanding the claimed truth-making distinction. My target here is much broader than that: I want to suggest a reason to be suspicious of the suggestion that there's any sort of truth-making distinction between "analytic" and "synthetic" truths, at least given a standard story about the truth-functional nature of logical connectives. If I'm not sure that it quite adds up to a full-fledged objection yet, I do think it at least strongly points the way to one.
Here it is.
Let P be a true statement--for the sake of convenience, let's use the old stock example "snow is white." In classical logic, (P v Q) follows from it, regardless of the content of Q. As long as we know that Q is some regular, meaningful, declarative sentence, the kind of thing that can be legitimately taken as the interpretation of a propositional variable, we know that the truth of P guarantees the truth of (P v Q), even though we don't know the specific content of Q, or even whether it is true or false.
Now, fiddle that picture just a little bit, to give us one new piece of information. We still know that P is "snow is white," and that that's true, and we're still in the dark about the specific content of Q, but now we also know that Q is false. At this point, we know not just that (P v Q) is true, but that it's true exclusively because P is true. Remember, whether or not there are any "analytic" statements, made true in a slightly mysterious secondary way, P is a completely banal "synthetic" statement, made true by the actual whiteness of the fluffy white stuff on the ground.
Now, you'd think that at this point in the argument, we know everything there is to know about how (P v Q) becomes true. Given that we know that it's false, we know that Q does no work in the process, and we know that P is "made true by the world" in the boringly normal fashion.
But wait. Let's consider two scenarios. For the sake of simplicity, in both options, Q is a (false) statement about snow.***
(1) Q is "snow is green."
(2) Q is "snow is not white." (Q=~P)
Now, in scenario (1), (P v Q) is a "synthetic" statement, made true by the world through the truth of its first disjunct. In scenario (2), however, (P v Q) is an "analytic" statement, made true in some other way.
So my almost-objection is this: there's something deeply counter-intuitive about the suggestion that, despite the fact that we knew that (P v Q) was true before we knew whether Q was even a true statement or a false one, despite the fact that we knew that Q wasn't going to be doing any work in making (P v Q) true before we even knew what it's specific content was, and despite the fact that P itself isn't made true in different ways in scenarios (1) and (2), (P v Q) arrives at truth in fundamentally different ways depending on the specific content of Q.
So the challenge I'd throw to defenders of a (more-than-just-epistemic) analytic/synthetic distinction is approximately this:
If one takes confirmation to work on a case-by-case, statement-by-statement basis, no one would argue with the claim that the story we should tell about how to confirm P is very different from the story we should tell about how to confirm (P v ~P). Whether or not we should take confirmation to work that way is a question for another time. Your claim about truth-making, however, seems to put you in a very strange and awkward position, and it looks like a position you have to good reason to put yourself in.
You admit that P is made true by the way snow is, and that ~P is made false by the same thing. Why not extend that analysis in a straightforward way, given the way that the truth or falsity of disjunctions and conjunctions works as a function of the truth or falsity of their components, to cover the way that (P v ~P) is made true and (P & ~P) is made false? Why, in other words, take anything but the way that snow is to do any work in the story we tell about how complex statements entirely about snow are, or are not, made true?
*I take it that some (but not all) formulations of the epistemic distinction are at least strongly suggested by the truth-making distinction, but again, that's a separate issue. And, of course, the epistemic distinctions can be quite independently motivated, and it's not uncommon to read defenses of (epistemic senses of) the analytic/synthetic distinction by theorists who profess to be unsure about how seriously to take talk of things being made true by virtue of anything but the objects referred to in the sentences being the way the sentence says they are.
**By way of at least gesturing at an example of the sort of thing I'm talking about, an expressivist version of the truth-making distinction holds that the way that analytic statements become true has something to do with the way they express the speaker's commitment to certain vaguely-defined linguistic norms or "rules of use" that have somehow made it into our language. I think that the evidence for the existence of such "rules" is non-existent and that demands for precise explanation of what these "rules" would or could even consist of tend to be met with vague and rather unhelpful analogies. To say that two people who set up a chess board and then move around the pieces in disallowed ways are "violating the rules of chess" is simply to say that their game is inconsistent with a bunch of actual written rules explicitly stipulated and agreed on by a bunch of human beings, and that as such what they're doing doesn't count as an instance of chess. To say that asserting a contradiction amounts to violating "rules of use" or whatever, on the other hand, is to say nothing that even could be remotely similar, both because languages arise not from explicit stipulation and agreement but in a sprawling, unplanned way, and because--assuming a logically orthodox picture of things--contradictions definitely count as instances of language. The classical assumption that contradictions are always false entails that they are meaningful, understandable bits of whatever language they are asserted in.
***We're talking about very, very closely related falsehoods at that, considering that the second statement is actually entailed by the first one, which should underline the strangeness lurking in all of this.
What I'm interested on touching on instead is the more robust, more-than-just-epistemic sense of analyticity held by those who take the distinction to be about truth-making.* This is the strongest (but most famous) sense of the distinction, where synthetic statements are "made true by virtue of the way the world is," whereas analytic statements are "made true by virtue of the meanings of the terms involved." How to understand the second option is a complicated and confusing issue, and if my personal feeling is that the most sophisticated-sounding explications of it tend to devolve into hand-waving and places where "here a miracle occurs" is written on the conceptual chalkboard, I can happily accept for my present purposes that people who talk that way are talking sense, even if it is a deep and subtle sort of sense that I have troubling grasping.** At the moment, at any rate, I won't be arguing against the details of any such proposal for understanding the claimed truth-making distinction. My target here is much broader than that: I want to suggest a reason to be suspicious of the suggestion that there's any sort of truth-making distinction between "analytic" and "synthetic" truths, at least given a standard story about the truth-functional nature of logical connectives. If I'm not sure that it quite adds up to a full-fledged objection yet, I do think it at least strongly points the way to one.
Here it is.
Let P be a true statement--for the sake of convenience, let's use the old stock example "snow is white." In classical logic, (P v Q) follows from it, regardless of the content of Q. As long as we know that Q is some regular, meaningful, declarative sentence, the kind of thing that can be legitimately taken as the interpretation of a propositional variable, we know that the truth of P guarantees the truth of (P v Q), even though we don't know the specific content of Q, or even whether it is true or false.
Now, fiddle that picture just a little bit, to give us one new piece of information. We still know that P is "snow is white," and that that's true, and we're still in the dark about the specific content of Q, but now we also know that Q is false. At this point, we know not just that (P v Q) is true, but that it's true exclusively because P is true. Remember, whether or not there are any "analytic" statements, made true in a slightly mysterious secondary way, P is a completely banal "synthetic" statement, made true by the actual whiteness of the fluffy white stuff on the ground.
Now, you'd think that at this point in the argument, we know everything there is to know about how (P v Q) becomes true. Given that we know that it's false, we know that Q does no work in the process, and we know that P is "made true by the world" in the boringly normal fashion.
But wait. Let's consider two scenarios. For the sake of simplicity, in both options, Q is a (false) statement about snow.***
(1) Q is "snow is green."
(2) Q is "snow is not white." (Q=~P)
Now, in scenario (1), (P v Q) is a "synthetic" statement, made true by the world through the truth of its first disjunct. In scenario (2), however, (P v Q) is an "analytic" statement, made true in some other way.
So my almost-objection is this: there's something deeply counter-intuitive about the suggestion that, despite the fact that we knew that (P v Q) was true before we knew whether Q was even a true statement or a false one, despite the fact that we knew that Q wasn't going to be doing any work in making (P v Q) true before we even knew what it's specific content was, and despite the fact that P itself isn't made true in different ways in scenarios (1) and (2), (P v Q) arrives at truth in fundamentally different ways depending on the specific content of Q.
So the challenge I'd throw to defenders of a (more-than-just-epistemic) analytic/synthetic distinction is approximately this:
If one takes confirmation to work on a case-by-case, statement-by-statement basis, no one would argue with the claim that the story we should tell about how to confirm P is very different from the story we should tell about how to confirm (P v ~P). Whether or not we should take confirmation to work that way is a question for another time. Your claim about truth-making, however, seems to put you in a very strange and awkward position, and it looks like a position you have to good reason to put yourself in.
You admit that P is made true by the way snow is, and that ~P is made false by the same thing. Why not extend that analysis in a straightforward way, given the way that the truth or falsity of disjunctions and conjunctions works as a function of the truth or falsity of their components, to cover the way that (P v ~P) is made true and (P & ~P) is made false? Why, in other words, take anything but the way that snow is to do any work in the story we tell about how complex statements entirely about snow are, or are not, made true?
*I take it that some (but not all) formulations of the epistemic distinction are at least strongly suggested by the truth-making distinction, but again, that's a separate issue. And, of course, the epistemic distinctions can be quite independently motivated, and it's not uncommon to read defenses of (epistemic senses of) the analytic/synthetic distinction by theorists who profess to be unsure about how seriously to take talk of things being made true by virtue of anything but the objects referred to in the sentences being the way the sentence says they are.
**By way of at least gesturing at an example of the sort of thing I'm talking about, an expressivist version of the truth-making distinction holds that the way that analytic statements become true has something to do with the way they express the speaker's commitment to certain vaguely-defined linguistic norms or "rules of use" that have somehow made it into our language. I think that the evidence for the existence of such "rules" is non-existent and that demands for precise explanation of what these "rules" would or could even consist of tend to be met with vague and rather unhelpful analogies. To say that two people who set up a chess board and then move around the pieces in disallowed ways are "violating the rules of chess" is simply to say that their game is inconsistent with a bunch of actual written rules explicitly stipulated and agreed on by a bunch of human beings, and that as such what they're doing doesn't count as an instance of chess. To say that asserting a contradiction amounts to violating "rules of use" or whatever, on the other hand, is to say nothing that even could be remotely similar, both because languages arise not from explicit stipulation and agreement but in a sprawling, unplanned way, and because--assuming a logically orthodox picture of things--contradictions definitely count as instances of language. The classical assumption that contradictions are always false entails that they are meaningful, understandable bits of whatever language they are asserted in.
***We're talking about very, very closely related falsehoods at that, considering that the second statement is actually entailed by the first one, which should underline the strangeness lurking in all of this.
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