Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

Anyone alive is dead
are false by virtue of the sense relations between the predicates in them. These are called
analytic truths and analytic falsehoods.
Most sentences, of course, are dependent on the state of the world for their truth and
falsehood; for instance,
Socrates is dead
is true because of how things are in the world, and
Socrates is alive
is false because of the way things are in the world. Such sentences are true or false
contingently, synthetically, a posteriori. There is now an obvious temptation to
reduce—or elevate—all contingent sentences to analytic ones; if we could assign to
Socrates the meaning ‘the Greek philosopher who…and who is dead’, then Socrates is
dead, which appears contingent, would be translatable as The Greek philosopher
who…and who is dead is dead, which is logically true. If we could reduce all the terms in
the language to predicates in logical relations to each other, we should be able to show
that the whole language consisted of sentences that were true in virtue of the relations
between the predicates in them. However, unless the language had direct purchase on
reality at some point, it would be useless; and the obvious point at which to connect the
language with reality would, of course, be at the time of renaming Socrates as the Greek
philosopher who…. It would then, in principle, be possible to go into the world and check
the truth of the statement, Socrates is the Greek philospher who…. Of course, we would
need some criteria for having all the properties we were going to claim for Socrates; if,
for instance, we wanted to claim that he was bald as well as dead, we would need to
specify that bald means ‘having no hair’. We’d then check to see if Socrates had hair or
not—once we had discovered some way of identifying hair correctly, etc. We shall
examine problems of this type of procedure on pages 395–8 below.
So far, the binary antonyms we have dealt with have been ungradable. Other pairs,
such as
fast—slow
high—low
sweet—sour
are applicable to things in a more-or-less manner. These are called gradable binary
antonyms, and we can recognize them by the fact that they can be modified by very and
how. It is quite coincidental that there are no linguistic realizations of the stages
intermediate between the pairs of terms. In some cases, indeed, some of the intermediate
stages are realized, as in the case of
hot—warm—cool—cold
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