An Introduction to Critical Thinking and Creativity - always yours

EMPTY MEANING 49
Either it will rain tomorrow or it will not. If it rains tomorrow, then
precipitation will occur. There might or might not be a heavy overcast
tomorrow. But if there is a heavy overcast that lasts the whole morning,
then it will not be a very sunny morning.
You can see that these empty statements fail to make any definite prediction
about tomorrow's weather. They will be true whatever the weather is like the next
day. These sentences are all analytic and in this context they convey no concrete
information at all.
Or consider the slogan "survival of the fittest", often used to describe Darwin's
theory of evolution. 4 Some people criticized the claim by saying that fittest just
means "those which survive." So the whole claim becomes "those which survive,
survive," which is of course empty and trivially true. Fortunately this is not an
accurate description of the theory of evolution. Otherwise it would be in deep
trouble!
It should be pointed out that it is not a mistake in itself to use analytic statements.
They are important to logic and mathematics, and they play a useful role
in language learning. "Bachelors are unmarried men" is analytic and conveys no
empirical information about bachelors—for example, how many bachelors there
are or whether they are happy. But obviously this statement is useful for people
studying English.
Analytic statements can also convey useful conversational implicatures. Suppose
Helen asks whether Francine will come to the party, and Francine replies, "If
I come, I come." This empty reply does not answer the question at all, but it shows
that the speaker is hesitant and does not want to commit herself. Similarly we often
use analytic statements to express uncertainty or to emphasize the available
options. If we don't know whether a proposal will be successful, we might say "this
might or might not work" as a qualification. Or if we want to remind an indecisive
person to make up his mind, we might say something like, "Either you do it or you
don't." These are not cases of linguistic pitfalls since they serve to convey useful
conversational implicatures.
Not all empty statements are analytic. Some empty statements are nonanalytic
and do have some empirical content. But we still say they are empty because
the information they provide is too trivial or obvious. For example, in many debates
people want to appear to be insightful and they might say something like "X
cannot solve all problems." Here, X might be democracy, technology, science, the
government, money, punishment, and so on. These claims are typically empty because
they are unlikely to be seriously disputed by anyone. For example, democracy
cannot prevent natural disasters from happening or stop people from getting
cancer, so it cannot solve all problems. But when people are debating whether
a country should adopt democracy, the real issue is whether democracy is better
than other systems of governments. The charge that democracy cannot solve all
problems is an empty and irrelevant criticism.
4 It was actually coined by the philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903).