roger wasson company - cheapersunglasses.com

"synthetic apriorists" go on to conclude that some of them are
therefore synthetic a priori while I tend to avoid the use of both
"analytic" and "synthetic" as obscure terms. . . . This . . . is an
area in which my views are undergoing development at the present
moment, so that I hesitate to deliver myself of any view
that I might expect to remain mine for a very long time.
since 1950, at least two of the world's outstanding empiricists
(broadly defined) have thrown the whole problem of the
relation between synthetic and analytic into an unstable equilibrium.
In that year, Morton White published in John Dewey:
Philosopher of Science and Freedom his now famous essay
called "The Analytic and the Synthetic: an Untenable Dualism."
In this essay, White shows---conclusively, I think---that the
whole distinction between analytic and synthetic is unintelligible
and obscure on a purely empirical basis.
In order to understand the meaning of the analytic, White
maintains that we should have to understand the meaning of
synonymy, else a definition would be unintelligible. But then
we would have to understand synonymy itself by an analytic
definition, and we are right back where we started with the analytic.
In fact, every attempted definition presupposes that either
analyticity or synonymy is understood to begin with.(Footnote:
26: Op. cit., pp. 319-320.
Similar considerations are urged by W. V. Quine, White's
colleague at Harvard, in his essay, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism."(Footnote:
27: Philosophical Review, January, 1951. After
a masterful criticism of the distinction between analytic and
synthetic, Quine concludes:
[indent]For all its a priori reasonableness, a boundary between
analytic and synthetic statements is simply has not been
drawn. That there is such a distinction to be drawn at all is an