Abstract
This paper explores, develops, and evaluates Waismann’s six papers on the analytic/synthetic distinction, which were published in Analysis between 1949 and 1953. Although the sequence is unfinished, Waismann develops a view of analyticity on which it can be defined in terms of definitions. Definitions, however, are a diverse group of things which cannot be given a definition themselves. Much like a family resemblance expression, definitions are irregular, incomplete, and their extensions are subject to our choices. Analyticity—being defined in terms of definitions—inherits these properties. Given the foundational importance of analyticity in the linguistic approach to philosophy popular at the time Waismann was writing, the view turns out to have far-reaching consequences for Positivism, for Ordinary Language Philosophy, for the epistemology of logic, and for the way we pursue philosophy.
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Notes
- 1.
Waismann’s records of some of his conversations with Wittgenstein were eventually published as McGuinness (1997).
- 2.
At one time he was given the (ill-fated) task of writing an accessible introduction to the ideas in the Tractatus on Wittgenstein’s behalf and later was expected to chronicle Wittgenstein’s newer, post-Tractarian views, including that “the meaning of a proposition is the method of its verification”—which was to become one of the Vienna Circle’s most famous theses. Though Waismann poured work into these projects, Wittgenstein was never satisfied with the results (Sigmund 2017, 249, 252).
- 3.
“I greatly like his careful reasoning and the focused way he leads the discussions,” wrote a [...] young Carl Hempel” (Sigmund 2017, 249–250).
- 4.
Sigmund (2017). Sigmund’s account leaves the impression that Waismann served as an under-appreciated and put-upon graduate student, exploited for his teaching and research skills and negotiating the egos of prestigious faculty while scraping together a living as a teacher and librarian.
- 5.
As in e.g. Malcolm (1964).
- 6.
Paper 1 even has some of the flavour of the opening sections of Quine (1951).
- 7.
My own copy is reprinted in a posthumous collection (Waismann 1968) and it dies with a footnote “This series of articles was never completed”.
- 8.
“He [the philosopher] may do a thousand things; reformulate results previously obtained so as to make us see them in a new setting and with a new significance, awaken an analytic spirit, forge powerful weapons of analysis, make us sensitive to new aspects; he may discover new types of questions, cast doubt on accepted answers, deepen our understanding, heighten our critical powers, penetrate to deeper insights: but whatever he does, he is first and foremost an agent of ferment” (172–173).
- 9.
He saves special scorn for talk of something “following from” (126) the meaning of something (e.g. in Pap’s account an analytic statement is one whose truth value follows from the meanings of its terms) on the grounds that “follows from” is a relation between statements and there is no sense to be made of something following from meanings. He doesn’t consider that this might be a way of saying that the meanings determine the truth of the sentence, or even that a statement attributing truth to the statement follows from statements attributing meanings to the terms. Instead he doubles down on the critique by finding a place in which Gottlob Frege uses the same locution: “If there were any meaning to be considered, the rules [of this game] could not be arbitrarily laid down. On the contrary, the rules follow necessarily from the meaning of the marks.” Waismann declines to consider Frege’s “mistake” further, remarking “Queer that so subtle a mind as Frege should have failed to see that there is a problem, dropping not the slightest hint as to what he had in mind.” The flat-footedness of this criticism is striking in the light of Waismann’s later remarks on novel and creative use of language, and the fact that he appears to ignore Frege’s actual definition of analyticity from the Foundations of Arithmetic—according to which an analytic proposition is one whose proof proceeds only from general logical laws and definitions—only to then quote it at the end of paper 2.
- 10.
Other writers sometimes say that there are two kinds of definition, or that a definition can be used in two ways: one discursive (or descriptive), one legislative (or prescriptive). See e.g. Russell (2008, Chapter 5).
- 11.
Locke (1690, IIIV), Putnam (1962). Famously, Kripke questioned Kant’s classifying of “gold is a yellow metal” as analytic in Naming and Necessity. “Kant (someone just pointed out to me) gives as an example [of an analytic statement] ‘Gold is a yellow metal’, which seems to me an extraordinary one, because it’s something I think can turn out to be false” (Kripke 1980, 39). See also (Russell 2008, chapter 6) for more on analytic sentences involving natural kinds.
- 12.
Or, strictly, by being analytic though they are not consequences of definitions of the terms they contain (but rather some other terms). This is a bare logical possibility, given the statement Waismann takes himself to be refuting, but there is little in the text to encourage this interpretation, and on page 128 Waismann seems to take ‘follows from definitions’ as a mere rewording of ‘follows from the definitions of its terms’—suggesting that he is not paying much attention to the aspect of the definition that requires the definitions to be of terms in the analytic statement itself.
- 13.
Whether it can itself be reduced to a logical truth by applying definitions would, it seems to me, depend on what kinds of transformation we regarded definitions as permitting.
- 14.
From this I surmise that Waismann counts only sentences of a formal language as logical truths. He doesn’t consider that natural language sentences—like, say “all planets are planets”—might themselves be logical truths.
- 15.
Waismann is referring to the recursive clause in the Peano axiom for ‘+’ which reads: \(a+S(b)=S(a+b)\). Since the ‘+’ appears on both sides of the equation, replacing one side with the other will not eliminate the defined symbol.
- 16.
A weaker reading would be that we simply assume or treat something like an analytic statement though it is not one really. This weaker interpretation is perhaps encouraged by Waismann’s use of ‘recognise’ in the last sentence of the same paragraph (139). However, I think we can make a lot of sense of Waismann’s view on the stronger, more interesting reading, so I will assume that more straightforward interpretation here.
References
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Waismann, F. 1968. Analytic—synthetic. In How I See Philosophy, ed. R. Harré, 122–207. London: Macmillan.
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Russell, G. (2019). Breaking the Spell: Waismann’s Papers on the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction. In: Makovec, D., Shapiro, S. (eds) Friedrich Waismann. History of Analytic Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25008-9_8
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