Analytic / Synthetic Distinction
 

Synthetic Truths - truths that are grounded in experience or fact. Truths that must be verified by comparison to reality - for instance the theory of evolution.

Analytic Truths - truths that are not grounded in fact, but are necessarily true by virtue of linguistic convention. Its truth or falsity is independent of experience. For instance, mathematical truths.

Distinct dichotomy or no?

Aren't synthetic truths paradoxical? How can anything be compared to reality when we don't even know what reality is?

:themoreyouknow

So you affirm then, that there is a distinction between analytic and synthetic truths?

You can contradict yourself with analytic statements (here is where paradoxes lie), but for synthetic statements, they are either right or wrong. Reality, for the matter of argument, is defined here as the observable world. According to some, the verifiability of a synthetic statement depends on its correspondence to facts about the world. They are not true or false in the sense that analytic statements are, but there are ways of verifying synthetic statements (for instance Peirce takes 'truth' to be the asymptotic limit of agreement by those investigating a certain area of inquiry). Although proving a hypothesis in biology is different from proving a mathematical theorem (obviously you could never know if the biology hypothesis is 100% true), these two are also different from unprovable beliefs and moral statements.

This is the analytic / synthetic distinction.

So what?

2+2 still equals 4.

The sun is still composed of a plasma.

I still have to go to work in a couple hours.

Hi CLAsp.

Your 'synthetic' truths are what classic philosophy refers to as axioms, I think. And, yeah, they and more advanced suppositions (your analytic truths?) are verifiable in different ways. In fact, axioms are not verifiable logically. They are considered emyrically evident. Logical axioms create certain self-referential fallacies and as any postmodernist would tell you any argument with logical foundation is invalid at certain levels of description due to this. All this is very basic I don't know what you need to know.

Not trying to get any particular piece of information - just a thought exercise, and I wanted to see what people thought of it. This is a philosophy etc. board but usually there is very little actual philosophy discussed on it. Yes the ideas are quite old, and usually the distinction is taken as given. But WVO Quine criticized this distinction, showing that the boundaries are actually quite porous. I'd have to re-read the argument as I don't quite remember it, but I'm sure it's online somewhere.

We don't need to discuss philosophy when we can discuss OAO's lack of sexual drive.

Yeah but that gets old, and he's boring. God I miss the 'ubermensch' chagroth...

haha I remember him resurfacing once, but he was before my time. Outline his philosophical personality a bit if you aren't too bored.

"The sun is still composed of a plasma."

The sun is a mass
Of incandescant gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where Hydrogen is turned into Helium
At a temperature of thousands of degrees
Whoah-Ho its hot!
The sun is not
A place where we could live
But here on Earth
There'd be no life
Without the light it gives

:themoreyouknow

And that's one to grow on!

So we're debating priori VS posteriori? To what end? Ultimately, as much as I see Kant's reponse to the question of Absolute Truth to be equalitive with an alchoholic in denial, I have to admit I've yet to come up with anything to debase his assertions. It's just a gut instinct which tells me both are dichotomous, it is self evident, at least in this now, that analytic truths can be drawn from synthetic suppositions/assumptions.

That "ubermensch" comment about Shitgoth made me laugh. Now THAT guy was entertaining.

Shitgoth, as I recall, was basically advocating eugenics etc. Hilarious.

Ror:

Kant actually holds that a priori truths are synthetic. Although modern logical positivism holds that a priori truths are analytic.

Onto Quine. Kant's separation of the two truths is based on the idea that the predicate necessarily follows from the subject. Though Kant would disagree, many others would say that 4 necessarily follows from 2+2. However Quine argues that the separation is limited to that subject-predicate relation, and that there is nothing that justifies assuming that a subject contains the predicate.

Not if they are objective and agreed upon by an overwhelming majority. Hence, when little is disputed by the "we" , then it must be true. I can concede to those beliefs when not only do I see but most others do as well ... otherwise, you look a little like a crazy loner.


Do the voices answer you, OAO? :)

Truth is not what we consider truth to be just because we consider it to be such.

Yeah, I could get into my principles of innate, subconscious induction again, but... no. I'll spare this thread.

Has any one ever mentioned to you that you're just the teensiest bit irritating?

Christ, radical doubt and radical rationalism piss me off.

No, we can't know for sure whether or not this reality is all an illusion forged by a "Master Deceiver." But so fucking what? We seem to be bound to the illusion anyway, and we're not going to find out whether we've been conned or not in this lifetime. Also, if you're so radical in your doubting, why do you still accept the primacy of logic? That wacko Descartes even believed that logic could be another ploy of the deceiver, making someone believe that 2+2=4 when it really equals 5.

Also, is the mind really as reliable as you make it out to be? Consider distorted memories, disorders like schizophrenia, and denial. If the mind were an infallible source of truth, surely the idea that you could forget something or even reconstruct an event in a different way would be impossible.

At the end of the day, radical doubt amounts to intellectual masturbation. It's a useless philosophy that breeds useless intellectuals.

In the case of synthetic truth, I was talking about objectively agreed upon empirical reality, the laws that govern such reality and fact that such reality is proven time and again by repitition and the laws of probability. If this isn't part of the some philosopher's ideal vision of reality, it's good enough for me until something better comes around. I guess I'm a bit of a pragmaticist in the way that, since the absence of a supernatural "reality" hasn't seemed to have lost me any points, I'll get along just fine without it.

OAO doesn't deal in "practicality." He might lose some of his grandiose sense of self-importance if he had to lower himself to the herd mentality of "usefulness." :rolleyes

My much prayed for puppy never arrived that Christmas and I have been a bitter man ever since.

Christ cares.

Logic is simply the study of how to make valid arguments can be made through reason, and reason is "the faculty by means of which or the process through which human beings perform thought." Without thought, no conclusions can be brought forth - to be more precise, we know of no other way to draw conclusions. So while I cannot truly accept the primacy of thought because I do not know that it is necessary to think in order to draw conclusions, I must do so because I do not know of any other way.

Mathematics is based on axioms, or more appropriately, incredibly well-established inductive truths. Because of this, it cannot provide absolute knowledge.

I never said that the mind was a reliable source of truth. I simply say that all knowledge must come from reason; I did not say that we actually could know anything.

Remember, there is a difference between practical truths from which we operate, and real truth.

Thanks for the recap.

Well no fucking shit. I love how you act like every sentence you type is a major revelation that will have philosophers creaming their pants.

You always seem to confuse the two.

Yeah, either OAO is utterly, hopelessly confused and self-contradictory, or he is Captain Obvious.

I wouldn't want to live in a world where everyone were exactly alike and experienced an identical truth like a bunch of automotons. I like the fact that there are a few "monkey wrenches" in my machinery. It makes it all the more interesting when I find those that have similiar wrenches, even if their wrenches are metric. Close enough.