View Single Post
  #4  
theapportioner theapportioner is offline
Mocker
theapportioner's Avatar
Join Date: Feb 2003
theapportioner is probably a spambot
Old Jan 11th, 2004, 12:59 PM       
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.
Reply With Quote