ANALYTIC TRUTHS—STILL HARMLESS AFTER ALL THESE YEARS?

Abstract

Hilary Putnam once proposed a semantic approach to, as well as a deflationist resolution of, the problem of analyticity. I take up and defend both ideas. First of all, I defend Putnam’s semantic construal of the issue against Quine’s reductive understanding. Secondly, I devise a semantics that successfully explains the genesis of the relevant analytic truths and that shows them to be harmless. Finally, I rebut the aspirations of the neo-descriptivist semantics, prominently propounded by David Chalmers and Frank Jackson, that is widely presumed to spearhead the re-establishment of substantial analyticities. I conclude that analytic truths ― at least those discussed ―are indeed harmless. 1. ‘Two Dogmas’ and Beyond Fifty years ago, Quine’s rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction sparked one of the most passionate disputes in analytic philosophy. However, hardly any contribution to this dispute can match the refreshing originality of Putnam’s The Analytic and the Synthetic. Published some ten years after Two Dogmas of Empiricism, Putnam’s paper propounds what amounts to a deflationist attitude towards the issue of analyticity. Arguing that the problem of analyticity is to be understood as one within rather than about semantics, Putnam claims that Quine is evidently wrong. Some truths are analytic, and some are not. Still, Putnam wholeheartedly endorses the thrust of Quine’s case. Putnam believes that a semantic approach lends itself quite naturally to a deflationist resolution of the problem of analyticity. He maintains that once we have provided an adequate semantics, suited to explain the genesis of analytic truths and apt to evaluate their importance, we will see that analytic truths are harmless. That is to say, they are trivial and hence ill-suited to play any exceptional epistemological or methodological role. Putnam consequently agrees with Quine on the deep issue: the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths is not a suitable ground to rest one’s