THE ACT OF ANALYSIS IT WOULD SEEM FAIR to say that the prevailing view of analysis has been largely shaped by Kant's account of the analytic judgment. In the Critique of Pure Reason that judgment is presented as one in which" the predicate B belongs to the subject A, as somewhat which is contained (though covertly) in the conception A." It is a judgment " in which the connection of the predicate with the subject is cogitated through identity." Forming it, therefore, involves no " recourse to the testimony of experience," no need to "go outside the sphere of my own conceptions." For example, " I need not go beyond the conception of body to find extension connected with it." I have but to " analyze the conception "-that is, to "become conscious of the manifold properties which I think in that conception." The judgment upon any notion demands only that we " analyze it into its constituent conceptions," thereby bringing into the full light of consciousness those elements "which were already in the subject, although in a confused manner." The product of the analytic act is thus " a proposition that stands firm a priori;" the mind needs" only to extract the predicate from the conception, according to the principle of contradiction, and thereby at the same time become aware of the necessity of the judgment." 1 The core of the above is also found in the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics: "Analytic judgments express nothing in the predicate but what has already been thought in the concept of the subject, though not so distinctly or with the same full consciousness." 2 1 Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Meicklejohn, pp. 7-8. (Willey Book Company, New York, 1900). •Prologue to Any Future Metaphysics, p. 14. (The Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill, New York, 1950). 45 46 JOHN D. BEACH Important problems attach to Kant's account of analysis and its product, problems rooted in the stated covert, confused or indistinct presence in the subject-concept of the elements that reflective thought brings to the light of day. Granting the product of analysis that initial status, we are led to ask what, if anything, is given overtly and distinctly to thought. Putting this somewhat differently, we must ask in terms of what, if anything , the subject of analysis is initially known or identified. This, in turn, prompts a question concerning the relationship between what is initially known and that which analysis yields. But these are matters more appropriately dealt with in another context. Let us proceed for now on the assumption that the product of analysis, the extracted predicate, is so given as an element of the subject-concept that the act of analysis unfolds exclusively in accordance with the principles of identity and contradiction. The prevailing view of analysis is based upon that very assumption. Its adherents stress that, as initially present to thought, the subject is seen to contain the predicate -i.e., the subject is known as a complex having the predicate as one of its discrete parts. Accordingly, they would note, the analytic proposition is simply the expression of the knowledge that the predicate, the extracted constituent, is such a part of the complex. And this is to say that there is a relation of direct and complete identity between the relevant part of the complex and the extracted predicate, and a relation of direct but partial identity between the extracted element and the initial complex. The favored examples of the latter, partial identity are the relationship between male and bachelor, or unmarried male, and that between sibling and brother, or male sibling. Proponents of this essentially conventional approach toward analysis also emphasize that the necessity involved is based on the laws of identity and contradiction. Contracted to the case in hand, these principles tell us, respectively, that a given cogitated element 0£ a subject-concept must be such an element and that it isimpossible for it not to be such an element. Thus male must be and cannot not be an element of unmarried male. THE ACT OF ANALYSIS 47 Rephrased, an unmarried male must be and cannot not be a male. Whence what is now the standard characterization...