Analytical judgment
In philosophy , one speaks of an analytical judgment or an analytical proposition when the truth or falsity of the judgment or proposition is already determined by an analysis of the concepts or their intensional characteristics . In particular, a judgment is analytically true which ascribes one of its characteristics to a concept, for example “All bodies are expanded”. The distinction between analytical and synthetic judgments comes from the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant ; the concept of analytical judgments is essentially older. In analytical philosophy , the distinction based on Ludwig Wittgenstein's and Rudolf Carnap's earlier work became prominent again, but was then criticized primarily by Willard Van Orman Quine .
Analytical judgments in Kant
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For Kant, the talk of analytical judgments plays a central role in the context of the juxtaposition of analytical - synthetic and a priori - a posteriori . Analytical judgments are true a priori because their truth results from the meaning of the concepts . You don't learn anything really new from them, which is why Kant also calls them “explanatory judgments”. In contrast to this, synthetic judgments expand knowledge (so-called "expansion judgments") and in their a priori form the central theme of Kant's epistemology, the famous central question of which is: "How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?"
An example of an analytical judgment would be: “All bachelors are unmarried.” The quality of being unmarried is already implied in the term “bachelor”. So nothing new is being added to the term. A synthetic judgment would be, for example: "All ravens are black." The term raven does not exclude the possibility that there are also white ravens.
The analytical philosophy
In early analytic philosophy, especially in the Vienna Circle , analytic sentences were considered the real theme of philosophy. It has been claimed that empirical statements are formulated by the natural sciences . The only truthful, non-empirical propositions are conceptual truths that are formulated by analytical propositions. All propositions that are not analytical propositions and cannot be empirically verified were meaningless in the view of early analytical philosophy. This belief led to large parts of classical metaphysics being viewed as meaningless.
A problem with this position is that the claim that all meaningful sentences must be empirical or analytical is itself a non-empirical and non-analytical sentence.
Contemporary philosophy
The current debate about the Analytical is dominated by the 1951 published paper Two Dogmas of Empiricism (dt. Two Dogmas of Empiricism ) by Willard Van Orman Quine . In this essay, Quine attacked the distinction between analytical and synthetic sentences as an ultimately untenable dogma . Even if Quine's general argumentation is recognized by many today, the distinction between analytical and synthetic sentences is usually at least heuristically maintained . A more recent defense of this approach can be found, for example, in Olaf Müller .
See also
Web links
- Entry in Edward N. Zalta (Ed.): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy .
- Essays on the topic of analyticity in modern epistemology
literature
- Christian Nimtz: analytical / synthetic. In: Jordan / Nimtz (ed.): Lexicon Philosophy: Hundred Basic Concepts. Stuttgart, Reclam 2009, pp. 24-26
- Olaf Müller : Synonymy and analyticity: two meaningful terms. An examination of WVO Quine's skepticism of meaning. Schöningh, Paderborn 1998. ( Diss. Chapters 6-12 as pdf )
- Albert Newen , Jochim Horvath (ed.): Apriority and analyticity . mentis, Paderborn 2007, ISBN 978-3-89785-412-3