How Can Semantics Avoid the Troubles with the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction?

Abstract

AbstractAt least since Quine (From a logical point of view. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1953) it has been suspected that a semantic theory that rests on defining features, or on what are taken to be “analytic” properties bearing on the content of lexical items, rests on a fault line. Simply put, there is no criterion for determining which features or propertiesFeatures are to be analytic and which ones are to be synthetic or contingent on experience. Deep down, our concern is what cognitive science and its several competing semantic theories have to offer in terms of solution. We analyze a few cases, which run into trouble by appealing to analyticity, and propose our own solution to this problem: a version of atomism cum inferences, which we think it is the only way out of the dead-end of analyticity. We start off by discussing several guiding assumptions regarding cognitive architecture and on what we take to be methodological imperatives for doing semantics within cognitive science—that is a semantics that is concerned with accounting for mental states. We then discuss theoretical perspectives on lexical causatives and the so-called “coercion” phenomenon or, in our preferred terminology, indeterminacy. And we advance, even if briefly, a proposal for the representation and processing of conceptual content that does away with the analytic/synthetic distinction. We argue that the only account of mental content that does away with the analytic/synthetic distinction is atomism. The version of atomism that we sketch accounts for the purported effects of analyticity with a system of inferences that are in essence synthetic and, thus, not content constitutive.