COMM 2273 Lecture Notes - Lecture 55: Logical Truth, Oneword, Universal Rule

• School: University of Arkansas-Monticello
• Department: Communication
• Course: COMM 2273
• Professor: Key

Document Summary

First, empiricism creates an analytic-synthetic distinction which is contradictory. The rst dogma is that of the analytic-synthetic distinction. This distinction tells us that analytic statements are true or false on the basis of their meaning, independent of facts. For example the statement a bachelor is an unmarried man" is analytic because bachelor" is de ned as unmarried man". Therefore closer inspection of the meaning of the terms in the sentence leads us to the logical truth an unmarried man is an unmarried man". Synthetic statements, on the other hand, are true or false on the basis of facts the world provides. To nd out if such a statement is true we need to look at the world. Quine concludes that the truth value of such a sentence can be analysed as involving a linguistic component (the meaning of the words) and a factual component (the situation in the world that makes the sentence true or false).