My question concerns analyticity. I'm a Danish undergraduate student of classics

My question concerns analyticity. I'm a Danish undergraduate student of classics

My question concerns analyticity. I'm a Danish undergraduate student of classics, so I don't have any formal education in philosophy. Anyway, here goes: How do you determine whether or not a proposition is analytic? I believe that the traditional definition is something like this: for a proposition to be analytic the predicate has to be contained in the subject (in the sense that the truth of the proposition can be determined purely on the basis of the semantics of the concepts used and of an understanding of the logical form of the proposition). But this does not seem to be enough. Consider this example: "Wolves live in packs". This would normally qualify as a synthetic proposition, but why exactly? Imagine that a person sitting in her favourite armchair uses her semantic mastery of the concept of wolves and determines the truth of the proposition without lifting a finger. Would that make the proposition "analytic". There seems to be something wrong here. One could say that every proposition that is not a member of the group of propositions sufficient to identify unequivocally the subject in question, does not qualify as a synthetic proposition. And since "living in packs" is not a member of the group of propositions sufficient to identify unequivocally the subject "wolves", it does not count as an analytic proposition. Is there some sense in this, or should I look at "analyticity" in another way?

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