Topics Language

Question Why isn't every true proposition of the form 'Xp' tautological/analytic? If I say 'All Chairs are red', and this is true, then the proposition means '(that which is red) is red', which is a tautology. This can be said of any similar proposition. If we look at 'All bachelors are single males' (an accepted analytic statement), how is this logically different to 'All chairs are red', to mark one as 'analytic' and one as 'synthetic'?

Accepted:
February 10, 2008

Comments

According to my dictionary, the word 'bachelor' means 'an unmarried man'. That's why the statement 'all bachelors are unmarried' is analytic, because the status of being unmarried is built into the meaning of 'bachelor'. Now, when I look up the word 'chair' in my dictionary, it tells me that it is 'a separate seat for one person, of various forms, usually having a back and four legs'. It doesn't define it as 'that which is red', or make any mention of colour at all. Of course, you might very well reply that this is just because it's not actually the case that all chairs are red; and that, if they were all red, the colour would in that case infiltrate the meaning of the word. But I don't buy that. Even if there was a global campaign to paint absolutely every chair in the world red, I still don't feel that the word 'chair' would thereby come to mean 'that which is red'. It would still be defined in the same old way, in terms of an object's form and function. And the reason why I say this is that it seems that the following would still remain true, even in this hypothetical world where all the chairs had as a matter of fact been painted red: if someone was then to paint one of them blue, it would not for that reason cease to be a chair. Even if it were the case that all chairs were red, the universal generalisation, though true, would still be only accidentally true. There are plenty of accidentally true universal generalisations, where everything in a certain category just happens to have a certain property in common, even though it plays no role in the definition of the category. 'All ravens are black', might be an example. 'All swans are white' used to be regarded as one, until they went to Australia and discovered black swans; and the crucial thing to appreciate is that they didn't respond to that discovery by refusing to call these things 'swans': they responded by concluding that the generalisation was false. It's by considering hypothetical scenarios, or actual historical cases like that one, that reveal the difference between necessary, analytic generalisations and contingent, synthetic ones. If a bird was discovered that sufficiently resembled a raven in all the salient ways, but was somehow white, we probably would still say that it was a raven despite that fact -- an albino raven, perhaps, but a raven nevertheless. Even in your world of red chairs, if an object was found which was blue, but which still satisfied the above definition, it would still be called a 'chair'. By contrast, if we meet a man and learn that he is married, we will not call him a 'bachelor'.