Читать книгу The Philosophy of Philosophy - Timothy Williamson - Страница 26

Unless one is a skeptic about meaning or modality, one can define several notions of analyticity in semantic and modal terms, but none of them provides any reason to regard the truths to which it applies as somehow insubstantial, or as posing no significant cognitive challenge. That upshot may seem puzzling. Surely we sometimes make a sentence true by stipulative definition. For example, I might introduce the term “zzz” (pronounced as a buzz) by saying “A zzz is a short sleep” and thereby make “A zzz is a short sleep” true. What prevents us from using such cases as paradigms to fix a semantic notion of analyticity on which analytic truths are insubstantial?

We can see the problems for the proposal more clearly by distinguishing the semantic from the metasemantic. Semantics facts are facts of the kind we attempt to systematize in giving a systematic compositional semantic theory for a language, facts as to what its expressions mean. Metasemantic facts are the nonsemantic facts on which the semantic facts supervene. The distinction is rough but clear enough to be workable. Thus the fact that “horse” applies to horses is semantic, not metasemantic; the fact that utterances of “horse” are often caused by horses is metasemantic, not semantic.²⁴ Similarly, the fact that “zzz” means a short sleep is semantic, while the fact that it was introduced by someone saying “A zzz is a short sleep” is metasemantic. The semantic theory takes no notice of the act of stipulation, only of its outcome – that a given expression has a given meaning. The act of stipulation makes the sentence true by making it have a meaning on which it is, in the quite ordinary way, true. My saying “A zzz is a short sleep” did not make a zzz be a short sleep, because that would be to make a short sleep be a short sleep, and my saying “A zzz is a short sleep” certainly did not make a short sleep be a short sleep. In particular, since there were many short sleeps before I was born, there were many zzzes before I was born, independently of my later actions. At best, my saying “A zzz is a short sleep” made “zzz” mean a short sleep, and therefore “A zzz is a short sleep” mean that a short sleep is a short sleep. This is simply the standard semantic contribution of meaning to truth, just as for synthetic truths. The peculiarity of the case is all at the metasemantic level; the use of stipulative definitions as paradigms does not yield a semantic notion of analyticity. Making “zzz” mean a short sleep helps make “A zzz is a short sleep” true only because a short sleep is a short sleep. “A short sleep is a short sleep” is a logical truth, but we have still been given no reason to regard logical truths as somehow insubstantial. The use of stipulative definitions as paradigms of analyticity does not justify the idea that analytic truths are in any way insubstantial.

My stipulation may smooth my path from knowing the logical truth “A short sleep is a short sleep” to knowing the Frege-analytic truth “A zzz is a short sleep,” but of course that does not explain how I know “A short sleep is a short sleep” in the first place.

The metaphysics and semantics of analytic truths are no substitute for their epistemology. If their epistemology is as distinctive as is often supposed, that is not the outcome of a corresponding distinctiveness in their metaphysics or semantics. It can only be captured by confronting their epistemology directly. We therefore turn to epistemological accounts of analyticity.