Analytic–synthetic distinction

The distinction between truths that hold by virtue of meaning or conceptual relations and truths that depend on how things are in the world.

Analytic proposition: A proposition true solely in virtue of meanings or conceptual relations. It captures the conceptual-truth side of the distinction.
Immanuel Kant: An eighteenth-century German philosopher who developed critical philosophy and influential accounts of knowledge. Kant made synthetic a priori judgments central to his account of cognition.
Meaning (philosophy of language): The study of what linguistic expressions signify and how they contribute to understanding. The distinction depends on whether truth can be explained through meaning.
Quinean holism: The view that statements face experience as interconnected systems rather than as isolated claims. It undermines a sharp division between meaning-based and fact-based truths.
Synthetic proposition: A proposition whose truth depends on facts beyond meanings alone. It captures the substantive, world-dependent side.
Synthetic a priori: A judgment that extends knowledge while being knowable independently of experience. It is the distinctive category Kant used to challenge a simple two-way division.
Truth by definition: Truth that follows from stipulated meanings or explicit definitions. Definitions offer a clear candidate for truths that add no empirical information.
Carnapian analyticity: Rudolf Carnap’s account of analytic truth through the semantic rules of a linguistic framework. Carnap offers a formal defense against Quine’s skepticism about analyticity.
A priori and a posteriori: A distinction between knowledge independent of experience and knowledge grounded in experience. The distinction is often paired with the question of how truths are known.
Gottlob Frege: A German mathematician and philosopher who helped found modern logic and analytic philosophy. Frege argued that arithmetic truths are analytic, opposing Kant’s account.

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