Recovering a Kantian
Analytic/Synthetic Distinction through Incompatibility
My dissertation seeks to recover a
viable analytic/synthetic distinction that retains a distinctly Kantian
heritage. It is formulated with
distinctly metametaphysical intent,
to be part of another philosophical project that Kant initiated: the critique
of metaphysics. My account is formulated
specifically with regard to its potential fruitfulness in future
metametaphysical work delimiting the bounds of metaphysics, which itself can
serve as a basis for advancing a philosophical proposal for avoiding metaphysics. To this end, the account of the divide I
offer seeks to remain metaphysically
agnostic: it attempts to stay neutral vis-à-vis competing metaphysical
viewpoints and anti-metaphysical viewpoints so that it can form part of a
mutually-acceptable portrait of the bounds of metaphysics to friends and foes
of metaphysics alike. In my view, to
take or treat a claim as analytic is
to, at least implicitly, undertake a commitment to its being deducible merely
from our commitments about object-general,[1]
non-localized[2]
incompatibility and entailments claims; to treat a claim as synthetic is, at
least implicitly, to undertake an implicit commitment to its not being so
deducible.
My account
of the analytic is strongly tied to Kant’s original idea of conceptual containment
and exclusion: incompatibilities articulate material and modally-robust
relationships of mutual exclusion
among claims, and incompatibility relations can also be used to define
entailments,[3]
which articulate modally-robust and material relations of inclusion or containment. Furthermore, my account harkens back to a
long neglected aspect of Kant’s divide between the analytic and synthetic. For Kant, concepts are irreducibly general or
universal representations: there are no concepts of particulars or individuals;
that role instead falls to intuitions.
In my account just as in Kant’s, since the analytic tracks relations of conceptual containment and
exclusion—relations which are modally robust—the analytic/synthetic division
thus tracks this divide between general
and particular sorts of representations.
It is the characteristic sort of modally-robust generality (in contrast with particularity)
that I take to be distinctive of the analytic.
In contrast, the synthetic takes on distinctive aspects of Kant’s
understanding of intuitions—in my
view their localization or essential
appeal to some “third thing” outside of conceptual relations of containment and
exclusion. By emphasizing the semantic
distinction between the modally robust generality
and universality of the analytic as opposed to the particularity and locality
of the synthetic, my account thus highlights a historical aspect of Kant’s
divide that has regrettably been overlooked by the dominant tradition,
especially when compared to the efforts devoted to understanding the divide in
terms of the epistemological distinction, roughly, between (justification based
on) interrogating our concepts versus interrogating the world, or the metaphysical
distinction, roughly, between truth in virtue of meaning alone and truth in
virtue of both meaning and the broader world.
The account of the
analytic/synthetic divide I provide is cleaved in terms of alethically modal concepts which, traditionally, have been seen as
metaphysically-loaded and hence problematic for my metametaphysical
purposes. This is because the dominant
philosophical tradition for understanding alethic modality rests its account on
the metaphysically and epistemically fraught notion of a continuum of
inter-accessible possible worlds. To avoid this, my account draws on resources
found in Robert Brandom’s incompatibility
semantics, which offers an alternative account of necessity and possibility
in terms of the less-problematic notion of incompatibility. My appropriation of Brandom’s incompatibility
semantics incorporates several changes.
First, I reinterpret Brandom’s semantics using an intensional notion of schematic generality (as opposed to set
theoretic and quantificational concepts), which helps me to clarify the
semantic interdependence of general and particular therein and resolve several
epistemological and methodological concerns.
I also discuss the complicating factor of nonmonotonicity of inferences by reference to the Michael
Thompson’s work on “natural-historical judgments,”[4] showing
how the generality and modality expressed in nonmonotonic,
modally-sophisticated claims can fit within my revised understanding of
incompatibility semantics and the analytic/synthetic divide. Finally, I modify Brandom’s incompatibility
semantics by formally extending it to equal the expressive power of Kripke
Semantics for modal logical systems, thereby rectifying formal and intuitive
impoverishments of Brandom’s formalism.
I do so by incorporating an analog of accessibility relations therein.
I provide an interpretation of what accessibility relations, transposed
into incompatibility semantics, can be taken to mean by invoking a broadly
logical notion of meta-compatibility,
and I provide a pragmatic explication of what linguistic practitioners must do in order to take or treat matters as
meta-compatible.
[1] Object-general claims
are those that are not objectless but rather are object indiscriminate: they hold of any objects within a certain
class or range in a modally robust way but regardless of which particular
object therein.
[2] For a
claim to be localized is for its
semantics to rest upon indexical, deixic, or otherwise non-object-general
reference.
[3] As Robert Brandom shows in his book,
Between Saying and Doing: Towards an
Analytic Pragmatism, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
[4] Michael Thompson, Life and Action: Elementary Structures of
Practice and Practical Thought, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2008).
