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The Synthetic Significance of Analytic Statements*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

William Rozeboom
William Rozeboom
Affiliation:
University of Alberta
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Extract

In his essay “Brains and Behavior” in Analytical Philosophy, edited by R. Butler, 2nd Series, Blackwell, 1965), Putnam has contended that Logical Behaviourism is not merely dead, its corpse has become olfactorily unattractive. For, says Putnam, while the translatability of mentalistic terms into the vocabulary of overt behaviour is no longer a live issue, innocent philosophers are still being corrupted by sinful urges of a Logical-Behaviouristic sort, namely, (a) suspicion that statements relating behaviour to mental events may be more than just synthetic, and (b) the possibility that the translatability thesis breaks down purely and simply through a mismatching of vagueness in the way, e.g., that a statement about baldness fails at translation into a statement about the number of hairs on a person's head merely because of the inherent vagueness of the term ‘bald’. But while the latter version of neo-Logical-Behaviourism can be dismissed with a curt reminder of what has been learned about the observational irreducibility even of dispositional terms, I remain unconvinced that propositions linking mental and behavioural events are wholly devoid of analytic support.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , September 1977 , pp. 464 - 471
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1977

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References

1 Rozeboom, W. W. The factual content of theoretical concepts. In Feigl, H., & Maxwell, G. (eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 111. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962Google Scholar. The analyticity involved here is by no means restricted to advanced theories in technical science; it also pervades our most primitively intuitive inferences to the underlying causes of observed events — see e.g., p. 66ff. in Rozeboom, W. W. “Dispositions Revisited,” Philosophy of Science, 1973, 40, Pp. 59–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See footnote 1. Also, “Intentionality and Existence,” Mind, 1962, 71. pp. 15–32Google Scholar; “The Crisis in Philosophical Semantics,” in Radner, M., & Winokur, S. (eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Phttosophy of Science, Vol. IV, University of Minnesota Press, 1970Google Scholar; “Problems in the Psycho-philosophy of Knowledge,” in Royce, J. R., & Rozeboom, W. W. (eds.), The Psychology of Knowing. Gordon & Breach, 1972Google Scholar; “What is Semantics a Theory of, and How Do I Know There are Such Things?,” in Freed, B. et al. (eds.), Forms of Representation, North Holland Publishing Company, 1975Google Scholar.

3 For discussion of the generic nature of explanatory induction (abduction), see my “Ontological induction and the Logical Typology of Scientific Variables. Philosophy of Science, 1961,28, pp. 337–377CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Scientific Inference: The Myth and the Reality,» in Brown, S. R., & Brenner, D. J. (eds.) Science, Psychoiogy and Communication: Essays Honoring William Stephenson, Teachers College Press, 1972Google Scholar.