Analyticity and Necessity in Moore's Early Work

Analyticity and Necessity in Moore's Early Work RONALD JAGER All real judgment is synthetic--that is, involves the carrying over of a predicate of one subject to affect the predicate of another subject numerically distinct. Any other form of judgment is tautological and hence no judgment at all. (G.F.S.--Baldwin's Dictionary, H, 441) IN DISCUSSIONSof necessity and analyticity there cropsup periodically the worry about whether a genuinely analytic proposition, one whose subject and predicate are in some sense partially or wholly 'the same', can really be regarded as a proposition at all. Though one can, I suppose, resolve the question by fiat. one cannot by the same sl~oke discern what has been gained or lost thereby. Viewing it historically, we may say that the worry crops up most naturally where one's conception of proposition is linked to the classical notion of judgment, or where propositions are more or less realistically conceived. Moreover, the very existence of scruples about a matter of this sort doubtless contributed both to the positivistic eclipse of propositions in the fight of something more linguistic and to the resultant complacency about analyticity. But, in the heyday of positivism Professor Broad wrote: [ do not know that it would be universally admitted that there are analytic propositions . The alleged instances of such propositions which are commonly given in logic books are, in my opinion, not instances of propositions at all.... I very much doubt whether it [''all equilateral triangles are eqnilateral'~J stands for a proposition, i.e., for something that can be true or false, that can be known or believed or entertained and so on, at all.., we seem to have here just one more instance of the disastrous results of blindly following the suggestions of language,x Can analytic propositions be known, believed, disbelieved? Obviously Broad thinks that there is a serious issue here, and not one merely de jure. More recently, Arthur Pap has succinctly expressed something of the impulse that has kept the problem alive: "Are There Synthetic Apriori Truths?" PAS supplementary volume (1936), pp. 104105 . [4411 442 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The word "proposition" has several proper uses, whereof "possible object of beliefs"... is only one. An equally proper use for it is "meaning of a declarative sentence." . . . But it is not enough to be aware of this duplicity of meanings of "proposition." One further ought to see their relationship, which is this: anything which it is possible to believe (and to disbelieve) is something which it is possible to mean by a declarative sentence, but not conversely. 2 We might relate Broad's remarks to Pap's in this way: To understand 'proposition' merely as "meaning of a declarative sentence" may lead to one of "the disastrous results of blindly following the suggestions of the language." And indeed, difficulties are likely to stem from our being able to mean while not being able to disbelieve what is expressed by analytic sentences. But with belief the door opens upon a host of other modal and epistemic concepts that may be affected by one's attitude toward our problem. Presupposing is one such instance. Judging is another. There is in fact a cluster of problems that stem from the question whether ostensibly analytic propositions are really propositions. If, as I suggested, the ancestry, but not the descendents of this question may be traced to the notion of 'judgment', it is not surprising that the problem itself first seemed really acute at that point in semantic history where 'judgment' was being supplanted by 'proposition', and where the characteristic problems of idealism were being faced by philosophers of avowedly realistic bent. That is: around 1900. As far as I can discover there is only one place in this century's literature where the issue is the vehicle for a total assault on the conception of analytic truth, an assault like that suggested but not developed by Broad and Pap. This attack appears historically just where one might have expected, though Broad and Pap made no reference to it. It is in an early paper of G. E. Moore's.3 I do not know that Moore's own argument has...