Essay On Analyticity

Since Kant, analyticity has been widely used as one of the central philosophical concepts. However, the critiques originating from Quine in1951have made analyticity vulnerable. In order to defend for analyticity, hundreds of theories are proposed and lots of progresses have been made in philosophy of language. However, none of these theories could completely defend against Quinean critiques.Under such background, by modifying and rebuilding Gillian Russell’s theory which I call the Multilayer Meanings Theory, this paper is trying to argue that the reason why we could not have a satisfactory definition of analyticity is not because that we lack a proper theory about proposition itself but because that we lack the knowledge about character which is one of the meanings of a word. Therefore we could not know details about analyticity until philosophy of language and cognitive science could give us enough information. What’s more, even though this paper could not give a definition of analyticity, by attributing analyticity to the character of words, we could know that language has some ontological independence from logic, mathematics and matters of fact.This paper has four chapters. The first chapter introduces what philosophers talk about by talking about analyticity and lists the problems this paper intends to solve. The first part of the second chapter is about how the Multilayer Meanings Theory is developed in the historical view. The second part consists of critiques about Gillian Russell’s Multilayer Meanings Theory. The core of this paper is the third chapter. By modifying and rebuilding the Multilayer Meanings Theory, it argues that if there is analyticity, it should depend on the relations between the characters of words. And since we know little about the nature of the characters of words, we could not have a definite description of analyticity. The fourth chapter briefly introduces some philosophical results of the Multilayer Meanings Theory which includes denying meaning illusion, denying the equality between analyticity and synonymity and proposing the independence of the analyticity of language from logic and mathematics.