3.2: Analytic sentences, synthetic sentences, and contradictions

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We have said that knowing the meaning of a sentence allows us to determine the kinds of situations in which the proposition which it expresses would be true. In other words, the meaning of a sentence determines its truth conditions. Some propositions have the interesting property of being true under all circumstances; there are no situations in which such a proposition would be false. We refer to sentences which express such propositions as analytic sentences, or tautologies. Some examples are given in (3):

(3) a. Today is the first day of the rest of your life.¹
b. Que será será. ‘What will be, will be.’
c. Is this bill all that I want? Far from it. Is it all that it can be? Far from it. But when history calls, history calls.²

Because analytic sentences are always true, they are not very informative. The speaker who commits himself to the truth of such a sentence is making no claim at all about the state of the world, because the truth of the sentence depends only on the meaning of the words. But in that case, why would anyone bother to say such a thing? It is important to note that the use of tautologies is not restricted to politicians and pop psychology gurus, who may have professional motivations to make risk-free statements which sound profound. In fact, all of us probably say such things more frequently than we realize. We say them because they do in fact have communicative value; but this value cannot come from the semantic (or truth conditional) content of the utterance. The communicative value of these utterances comes entirely from the pragmatic inferences which they trigger. We will talk in more detail in Chapter 8 about how these pragmatic inferences arise.

(4) And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, “Speak to us of children.”And he said: “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself…”³

Propositions which are neither contradictions nor analytic are said to be synthetic. These propositions may be true in some situations and false in others, so determining their truth value requires not only understanding their meaning but also knowing something about the current state of the world or the situation under discussion. Most of the (declarative) sentences that speakers produce in everyday speech are of this type.

We would expect an adequate analysis of sentence meanings to provide an explanation for why certain sentences are analytic, and why certain others are contradictions. So one criterion for evaluating the relative merits of a possible semantic analysis is to ask how successful it is in this regard.

¹ Attributed to Charles Dederich (1913–1997), founder of the Synanon drug rehabilitation program and religious movement.

² Sen. Olympia Snowe explaining her vote in favor of the Baucus health care reform bill, Oct. 2009.

³ From “On Children”, in The Prophet (Kahlil Gibran, 1923).