Meixner, U.

Wachter, Daniel von

English

Universität München: Elektronischen Publikationen

What has Necessity to do with Analyticity? 
Daniel von Wachter 
Oriel College, Oxford 
 
Homepage of the author: http://von-wachter.de  
Email: replace “ABC” in daniel@ABC.de by “von-wachter” 
Address: Dr. Dr. Daniel von Wachter, Institut für Philosophie, Universität 
München, PF 42, D-80539 München, Germany. 
 
This is a preprint version of:  
Wachter, Daniel von. 1999. "What has Necessity to do with Analyticity?" In Me-
taphysics in the Post-Metaphysical Age, edited by U. Meixner. Wien: öbvhpt, 326-
330. 
 
This document is available at http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de.  
(Format A5; print 2 pages per sheet) 
 
 
The claim that analytic statements are necessary is as old as the concept of 
analyticity and seldom taken to be contentious. The claim that necessary 
statements are analytic is a bit younger and usually taken to be a bit more 
contentious, but it gained a remarkably wide following. Both claims are 
sometimes not really claims but rather parts of stipulative definitions of 
‘necessary’ or ‘analytic’. There is no totally non-arbitrary philosophical 
use of the word ‘necessary’, and how philosophers use it often depends on 
how they want to relate necessity to analyticity. What we should try to do 
is to think about what phenomena there are in that area of objects of phi-
losophical investigation where philosophers speak about ‘necessity’ and 
 1 
‘analyticity’. That is, we have to investigate what the matter is with these 
statements which philosophers call ‘necessary’ or ‘analytic’. Then we have 
to look for a fitting classification whereby we should be anxious that we 
do not put too different phenomena in the same class.  
In what follows I want to make suggestions about how the words ‘neces-
sary’ and ‘analytic’ are fittingly used in philosophy. In the end, I shall re-
consider the question whether analytic statements are necessary, and 
whether necessary statements are analytic.  
1. Analyticity 
Let us start with the worn-out example ‘All bachelors are unmarried’, 
which is the most often quoted example of an analytic statement. There 
is, of course, something peculiar about this statement. We should investi-
gate what it is, and if it is not something totally different from what phi-
losophers usually meant when they spoke about ‘analyticity’, then we will 
be well advised to design our concept of analyticity such that it captures 
the particular peculiarity of the statement ‘All Bachelors are unmarried’.  
To make it short, I suggest that the peculiarity of this statement should be 
accounted for as follows. The word ‘bachelor’ in English is used to say 
about something that it is a man who has never married or to refer to ob-
jects which are men who have never married. So it is part of the stipula-
tive (nominal) definition of the word ‘bachelor’ that bachelors are unmar-
ried. The only thing which is stated by the statement that bachelors are 
unmarried is that the word ‘bachelor’ has such and such a meaning. Sev-
eral things which Kant said about analytic statements are true here: The 
concept of being unmarried is already contained in the concept of a 
bachelor. To quote Kant ‘Nothing is said in the predicate which is not al-
ready thought in the subject-concept’. That is the reason why there is a 
sort of ‘redundant predication’ (Katz 1998, 557). A.J. Ayer’s way of de-
 2
scribing the peculiarity of this statement is to say that its truth depends 
solely on the definitions of the symbols it contains’ (Ayer 1936, 73). Note 
that the word ‘solely’ here is crucial. Of course all statements depend in 
their truth on the definitions of the words, but what is peculiar about the 
statement ‘All Bachelors are married’ is that it is made true solely by the 
fact that the words have the meaning they have. I think that is the right 
analysis of the peculiarity of the statement ‘All bachelors are unmarried’, 
and I think all this is close enough to what is usually said about analyticity 
so that we can coin a corresponding definition of analyticity. I propose 
that:  
A statement is to be called ‘analytic’ if and only if it is made true solely by 
the linkage of a certain word to its meaning, and if it does not explicitly 
have the form ‘A means B’. 
This yields us a criterion for analyticity. To deny a true analytic statement 
is, in effect, to deny falsely that a certain word has a certain meaning. That 
is, to deny a true analytic statement is to commit a mistake of language.  
2. Necessity 
Our next task is to approach the concept of necessity and the connected 
modal concepts, i.e. impossibility, possibility, and contingency. What is 
necessity? What should we call ‘necessary’? There is no one non-
controversial paradigm example of necessity. We can start from some 
very basic intuitions. What is necessary is, for some reason, such that it 
could not possibly be otherwise. What is necessarily not the case is such 
that it is not only not actually the case, it is even somehow excluded that 
the course of history could have gone such or will go such that it would be 
the case. Some things would obviously be otherwise had history gone oth-
erwise. There could be unicorns, had history gone otherwise, and NATO 
would not have intervened in Kosovo in 1999 had Slobodan Milosevic 
 3 
acted differently. To say that something is necessarily so-and-so is, at 
least, to rule out that the course of history at any time goes such that it 
comes otherwise.  
It is helpful to look at statements with which we make claims about some-
thing being necessarily so-and-so. Let us consider the statement ‘Nobody 
can be guilty for something he did not do freely’. By ‘guilt’ we mean that 
thing about which our conscience occasionally tells us that we have it. By 
somebody ‘being free’ we mean that the person has it in his power to 
choose between alternative actions and to perform the one he chooses. 
Or, more precisely, somebody does something freely if and only if his un-
dertaking the action is not fully caused by earlier events. With the state-
ment ‘Nobody can be guilty for something which he did not do freely’ one 
claims that there is a certain thing which cannot occur without a certain 
other thing. We understand what somebody is speaking about when he 
says about somebody that he is guilty for something. We also understand 
what somebody is speaking about when he says about somebody that he 
did something freely. And we also understand what somebody claims if 
he claims that somebody is guilty for something he did not do freely. But 
some of us believe that any such a claim is false because, we believe, one 
cannot be guilty for something one did not do freely.  
Let us consider one more example, say the statement ‘Nothing can cause 
something which took place earlier’. What do we mean by ‘cause’? We 
take cases like somebody throwing a stone into a window which then 
breaks, or one billiard ball hitting another, as paradigm cases of causation. 
We believe that there is something special about such ordered pairs of 
events or things. We say in such cases one thing brings about the other, or 
one thing ‘causes’ the other. Ordered pairs of things are such that one of 
the things is rightly called the cause of the other if and only if these pairs 
resemble our standard cases in the relevant respect. If somebody tells us 
that a window in his house broke because somebody had thrown a stone 
into it, we understand that this is a claim about a case of causation and we 
believe that what we are told might have happened. If somebody tells us 
 4
that somebody on Wednesday performed a rain dance to bring about rain 
on the Monday before at some other place about which nobody knows 
whether it was raining there on Monday, then we also understand that 
this is a claim about a case of causation. But some of us believe that any 
such claim is false, not only because we do not believe that dances are the 
sort of thing which brings about rain, but because we believe that back-
ward causation is impossible. To claim that backward causation is impos-
sible is to claim that there cannot be ordered pairs of events or things 
where one is cause of the other but is later than the other.  
Examples like the impossibility of guilt without freedom or the impossi-
bility of backward causation, seem to me to be examples of the sort of 
thing for which it is fitting to use the term ‘necessity’ in philosophical dis-
course. They are claims about something being necessarily so-and-so, 
they are not just claims about some hypothetical or conditional necessity 
like ‘If you want to have healthy teeth it is necessary that you brush your 
teeth regularly’, they makes sense, they are easy to understand, they are 
interesting, and they are even about philosophically relevant issues. So I 
think we are well advised if we design our philosophical concept of neces-
sity such that it captures what we mean in such examples.  
As we understand such claims about impossibility or necessity quite eas-
ily and we have a good grasp of the meaning of talk about ‘necessity’ here, 
there is perhaps no need for a further going definition of the term ‘neces-
sary’. But it would be nice if we could say something more general about 
necessity, or if we could say something about the source of necessity. Here 
is an attempt to say more about the source of necessity: We human beings 
have the ability to have views about things. One essential part of this is 
our ability to recognise and to refer to causal aspects, or ‘properties’, of a 
thing. We form predicates with which we can refer to properties and 
therefore we are able to describe things and situations. We can not only 
describe them, we can conceive of them, we can consider them. In that 
sense we can say that we can ‘construe things in our mind’. For any set of 
predicates, as long as these predicates – like in our examples – are not ex-
 5 
plicitly defined in terms of each other like ‘bachelor’ is defined in terms of 
‘being unmarried’, we can consider the existence of a thing or a situation 
to which they all apply. If we have the predicates ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’, we can 
consider that there is a thing which is A and B and C. Predicates can be 
combined arbitrarily. But, I suggest, we have no reason to assume that the 
objects of these predicates are to be combined equally arbitrarily. Why 
should all properties be combinable with each other. (Cf. Armstrong 
(1989), who holds that all properties are combinable.)  
We can express the belief that the objects of the predicates ‘A’ and ‘B’ are 
not combinable by saying that it is impossible that there is something 
which is A and B. We can construe all sorts of things or situations in our 
mind, and the world may or may not allow for the existence of such a 
thing or situation. We can consider and claim that there is somebody who 
is guilty for something which he did not do freely, but presumably it is 
impossible that there is such a thing.  
We may say then that every non self-contradictory description of a thing 
or a situation is such that either necessarily there is such a thing, or neces-
sarily there is no such thing, or contingently there is such a thing, or con-
tingently there is no such thing.  
3. Necessity and Analyticity 
Now we are in a position to reconsider the claim that analytic statements 
are necessary and the claim that necessary statements are analytic. An 
analytic statement is one which is made true solely by the linkage of a cer-
tain word to its meaning. I linked the concept of necessity to the phe-
nomenon that we can construe all sorts of things in our mind, some of 
which the world might not allow for. A necessary statement is one where 
the existence of a thing or situation is described and it is claimed that the 
world does not allow for the existence of such a thing. A necessary state-
 6
ment is made true by the fact that the world does not allow for the exis-
tence of a thing or situation of a certain type. It is made true by the fact 
the the objects of the predicates involved are not compatible in the way in 
question. But that means that it is never made true by the linkage of a cer-
tain word to its meaning, because any word could have any meaning. So 
analytic statements are not necessary.  
Are necessary statements analytic? No, they are not, because they are not 
made true by the linkage of a certain word to its meaning. They are made 
true by the objects of the predicates involved. Further, to contradict an 
analytic statement is to commit a linguistic mistake. To contradict a true 
necessary statement does not involve a linguistic mistake – it is a mistake 
about what is possible.  
One might draw the conclusion from this result that the concepts of ana-
lyticity and necessity from which I derived this result must be inadequate. 
I do not think they are. These concepts of analyticity and necessity cap-
ture what is essential about cases which are very good candidates for be-
ing paradigm cases for analyticity or necessity respectively.  
Of course, one may widen the concepts such that one can say at least that 
analytic statements are necessary. As I said, there is no totally non-
arbitrary usage of the word ‘necessary’. Or one may use ‘necessary’ in the 
sense of ‘analytic’. But then the term ‘necessary’ would be quite useless, 
because we have already the term ‘analytic’, and we would need another 
term for what I called ‘necessary’. Besides that would this usage of ‘neces-
sary’ be far away from our normal talk about ‘necessity’. That does not 
seem advisable. And I think if one widens the concept of necessity such 
that it covers also analytic statements, then the concept of necessity be-
comes too much a mixed bag. It is true, both, analytic and necessary 
statements are in some way immune against being false. But the reason 
for that lies in the one case in linguistic conventions and in the other case 
in the objects of the predicates. Necessary statements are claims that 
such-and-such a thing cannot exist. They are claims that something 
 7 
which can be described consistently in fact cannot exist. Analytic state-
ments, on the other hand, are true by stipulative definition. They are 
about linguistic conventions. These conventions could be different. There 
is nothing necessary about analytic statements.  
References 
Armstrong, D.M. (1989), A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility. Cam-
bridge University Press. 
Ayers, A.J. (1936), Language, Truth and Logic. London: Penguin, 1971.  
Katz, J. (1998), “The Problem in Twentieth-Century Philosophy”. Journal 
of Philosophy 95: 547-575. 
 
 8


What has Necessity to do with Analyticity?

Open Access LMU

What has Necessity to do with Analyticity? Daniel von Wachter Oriel College, Oxford  Homepage of the author: http://von-wachter.de  Email: replace “ABC” in daniel@ABC.de by “von-wachter” Address: Dr. Dr. Daniel von Wachter, Institut für Philosophie, Universität München, PF 42, D-80539 München, Germany.  This is a preprint version of:  Wachter, Daniel von. 1999. "What has Necessity to do with Analyticity?" In Me-taphysics in the Post-Metaphysical Age, edited by U. Meixner. Wien: öbvhpt, 326-330.  This document is available at http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de.  (Format A5; print 2 pages per sheet)   The claim that analytic statements are necessary is as old as the concept of analyticity and seldom taken to be contentious. The claim that necessary statements are analytic is a bit younger and usually taken to be a bit more contentious, but it gained a remarkably wide following. Both claims are sometimes not really claims but rather parts of stipulative definitions of ‘necessary’ or ‘analytic’. There is no totally non-arbitrary philosophical use of the word ‘necessary’, and how philosophers use it often depends on how they want to relate necessity to analyticity. What we should try to do is to think about what phenomena there are in that area of objects of phi-losophical investigation where philosophers speak about ‘necessity’ and  1 ‘analyticity’. That is, we have to investigate what the matter is with these statements which philosophers call ‘necessary’ or ‘analytic’. Then we have to look for a fitting classification whereby we should be anxious that we do not put too different phenomena in the same class.  In what follows I want to make suggestions about how the words ‘neces-sary’ and ‘analytic’ are fittingly used in philosophy. In the end, I shall re-consider the question whether analytic statements are necessary, and whether necessary statements are analytic.  1. Analyticity Let us start with the worn-out example ‘All bachelors are unmarried’, which is the most often quoted example of an analytic statement. There is, of course, something peculiar about this statement. We should investi-gate what it is, and if it is not something totally different from what phi-losophers usually meant when they spoke about ‘analyticity’, then we will be well advised to design our concept of analyticity such that it captures the particular peculiarity of the statement ‘All Bachelors are unmarried’.  To make it short, I suggest that the peculiarity of this statement should be accounted for as follows. The word ‘bachelor’ in English is used to say about something that it is a man who has never married or to refer to ob-jects which are men who have never married. So it is part of the stipula-tive (nominal) definition of the word ‘bachelor’ that bachelors are unmar-ried. The only thing which is stated by the statement that bachelors are unmarried is that the word ‘bachelor’ has such and such a meaning. Sev-eral things which Kant said about analytic statements are true here: The concept of being unmarried is already contained in the concept of a bachelor. To quote Kant ‘Nothing is said in the predicate which is not al-ready thought in the subject-concept’. That is the reason why there is a sort of ‘redundant predication’ (Katz 1998, 557). A.J. Ayer’s way of de- 2scribing the peculiarity of this statement is to say that its truth depends solely on the definitions of the symbols it contains’ (Ayer 1936, 73). Note that the word ‘solely’ here is crucial. Of course all statements depend in their truth on the definitions of the words, but what is peculiar about the statement ‘All Bachelors are married’ is that it is made true solely by the fact that the words have the meaning they have. I think that is the right analysis of the peculiarity of the statement ‘All bachelors are unmarried’, and I think all this is close enough to what is usually said about analyticity so that we can coin a corresponding definition of analyticity. I propose that:  A statement is to be called ‘analytic’ if and only if it is made true solely by the linkage of a certain word to its meaning, and if it does not explicitly have the form ‘A means B’. This yields us a criterion for analyticity. To deny a true analytic statement is, in effect, to deny falsely that a certain word has a certain meaning. That is, to deny a true analytic statement is to commit a mistake of language.  2. Necessity Our next task is to approach the concept of necessity and the connected modal concepts, i.e. impossibility, possibility, and contingency. What is necessity? What should we call ‘necessary’? There is no one non-controversial paradigm example of necessity. We can start from some very basic intuitions. What is necessary is, for some reason, such that it could not possibly be otherwise. What is necessarily not the case is such that it is not only not actually the case, it is even somehow excluded that the course of history could have gone such or will go such that it would be the case. Some things would obviously be otherwise had history gone oth-erwise. There could be unicorns, had history gone otherwise, and NATO would not have intervened in Kosovo in 1999 had Slobodan Milosevic  3 acted differently. To say that something is necessarily so-and-so is, at least, to rule out that the course of history at any time goes such that it comes otherwise.  It is helpful to look at statements with which we make claims about some-thing being necessarily so-and-so. Let us consider the statement ‘Nobody can be guilty for something he did not do freely’. By ‘guilt’ we mean that thing about which our conscience occasionally tells us that we have it. By somebody ‘being free’ we mean that the person has it in his power to choose between alternative actions and to perform the one he chooses. Or, more precisely, somebody does something freely if and only if his un-dertaking the action is not fully caused by earlier events. With the state-ment ‘Nobody can be guilty for something which he did not do freely’ one claims that there is a certain thing which cannot occur without a certain other thing. We understand what somebody is speaking about when he says about somebody that he is guilty for something. We also understand what somebody is speaking about when he says about somebody that he did something freely. And we also understand what somebody claims if he claims that somebody is guilty for something he did not do freely. But some of us believe that any such a claim is false because, we believe, one cannot be guilty for something one did not do freely.  Let us consider one more example, say the statement ‘Nothing can cause something which took place earlier’. What do we mean by ‘cause’? We take cases like somebody throwing a stone into a window which then breaks, or one billiard ball hitting another, as paradigm cases of causation. We believe that there is something special about such ordered pairs of events or things. We say in such cases one thing brings about the other, or one thing ‘causes’ the other. Ordered pairs of things are such that one of the things is rightly called the cause of the other if and only if these pairs resemble our standard cases in the relevant respect. If somebody tells us that a window in his house broke because somebody had thrown a stone into it, we understand that this is a claim about a case of causation and we believe that what we are told might have happened. If somebody tells us  4that somebody on Wednesday performed a rain dance to bring about rain on the Monday before at some other place about which nobody knows whether it was raining there on Monday, then we also understand that this is a claim about a case of causation. But some of us believe that any such claim is false, not only because we do not believe that dances are the sort of thing which brings about rain, but because we believe that back-ward causation is impossible. To claim that backward causation is impos-sible is to claim that there cannot be ordered pairs of events or things where one is cause of the other but is later than the other.  Examples like the impossibility of guilt without freedom or the impossi-bility of backward causation, seem to me to be examples of the sort of thing for which it is fitting to use the term ‘necessity’ in philosophical dis-course. They are claims about something being necessarily so-and-so, they are not just claims about some hypothetical or conditional necessity like ‘If you want to have healthy teeth it is necessary that you brush your teeth regularly’, they makes sense, they are easy to understand, they are interesting, and they are even about philosophically relevant issues. So I think we are well advised if we design our philosophical concept of neces-sity such that it captures what we mean in such examples.  As we understand such claims about impossibility or necessity quite eas-ily and we have a good grasp of the meaning of talk about ‘necessity’ here, there is perhaps no need for a further going definition of the term ‘neces-sary’. But it would be nice if we could say something more general about necessity, or if we could say something about the source of necessity. Here is an attempt to say more about the source of necessity: We human beings have the ability to have views about things. One essential part of this is our ability to recognise and to refer to causal aspects, or ‘properties’, of a thing. We form predicates with which we can refer to properties and therefore we are able to describe things and situations. We can not only describe them, we can conceive of them, we can consider them. In that sense we can say that we can ‘construe things in our mind’. For any set of predicates, as long as these predicates – like in our examples – are not ex- 5 plicitly defined in terms of each other like ‘bachelor’ is defined in terms of ‘being unmarried’, we can consider the existence of a thing or a situation to which they all apply. If we have the predicates ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’, we can consider that there is a thing which is A and B and C. Predicates can be combined arbitrarily. But, I suggest, we have no reason to assume that the objects of these predicates are to be combined equally arbitrarily. Why should all properties be combinable with each other. (Cf. Armstrong (1989), who holds that all properties are combinable.)  We can express the belief that the objects of the predicates ‘A’ and ‘B’ are not combinable by saying that it is impossible that there is something which is A and B. We can construe all sorts of things or situations in our mind, and the world may or may not allow for the existence of such a thing or situation. We can consider and claim that there is somebody who is guilty for something which he did not do freely, but presumably it is impossible that there is such a thing.  We may say then that every non self-contradictory description of a thing or a situation is such that either necessarily there is such a thing, or neces-sarily there is no such thing, or contingently there is such a thing, or con-tingently there is no such thing.  3. Necessity and Analyticity Now we are in a position to reconsider the claim that analytic statements are necessary and the claim that necessary statements are analytic. An analytic statement is one which is made true solely by the linkage of a cer-tain word to its meaning. I linked the concept of necessity to the phe-nomenon that we can construe all sorts of things in our mind, some of which the world might not allow for. A necessary statement is one where the existence of a thing or situation is described and it is claimed that the world does not allow for the existence of such a thing. A necessary state- 6ment is made true by the fact that the world does not allow for the exis-tence of a thing or situation of a certain type. It is made true by the fact the the objects of the predicates involved are not compatible in the way in question. But that means that it is never made true by the linkage of a cer-tain word to its meaning, because any word could have any meaning. So analytic statements are not necessary.  Are necessary statements analytic? No, they are not, because they are not made true by the linkage of a certain word to its meaning. They are made true by the objects of the predicates involved. Further, to contradict an analytic statement is to commit a linguistic mistake. To contradict a true necessary statement does not involve a linguistic mistake – it is a mistake about what is possible.  One might draw the conclusion from this result that the concepts of ana-lyticity and necessity from which I derived this result must be inadequate. I do not think they are. These concepts of analyticity and necessity cap-ture what is essential about cases which are very good candidates for be-ing paradigm cases for analyticity or necessity respectively.  Of course, one may widen the concepts such that one can say at least that analytic statements are necessary. As I said, there is no totally non-arbitrary usage of the word ‘necessary’. Or one may use ‘necessary’ in the sense of ‘analytic’. But then the term ‘necessary’ would be quite useless, because we have already the term ‘analytic’, and we would need another term for what I called ‘necessary’. Besides that would this usage of ‘neces-sary’ be far away from our normal talk about ‘necessity’. That does not seem advisable. And I think if one widens the concept of necessity such that it covers also analytic statements, then the concept of necessity be-comes too much a mixed bag. It is true, both, analytic and necessary statements are in some way immune against being false. But the reason for that lies in the one case in linguistic conventions and in the other case in the objects of the predicates. Necessary statements are claims that such-and-such a thing cannot exist. They are claims that something  7 which can be described consistently in fact cannot exist. Analytic state-ments, on the other hand, are true by stipulative definition. They are about linguistic conventions. These conventions could be different. There is nothing necessary about analytic statements.  References Armstrong, D.M. (1989), A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility. Cam-bridge University Press. Ayers, A.J. (1936), Language, Truth and Logic. London: Penguin, 1971.  Katz, J. (1998), “The Problem in Twentieth-Century Philosophy”. Journal of Philosophy 95: 547-575.   8

A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility.

Language, Truth and Logic.

The Problem in Twentieth-Century Philosophy”.

https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/1969/1/wachter_1999-analyt.pdf

What has Necessity to do with Analyticity?

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