Learning philosophy historically, one finds a distinction frequently made between analytic and synthetic statements. We want to put declarative statements into two boxes:
Analytic:
“Cats are mammals”
“Every bachelor is unmarried”
Synthetic:
“There has existed a black dog”
“There are three people in this room right now”
How would we characterize analytic statements? One common way is to say that the truth of analytic statements depends purely on what the constituent terms mean, whereas synthetic statements (additionally) depend on the state of the world.
One of the two dogmas of Two Dogmas of Empiricism by Quine is the notion of analyticity, i.e. that the analytic-synthetic distinction can be made at all.
He argues that the type of information required to make us change our opinion of the truth of “cats are mammals” and any synthetic statement are actually not different in kind.
Quine’s conclusion: we should cease to make the meaning-theory distinction / language-theory distinction / meaning-belief distinction — all there is is the use of our expressions, and the usage is what determines both the meanings and what we take to be true.
Quine’s target is Carnap (who is thinking of artificial languages: first you fix the language and then you go into the world to see which are true in virtue of what they mean).
Anti-bifurcationism coined by Huw Price.
From Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism “So, a second characterization of pragmatism might go like this: there is no epistemological difference between truth about what ought to be and truth about what is, nor any metaphysical difference between facts and values, nor any methodological difference between morality and science.”
THese are all just statements in vocabularies. Without privileging a nature’s own vocbularty’
In neither case do you need to worry about what makes such-and-such statement in the vocabulary true. What you should worry about is the reason relations within each vocaublary - there will be socioilogical differences between physics and literary theory in how reason relations cone - But the representationalist mistake one can make is thinking that these sociological differences are metaphysical differences in the underlying content.
Two meanings of “\(X\) depends on \(Y\)” that are easily conflated.
To assert a sense dependence of \(X\) on \(Y\) is to say: “.
To assert a reference dependence is to say: “.”
Brandom points out that we can have sense dependence without having reference dependence.
An example is a toy concept of beauty: “\(X\) is beautiful if looking at it elicits pleasure in people.” - This is asserting a sense dependence of beauty on people, but not a reference dependence. - It is intelligible that there could exist beautiful sunsets before there ever were people in the world, or if people never existed.