Which Comes First: Concept or the Application?
Dedicated to those who think a dichotomy exists between analytic, or conceptual, statements ("Bachelors are unmarried men.") and synthetic, or empirical, statements ("That dog is brown.): As traditionally understood, analytic truths are linguistic stipulations, and therefore have no factual commitments, whereas synthetic truths do have factual commitments, and so are not merely stipulative. Neither of these descriptions characterizes conceptual truths as [Ludwig] Wittgenstein understands them. For Wittgenstein, a conceptual (or, as he would say, “grammatical”) proposition is indeed stipulative, and so in a certain sense lacks factual content; so it would be misleading to call it “synthetic.” Is 252 = 625 a fact of experience? You’d like to say: “No.”—Why isn’t it?—“Because, by the rules, it can’t be otherwise.”—And why so?—Because that is the meaning of the rules. Because that is the procedure on which we build all judging.... Following a rule is a human activity. [Wit...