The Logical Atheist

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...

Just to recap what I reported here , this is from Leonard Peikoff's essay  "The Analytic/Synthetic Dichotomy" : In one sense, no  truths are "analytic." No proposition can be validated merely by "conceptual analysis"; the content of the concept--i.e. the characteristics of the existents it integrates--must be discovered and validated by observation, before any "analysis" is possible. In another sense, all  truths are "analytic." When some characteristic of an entity has  been discovered, the proposition ascribing it to the entity will be seen to be "logically true" (its opposite would contradict the meaning of the concept designating the entity). In either case, the analytic-logical-tautological vs. synthetic-factual dichotomy collapses. If you wonder about this, ponder the proposition  water is H 2 O.

"Skeptical" atheists often admonish their theistic interlocutors thus: you have a hypothesis, namely, that God exists. So get out there and try to confirm it empirically -- better yet, try to disprove it. When you've done either, get back to me. This is said to be the proper way to acquire knowledge and to dispose of erroneous beliefs. Ignoring the logical problem with any notion of the supernatural (as if...), which I've discussed several times, the skeptic's admonition depends on epistemological considerations that were demolished in 1951, notably by W.V.O. Quine in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism."  (It's, again, a case of basking in the light of a long-dead star.) Specifically, the simplistic admonition depends on the analytic/synthetic dichotomy , which holds that meaningful statements can be only one of two kinds: 1) analytic: necessarily true by definition (convention) and so, as tautologies, uninformative about the world (e.g., cats are domestica...