An annoted bibliography of about 100 works on the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction.

This paper brings together three consequences of Kaplan's approach to indexicals and his formal system LD. I argue that it requires us to recognise that logical consequence is not really necessary truth preservation, give a new argument against the linguistic doctrine of necessary truth and then formulate and prove an indexical barrier theorem for LD. (The 2nd point is explored in more detail in "A New Problem for the Linguistic Doctrine of Necessary Truth" and the third in "Indexicals, Context-sensitivity and The Failure of Implication".)

An introduction to some philosophical issues concerning the relationship between meaning and modality.

This paper investigates, formulates and proves an indexical barrier theorem, according to which sets of non-indexical sentences do not entail (except under specified special circumstances) indexical sentences. It surveys the usual difficulties for this kind of project, as well some that are specific to the case of indexicals, and adapts the strategy of Restall and Russell's "Barriers to Implication" to overcome these. At the end of the paper a reverse barrier theorem is also proved, according to which an indexical sentence will not, except under specified circumstances, entail a non-indexical one.

Could it ever be right to say that a language---as opposed to a speaker of the language---makes, or presupposes or somehow commits itself to certain claims? It can be tempting to think that languages are just the neutral media through which speakers make claims. Yet certain, surprisingly diverse, phenomena have pushed philosophers towards views on which languages can have presuppositions or commitments of their own. In this short paper I present some recent data from linguistics that supports a neglected, and rather surprising, version of this idea: namely that English presupposes the existence of locations or places. The nature of this claim is clarified, and the work in linguistics is summarised and compared to some older philosophical work by David Kaplan. I argue that the recent work is more significant for the presupposition debate, and that the correct sense of 'presupposition' in this case is one with some interesting implications for the philosophy of language, but few for the metaphysics or epistemology of places.

The traditional Linguistic Doctrine of Necessary Truth attempts to reduce the metaphysical property of necessity to meaning-based properties, like analyticity. The simplest version of such a view identifies being a necessary truth with being expressed by a sentence that is analytically true, and it is well known that this view runs into difficulties in accounting for apparent necessary synthetic truths, such as "Water is H20" and "Mars is not Hesperus". In this paper I present a further problem for the view, arising from the existence of indexical expressions, which allow us to have, among other things, analytic sentences that express necessary propositions relative to some contexts, but contingent propositions relative to others. I argue that the usual attempts to revise the view in the face of the necessary synthetic are not easily extended to deal with this new problem.

In this paper I am going to present, and argue for, a different way of thinking about the analytic/synthetic distinction (ASD). The account is intended to apply indifferently to both natural and artificial languages, but it is rather complicated and it makes reference to some unfamiliar entities. My strategy in arguing for the account will thus be Russell’s strategy from the famous “On Denoting”: I will present a number puzzles about analyticity, and argue that my view solves them all. The puzzles arise because philosophy of language has come a long way since the height of the debate between Quine and Carnap. For one, we are now very sensitive to a number of phenomena—such as direct reference, semantic externalism and indexicality—which were not as well understood then as they are now. There is some awareness in the post-Quinean literature—particularly in work by Hilary Putnam, Nathan Salmon, Paul Boghossian, and Timothy Williamson—that these phenomena cause new problems for the already beleaguered ASD. [Putnam, 1962] [Kripke, 1980a] [Salmon, 1993] [Boghossian, 1996] [Williamson, 2008] But if the central claim of this paper is correct, then the analytic synthetic distinction—properly understood—is compatible with all these new developments.

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