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May 15, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:06
237 The Analytic/Synthetic Dichotomy - How Confusion Serves Power
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Good afternoon, one and all.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It is five o'clock, May the 15th, 2006.
Beware the Ides of May.
So we are going to do our level best to please the honorable and noble listenership who have, in their wisdom, requested more.
Conversations about philosophy, and we are going to take a swing at what is sometimes called by the gripping title, the analytic-synthetic dichotomy.
Ooh, ooh, doesn't that just make your hands sweat with anticipation?
Ha! Now, I've got to tell you, I've read, I guess when I was younger, taking graduate school courses, I did some work on this.
I just, you know, this is one of these areas that I have a real, because I'm so innately not religious and have no particular love of concepts other than as sort of subjugated tools of the sensual experience and of logic, Then I have a real difficulty understanding what the heck people are on about with this.
But I will try and present the case as best I can.
And if you study this kind of stuff in more detail, please feel free to let me know.
This is one of these arguments, like all of these ontological proofs of God and all this kind of stuff.
I've just had never really had any luck trying to get a hold of this stuff in my head and really understand what it is that people mean By these statements, so I will do my best and we'll see how it goes.
Now, in philosophy, and naturally this is in German branches of philosophy, notably this is a sort of a distinction that was invented by Kant and taken up by Leipzig, I think, and Wittgenstein and some others, and the distinction goes something like this.
There are two kinds of propositional statements within philosophy.
The first kind is something where, as they put it, the predicate is involved in the subject or something like that, but basically it seems to me that what they're talking about is tautology.
Tautology is a statement that is true by definition.
As I mentioned recently, an example would be something like you have a situation where an argument is being made that Coke is it.
And then when you get all the way around to the other side of the argument, it turns out that it is defined as Coke.
So basically your argument is Coke is Coke, which is, I guess, a rather effervescent and bubbly and highly carbonated version of Aristotle's first law, which is A is A.
And we can get into those another time.
But that is one kind of truth wherein if you say all unmarried men are bachelors, well, what is the definition of bachelors?
Well, a bachelor is a short form for unmarried men.
So you're basically saying all unmarried men are unmarried men.
And so this is considered to be something that can be true, but I've never really seen it to be particularly helpful.
It's just different ways of describing the same thing using synonyms.
It doesn't seem to be a very positive or productive intellectual exercise, but it's considered to be a big thing.
Now, the second kinds of propositions are called synthetic for reasons that I'm sure have something to do with mouthfuls of German syllables I wouldn't even try and reproduce here because when I speak German, my mother was German, I spoke it when I was younger, and when I do speak German, I do sound like a cat coughing up a pineapple wrapped in a hairball, so I'm not going to try that.
All I'm going to do is say that synthetic arguments are considered to be conditional.
In other words, a synthetic argument would be grass is green.
Grass is green.
This is a synthetic argument versus an analytical argument, which would be something else.
So, to take another example, an analytical argument would be all golden retrievers are dogs.
Because dogs is defined as what?
Yes, a superset of golden retrievers.
So this is something which we can say is true because it's a subset of the original concept, so well and good.
However, a synthetic judgment would be golden retrievers enjoy chasing squirrels.
Because there's nothing in the argument that golden retrievers enjoy chasing squirrels, there's nothing in chasing squirrels that is innately defined within golden retrievers.
If you say all grass is vegetation, right?
Well, what's vegetation? Vegetation is such and such a matter, such and such an approach, survives by using photosynthesis, contains chlorophyll or whatever, right?
It's defined as a superset of all the characteristics which is represented by grass.
So when you say all grass is vegetation, it's sort of true by definition because you've defined vegetation as a superset of grass.
So that's sort of true.
You don't need to go out and test anything, right?
This is sort of the big deal with the analytic arguments.
So, all unmarried men are bachelors.
What does bachelors mean? It's a synonym for unmarried men.
Yeah, we don't actually have to go out and ask all the unmarried men, are you a bachelor?
And they say yes and no and statistics and compile and experimentation and blah, blah, blah.
So, an argument which is perceived to be true simply by definition would also include things like mathematics, right?
So, a mathematical argument can be proven true or false without any reference to empirical observation.
2 plus 2 is 4, and so on.
Now, there are some of the analytical philosophers or the philosophers who are really very interested in this distinction who say that if you say 7 plus 5 equals 12, well, 12 as a number is nowhere implied within 7 and 5, and therefore, therefore, I just find that stuff.
It makes me get sleepy, frankly, since I'm driving.
I'm not going to spend too much time with it.
Because I think I sort of understand what the distinction is here that is being aimed at, and I'll sort of get to that in a little bit.
Why is this even important?
Well, whenever you get stuff that's just weird, baffling, and just all-around strange, then it usually has the purpose of supporting something nefarious, and we'll get to that shortly.
But let's spend a little bit more time understanding the distinction between these two things.
Now, of course, analytical truths are considered to be...
Well, some people consider them to be more honestly, accurately true, that you can say all unmarried men are bachelors with a greater degree of veracity than you can say...
All golden retrievers enjoy chasing squirrels or all grass is green and so on because if you've looked at my lawn lately you'll see that it's not all green and not all blades of grass are green and each blade of grass is a slightly different color so when you start to talk about things which are empirical in the real world then you run into statements which are no longer as precise.
I mean... Even a single blade of grass is going to have different colors along its stem and along its outer bits and so on, and towards its root it's probably going to get more pale.
So if you say something like, all grass is green, you really are coming up with a pretty sort of wide approximation of the truth.
Even if we understand that green is an objective color that can be measured by a wavelength, each individual blade of grass is going to have a different color within each one of its square basillometers or nanometers, whatever the heck the small bits are.
And, of course, every blade of grass relative to each other is going to have a slightly different shade, and every single blade of grass relative to its dryness is going to have a slightly different shade.
You water your grass, and it gets greener, and then as the sun comes out, it gets browner, and so on.
So saying all grass is green is a pretty blanket kind of statement to make.
And that is something that is conditional upon a large amount of external verification.
And so analytical truths which are defined within themselves and require no external verification, so if you say two sacks of flour, if you put them together, Sorry, if you take two stacks of flour and stack them on top of a weight with two other stacks of flour, then the weight will equal four stacks of flour, or four bags of flour.
With stacks of flour?
Where the heck's that coming from? I'm sort of playing Atomic Jenga here.
Let's say two sacks of flour combined with two other sacks of flour will produce a weight of four sacks of flour.
Well, from an analytical standpoint, if you get away from the sacks of flour and you say two units plus two units produces four units, then you can be entirely accurate and perfect in your conception.
Because you're not actually dealing with any messy material objects.
However, there is no possibility that any sack of flour is going to weigh exactly the same as any other sack of flour.
So when you say that two sacks of flour plus two sacks of flour equal the weight of four sacks of flour, then what you're saying is an approximation, but it's not accurate.
Because Those four sacks of flour are all going to weigh something slightly different, and the combination of them is not going to be the same as each one of them times four, and so on.
So there is a degree of difference between concepts derived from reality, which can then be abstracted into sort of pure concepts.
I.e., four sacks of flour will give you the idea of four, and then you can take four, twirl it out of the physical realm, and just put it up in this realm of pure abstracts and begin to do mathematical manipulations, all of which, of course, are very helpful, and so on.
So nobody's saying that these analytical distinctions are not valuable or not valid and so on, but they're often sort of given the idea that they're superior to synthetic Synthetic evaluations are subject to all of the inconsistencies and poor measurements of the senses of material reality, of the lack of reproducibility with certain things, and so on.
And so it is considered to be less sort of true, right?
It's true-ish, right?
So the two sacks of flour plus two sacks of flour equals four sacks of flour in weight or volume or whatever.
It's true-ish.
I mean, it's certainly more true than two plus two equals five sacks of flour.
So, it is to be the case, or it is understood to be the case, that when it comes to messy material reality, that truth propositions are not going to be valid in all situations and under all circumstances, which is usually not the case with mathematical theories and so on.
So, A golden retriever, you can say most golden retrievers enjoy chasing squirrels.
Can you say how many, what percentage?
Well, of course not, because if you started measuring by the time you were finished measuring, you'd have to start all over again because there'd be about a bazillion new golden retrievers.
And, of course, there would be some golden retrievers who are not going to exhibit any preference for chasing squirrels because they're on their deathbed or, you know, they have no legs or maybe they'd be swimming like a guppy, who knows, or they've broken their legs and so they're not going to move.
Or it could be that, I don't know, the golden retriever was beaten by sacks of squirrels when it was a pup, and so finds the smells of squirrels scary, and so it doesn't, like, there's lots of ways in which this might not be the case.
Or some golden retriever ran across a rather intelligent and well-organized group of squirrels that mounted a massive defense and threw acorns at its head and jumped and bit and so on, and so it no longer enjoys that.
I mean, you just make up sort of any of these things that you want, and you can come up with exceptions to these rules involving material reality and so on.
And so what then ends up being the case is people say, well, there's this realm of pure reason, pure logic, higher logic, higher reason, whatever you want to call it, analytical judgments, analytical propositions, which is good or better.
This is all the way back to the Platonic stuff that we were talking about a couple of months ago.
And then, on the other hand, you have these approximate, true-ish, truthiness-based statements about material reality that are always going to be problematic.
So, if you look at something like a...
Mathematician's job versus the job of someone who's trying to figure out whether a drug is safer.
Well, the mathematician can do all of his work sitting in his study or her study and coming up with equations.
And, I mean, the guy who solved Fermat's last theorem, at least I heard it was solved last time I read the book and it was quite interesting.
The guy who solved Fermat's last theorem worked for 10 years, mostly on his own, and, you know, killed about 800 blackboards putting the proof up.
But never had to go out and verify anything in the real world.
Didn't have to put a voltometer onto Fermat's last theorem's proof and see if there was voltage running through it.
He could just work in isolation on his own and so on.
And I will also try and get rid of the phrase, and so on.
Because, of course, if it's worth me expanding it, then I should.
And if it's not, there's no point saying, and so on.
I'll be working on that. It's just another one of the verbal tics that I have to try and wrestle down.
So, if you compare this to somebody who has to prove or establish to a large degree of probability that a particular drug is safe, then you can imagine the amount of work that this person...
They can't exactly do it in their lab with equations, right?
They have to go and give the drug to, I don't know, amoebas and then...
Bigger amoebas and eventually rats and then monkeys and people and so on.
And you have to have all these double-blind experiments.
You have to have placebos.
You have to track them for a long period of time.
You have to investigate every anomaly.
I mean, it's an enormous amount of empirical labor.
And so the solution...
To the question, is this drug safe for people, is obviously very hard to figure out.
You just can't create a sort of one-time theory that's going to prove it.
You have to go out into the real world and prove it as well.
And this, of course, ties into what occurs in the business world as well.
You can say, I think this is a wonderful product, and you can whiteboard it, and you can put together a model of it, and so on, but You actually have to go out and sell it in the real world.
And it's very hard to predict how well it's going to sell, where you should sell it, how many you should supply to each area that you are selling it in.
So it's very hard to come up with all of this kind of stuff and prove it in the real world.
So this analytical stuff, of course, a lot of people feel much more comfortable with it because it is blackboard time, it's inner conversation time, it's non-empirical time.
So it appeals to sort of brilliant introverts, which a lot of philosophers are.
And so there is that particular aspect to it.
Now, I really don't see a dichotomy.
I really, really, really don't see a dichotomy between these analytic and synthetic judgments or statements or propositions.
And the reason for that Is that concepts, as I've mentioned before, in my view, are descriptions of the behavior of atoms.
Because if atoms didn't have particular properties and behave in particular ways, then aggregates of atoms would exhibit no common characteristics.
So a rock would be indistinguishable from an egret, and they could switch places and switch roles and switch behavior and so on.
Ah, there's another one! Okay, we'll rein it in!
But, um... If atoms didn't have particular characteristics of properties, behaviors, mannerisms, or whatever you want to call them, then we could not have such a thing as concepts because nothing would behave in any predictable, consistent manner.
Now, matter can be neither created nor destroyed.
It can only pass from one form to another.
Atoms can't be created or destroyed.
Atoms have objective qualities based on the numbers of electrons and protons and neutrons and all that kind of stuff.
And so, because...
Behavior relies on atoms, or behavior is characterized by atoms.
All material objects are composed of atoms, or energy.
And so all of these have common characteristics, which allows us to have concepts.
So common concepts are the way that we abstract the behavior of atoms.
I'm not saying that we see the atoms, but of course we see the effects of the atoms through our senses.
And so to me, to say that everything that we extrapolate from the behavior of matter, all the ideas and concepts that we come up with, which is extrapolated from the behavior of matter, that it is somehow superior to matter or that the truth propositions that are within concepts alone, it doesn't really that it is somehow superior to matter or that the truth propositions that are within concepts alone, it doesn't So since concepts are derived from the behavior of matter, there's no possibility that concepts could be considered superior to matter.
It really doesn't matter.
Let's not use that word in too many contexts, shall we?
It doesn't have any particular meaning to me to say that concepts are superior to matter or that the truth value that is concept to concept is greater than that of concept to matter.
So to say that all grass is vegetative is to me no better or worse than saying all grass is green.
Now, that's sort of one way of looking at it.
Since all concepts are derived from matter, they can never be considered superior to or independent of matter, and therefore mathematics is simply a way of organizing the logic and the principles and the discrete objects which we can number, all derived from the senses.
Mathematics is just a way of organizing all of those principles derived from the senses.
It never ever operates independently of the senses.
In any verifiable manner.
I mean, let's say that I said, oh, I have solved all the mathematical theories that have baffled mankind from the beginning of time.
But I never wrote them down.
I never communicated them in any way.
I just, I thought them at you.
Well, you'd say, well, that's very nice, but there's simply no way to tell about it or whatever.
And so there's no way to communicate about pure concepts or ideas without using the senses.
And that's another reason why you can't conceive or rationally understand that concepts would ever be considered to be superior to the senses.
So E equals MC squared, fabulous idea, great theory, seems to work.
But you can't communicate it without an imperfect typewriter hitting an imperfect ribbon on imperfect paper with lots of gaps between the ink and shredding and decay and so on.
But all of that is perfectly fine.
If you're using material matter...
To transfer concepts or pure ideas, then, again, you really can't say that concepts are superior to or abstracted from or independent of the senses in any way, since they can't ever be communicated or verified without reference to the senses.
So all of that kind of stuff is, to me, it's a false dichotomy to say that stuff which is derived from pure concept is somehow superior to or fundamentally different from stuff that is derived from the evidence of the census and requires verification and so on.
And that's sort of one side of things.
Now, the other side of things, I would actually, I think, be fair in making a strong case for the fact that empirical or synthetic statements are far superior to self-referential, tautological, analytical statements because synthetic statements are actually useful.
They're actually useful in a way that the other categories are just not useful.
I know that this is simplifying things a little bit, but bear with me if you don't mind.
If you say something like, all unmarried men are bachelors, then people say, huh...
Okay, well, so what?
You've just defined bachelors as unmarried men, and you've just run into a big circle and said, look what a destination I've arrived at.
If you say that all golden retrievers are dogs...
Have you really done that much that is useful?
I'm no expert on zoology, so please correct me.
I'm sure that I'm wrong six million ways from Sunday on this, but it's not, to me, nearly as useful to categorize things as it is to describe characteristics which are actually of use.
So, if you say, for instance, that there is two containers of powder on my table, one of which is arsenic and the other one is salt.
I don't know. Let's just say arsenic is black.
I have no idea, but let's just sort of guess, right?
And you say, pass me the white powder.
Well, that is something that is open to verification, right?
You have to look at it. You have to judge it.
You can't say that this statement can be achieved or evaluated without reference to any external reality.
It's not analytic because you actually have to look at the powder and see is it white or is it, you know, death-dealing arsenic.
Well, I kind of want you to correctly interpret my synthetic statement and hand me the white powder so that I get some salt on my eggs rather than some arsenic.
So there's a great deal of usefulness in empirical things because, of course, everything that human life comes down to comes down to the senses.
Human life does not exist in any way, shape, or form that is ever verifiable independent of the senses.
And of course, human life cannot survive without accurate interpretation of an action based on the evidence of the senses.
I mean, the senses rule all.
Without the senses, you're not hearing me.
I don't even know that I'm speaking.
I'm not driving.
I have no idea if I'm in bed or out of bed or anything like that.
So everything in human life is dependent upon the senses because the senses give us food and resources and tell us dangerous and positives and negatives from external reality, which we kind of need because, you know, drinking is nice and eating is nice.
So this aspect of things I think is very important.
Everything relies on the senses.
Everything is dependent on the senses.
The senses are the greatest values in human life.
Evidence of trusting the senses, the senses lead to reason, the senses lead to concepts, the senses also lead to instincts, which we've talked about in other contexts, but it's worth mentioning, I think, here as well.
Everything is subjected to the senses.
Everything is subjugated by the senses, and the senses rule everything.
And if you want to convince me of otherwise, find a way to do it without using any of my senses, and I'll be more than happy to mentally agree with you.
But if you're going to use my senses, don't ever tell me that they're not valid.
That to me would just be manipulative and destructive in the worst kind of way.
Now, the fact that the senses rule everything and the fact that logic and empiricism rules everything is not something that people like our good friend Immanuel Kant were ever very comfortable with.
And why? Well, my friends, because if the senses rule everything, if empiricism and logic rule every category of truth, Then, irrational and exploitive concepts like God, the family, the state, the country, the army, the police, all of these exploitive and brutal bullshit concepts do not exist in any way, shape, or form that is ever valid or true.
Now, Emmanuel, our good friend Emmanuel, set forward his propositions with the express intent of saving Religion from rationality.
That's his thing.
That's all that he's about, is saving religion from rationality.
And so the first thing that you have to do if you want to save religion or the state or the race or the class or all of this crap that is spewed out across the world at all times in order to exploit and degrade people, well, if you want to save These ideas, the first thing that you have to do is explicitly and specifically reject the idea that empiricism, the senses, and objective rationality rule everything.
And why? Because if the senses rule everything, then God doesn't exist.
The state doesn't exist.
The country doesn't exist.
The collective doesn't exist.
All of these things are just pure, made-up nonsense.
So that is a pretty significant thing to understand when you hear people talking about concepts.
If they don't take the approach that the senses rule everything in the sort of scientific method, right?
That you have to have a theory which is logically consistent, but even more important than it being logically consistent, it has to conform with the evidence of the senses.
It has to be reproducible.
The experiments have to be as close to double-blind, as far apart from any kind of interference as possible.
And that's how we know the whole fusion in the jaw thing didn't pan out quite so well because it was never able to be reproduced by anyone else.
Now, if you basically accept the idea or take the proposition under your wing that nothing exists except what the evidence of the census provides, and yes, yes, I know electromagnetic, infrared, ultraviolet, blah, blah, blah, we see all of those through spectrographs and so on, so don't...
You can't see x-rays, can you?
Yes, I can see x-rays, actually.
You just have to get the right equipment.
And, of course, if we couldn't see x-rays with any equipment, nobody would have any right to say that they exist.
This was the whole argument around ether in the late 19th century before Einstein came along.
You can look that up if you like.
If you accept that nothing exists except what is derived from the senses, except what comes into our consciousness through the senses, then you get rid of a whole host of plagues that destroy mankind.
There's no such thing as war.
There's only murder. There's no such thing as the state.
There's only brutal power masters.
There's no such thing as cops.
There's only those who are willing to use violence if somebody else tells them to.
There's no such thing as soldiers.
There are only hitmen. So, once you get rid of these concepts, which is false concepts, concepts for which there is no evidence in reality whatsoever, which is, of course, what the argument for morality is basically stating over and over and over again, that if you want to have a concept, like you have something called a government,
then tell me how it exists, under what conditions this thing called government exists that we should obey, and why I shouldn't just look at it as people who have opposing rights, and therefore a moral theory which proposes opposing rights is completely invalid.
So, I mean, this is the argument for morality, is all the way back to nothing exists except that which is evident to the senses.
Nothing is true except that which is both logical and empirically verifiable.
And therefore, to say that there's this analytic-synthetic dichotomy makes no sense to me whatsoever.
To say that there's such a thing as concepts divorced from reality that are superior to reality is ridiculous.
Either the concepts exist as a tautological self-definition, in which case they're just like a waste of time.
I mean, why would you even bother wasting the energy of one brain cell on figuring out that two is two?
I mean, once you've figured that out when you're about, I don't know, 12 or 14 months old through object constancy, There's really not much point revisiting it again, in my opinion.
I mean, I don't think you see advanced mathematics courses in sort of grad school at Caltech where they say, 2 plus 2, is it really 4?
I mean, they just don't revisit these pages in order to try and build more complicated things, right?
So, to me, the tautological analytical arguments, to me, is a complete waste of time and energy and who cares.
And the ones that are based on mathematics and so on, all well and good.
They're all derived from the senses, and the only way that they have any value is when they go back to the senses.
So you come up with 2 plus 2 equals 4.
You have to apply that in some way in reality in order for it to have any value.
Otherwise, it's just sort of intellectual whack jobs, right?
You just sort of make it up.
You know, I'm defining my own language, speaking it to myself with a hand puppet, and then burning the manuscripts.
It's like, well, what's the point of all that?
I don't see how that solves anything.
So this analytic-synthetic dichotomy was generated to save the world from concepts as the rise of science and the rise of capitalism showed.
Empirical rationality is the best, the only way to determine truth from falsehood.
It is the only way that human beings live in peace and harmony.
And so to say that this stuff should be saved from any kind of statement of effect is ridiculous.
So what you have to do is create two categories of propositions or of logic.
One of which is superior to the other, and the superior one is always the one that's non-empirical, always the one that's self-referential, always the one that's tautological and mathematical, because then you can say that there are concepts that have value that are not derived from the senses, and they have greater value because they're not derived from the senses, and lo and behold, you then have a very strong defense for the existence of God and the state and all this other kind of crap that so enslaves and chokes the human potential.
So when you sort of hear about these analytic-synthetic dichotomies, it's worth exploring and asking questions about them and why people believe this and what it serves and how it's considered to be valuable.
And it really could only arise from the son of a priest, and it really could also only arise in a situation where people were trying to defend the existence of abstracts that were not at all perceivable.
Through the senses in any way, shape, or form, or verifiable, or open to any kind of independent evaluation, because this is something that everybody and their brother wants to maintain who is corrupt, is the idea that there is value in concepts that doesn't have anything to do with the value in individuals, and fundamentally, of course, as I keep saying, this comes all the way back to parents.
The parents have no value as a category.
There are only individuals who raise you, and if they treat you well or treat you badly, that is how they should be judged.
The category of parenting, the category of God, the category of priest or cop or soldier or politician or collective or majority or democracy or any of that crap, none of that has any meaning whatsoever.
There's only individuals who act, and that's all who should be judged.
And anything that comes from the analytical world is derived from the senses, and in order to have any value must return to the senses, and therefore to say that it exists independently from the senses and superior to the senses is pure nonsense.
So I hope that this has helped. If you like these little rambles, please drop by www.freedomainradio.com And drop me some bucks.
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