Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!ames!umd5!uvaarpa!mcnc!rti!scirtp!george
From: george@scirtp.UUCP (Geo. R. Greene, Jr.)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Classifying the Axiom of Choice
Message-ID: <1190@scirtp.UUCP>
Date: 18 Mar 88 22:44:12 GMT
References: <7123@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <8768@sunybcs.UUCP> <9734@shemp.CS.UCLA.EDU> <1937@mind.UUCP> <1938@mind.UUCP> <1186@sjuvax.UUCP>
Organization: SCI Systems, Research Triangle Park, NC
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> 
>     Greg,
> 
> 	How would you classify the following the following proposition:
> 
> 	"Water is H2O."?
> 
> 
> 	It certainly seems to be one gotten from experience and thus 
> a posteriori; yet there also seems to be something necessary about it, hence
> analytic.

I would classify it as false.  One pair of counterexamples leaps
immediately to mind.  Ice is not normally called water; neither is steam.
"Water" is a colloquial term, H2O a technical one.
To those who would object that since, even colloquially,
ice is frozen water,  ice must be water, I would answer simply that
in any situation where both frozen and non-frozen water are
alternatives, nobody except MAYBE your neighborhood hyper-pedantic
philosopher is going to ask you to choose between frozen and
non-frozen water.  You are going to be asked to choose between
ice and water.  As though never the twain had met.
Water is non-frozen and non-heat-vaporized BY DEFAULT.

"Is" is one of the most overloaded words in the language.
Sometimes it means equality, sometimes it means subsetting
(Bats are mammals), sometimes it means set membership
(My pet is A Bat); sometimes it's about holes & pegs
(My house is at 5 Fifth St.); sometimes it's just
an auxiliary verb (The temperature is rising).

The prototypical analytic statement is
(A & B) ==> A	,
i.e., its truth is deducible just from analyzing its parts
and noticing that what is concluded is "part of" what has
"already" been hypothesized.

An interesting consequence of this is that all statements
regarding explicitly exhibited substrings are analytically
true or false (i.e., by inspection).

There is a second class of analytic statements
involving stipulated definitions and abbreviations 
(Bachelors are unmarried men).  "'Water' means liquid H2O"
is clearly one of those.

An interesting consequence of the analyticity of statements
like "The first letter of the string 'AB' is 'A'" is
that they invite us into the analytic a posteriori; I mean,
it is kind of ridiculous to say that we knew the first
letter of 'AB' would be 'A' prior to observing or experiencing
'AB', or that we understood strings as a concept prior to
experience or theorizing.

There is an excellent case to be made for the position
that while some things have to be stipulated prior
to other things' being discussed (e.g., an alphabet
in which to conduct the discussion, a number of truth-
values that sentences can have), there is
NOTHING that has to be a priori.
-- 
Benchley's Distinction:
	There are two types of people in the world--
	those who think there are two types of people in the world,
	and those who don't.