Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!watdragon!dahlia!rmpinchback
From: rmpinchback@dahlia.waterloo.edu (Reid M. Pinchback)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.tech
Subject: Re: Classifying the Axiom of Choice
Message-ID: <6211@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Date: 4 Apr 88 22:06:32 GMT
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In article <1190@scirtp.UUCP> george@scirtp.UUCP (Geo. R. Greene, Jr.) writes:
>> 
>>     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.

  Is this, perhaps, a confusion between the sense and reference of a
term?  "Water" and "H2O" may not connote the same thing, but they do
denote the same thing. 

  Aside from that, if you want some really disgusting confusion of the
a priori/a posteriori distinction (which has been chucked out for quite
some time as a false dichotomy), try Kant's approach.  He proposed a
system where by there existed not only purely analytic and synthetic
knowledge, but analytic/synthetic and synthetic/analytic.  (Maybe this
was partly why philosophers are inclined to discount this dichotomy?).



       Reid M. Pinchback
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