Re: Are analytical statements "come what may"?

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Eray Ozkural  exa) writes:
>Willard Quine wrote 
>(http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/quine.htm):

>> ... it becomes folly to seek a boundary between synthetic statements,
>> which hold contingently on experience, and analytic statements which
>> hold come what may. Any statement can be held true come what may, if
>> we make drastic enough adjustments elsewhere in the system. ....

Quine misdescribes.

>That analytical statements are determined by our imagination and we
>may always construct a system in which an analytical statement of our
>*choice* would be true seems to me fundamentally wrong.

>To a programmer, nothing could be self-evident.

        static int x;
        static const int *p = &x;

It is now self evident that 

        ( x = *p )

regardless of what values we may assign to x.

>I might agree that the distinction between analytical and synthetic
>statements is exaggerated or that it is non-existent for this line of
>thought seems to follow from the similarity of physics to mathematics,
>defended earlier by Russell (if my memory serves me right). However, I
>do not conceive of analytical statements as "come what may".

I think you are misreading Quine.  He is not saying that analytic
statements are "come what may".  He saying that, given an analytic
statement, its truth is "come what may".

For example, the truth of

        ( x = *p )

is certain, given the definition of p.  So it is true "come what
may".

Well, maybe not quite.  Memory corruption at location p could cause
it to then become false.

>Are these statements simply conventions devoid of content?

When restricted to logic, they are.  But when the conventions are
empirical, then they can be rich in content.