Re: Are analytical statements "come what may"?

Eray Ozkural exa wrote:

> 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. ....
>
>
> 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.

Why?  If I define a bachelor (by virtue of my imagination) 
to be an unmarried man, then the statement (=> (isa ?x 
bachelor) (and (not_married ?x) (isa ?x male))) is true 
"come what may" as long as certain other logical axioms hold 
in my imagined system.

Suppose that we have a system where we cannot distinguish 
the sex or maital status of an individula, but we *can* 
sense whether an individual is a bachalor ... to such a 
system being a bachalor is contingent on experience and sex 
and marital status would be analitic truths inplied from the 
above formula.  On the other hand suppose we have a system 
where we can sense the sex and marital status but not 
bachalorhood.   I think that is the kind of thing that Quine 
was talking about.

> To a programmer, nothing could be self-evident. The formalism the
> programmer chooses forces him to bound his creations within the realm
> of effective computation and expressibility which the formalization
> offers. He also knows that these limits to creation are universal:
> there is no way to getting around them in a fundamental way *merely*
> by changing formalization of computation adapted.


> To a logicist, maybe it is less clear for he may imagine that one
> could always contrive a new language of logic with rules that would
> enable creations of absurdity. I imagine the logicist feels in control
> of the composition of his statements for it would seem to him that he
> has chosen the very syntax and semantics of his expressions. I have
> never been able to view logic in that way, however. Perhaps, I am
> misled!
>
> 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".
>
> Are these statements simply conventions devoid of content? With all
> due respect, I must disagree! Every formal system, including natural
> language, borrows from the universal limitations of effective
> computability and the universal concepts of set theory will impose
> restrictions on what remains true. Hence, the analytical statements
> cannot be "come what may" as long as we exist in this universe
> governed by the laws of mathematics that underlie every inquiry into
> truth.

How about (forall x (or x ~x)) ?

Patty