C O M M E N TAT O R Second Response to Ken Matheson Simon Holmes, Texas A&M University I enjoyed the way you created a dialogue regarding Ayer’s views on metaphysics and his argument for why they created nonsense statements. It was especially interesting to read the ending where you did to Ayer what he did to metaphysics, in that you called his argument nonsense. Something I do wonder is what would Ayer say to the idea of synthetic a priori statements? As we know, “a priori” statements are those statements that are true from “merely understanding or thinking about that proposition”1 which are different from a posteriori because those types of statements require experience. An example of an a priori statement could be “all bachelors are unmarried men”. We know this to be true based on the definition of the constituent terms. The fact that we can know the truth based on the constituent terms is also the indicator for it to be an analytic judgement, a further delineation for the types of judgements and statements that Immanuel Kant notes in his Critiques on Pure Reason. Synthetic judgements are those whose truth “depends also upon the facts about the world that the sentence represents.”2 So, what Kant and subsequently Ayer will pull from are the following four types of categories relating to judgments/propositions: analytic a priori, synthetic a priori, analytic a posteriori and synthetic a posteriori. Analytic a posteriori statements are counter intuitive because as we now understand, analytic judgements are those whose truth can be determined from the definitions of the constituent terms, whereas a posteriori statements require looking out into the world. This category is a contradictory and inherently irrelevant because if something is analytic then we would not need to look outside of the statement itself. The analytic a priori and synthetic a posteriori statements are ones that are fairly common place as we noted the analytic a priori statement earlier regarding the bachelor definition. Synthetic a posteriori statements could be those such as “all bachelors in the United states are taxed at a different rate from married men”. We would need to look outside of the statement itself to determine the truth to that judgment and combine our knowledge of the various facts about the world in 1 Russell, Bruce, “A Priori Justi
ication and Knowledge”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2020 Edition),
Edward N. Zalta (ed.). 2 Rey, Georges, “The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition), Edward N.
Zalta (ed.).
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