Gate One: Analytic and Synthetic

From the book A Presence and an Absence by Rabbi Michael Avraham. Translated from Hebrew using gpt-5.4 (reasoning_effort=high, batch API).

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Introduction: Analytic and Synthetic

Introduction

As noted in the introduction, this short gate serves as a preface to the book. In the first chapter I will briefly summarize the matters we need from the first book, Two Wagons and a Hot-Air Balloon — On Judaism and Postmodernism. In the second chapter I will briefly indicate the aim of this book, and I will try to place it within the broader context of the analytic-synthetic discussion.

Chapter One: The Meaning of the Synthetic A Priori

The Analytic and the Synthetic

As noted, the terms analytic and synthetic are drawn from Kant’s philosophy. Kant distinguished between two kinds of statements: an analytic statement and a synthetic statement. An analytic statement is one whose entire content consists in analyzing the subject of the statement, as for example: “This ball is round.” Roundness is a property that follows from the very concept of a ball, and no further information beyond the definition of the concept is needed in order to see that the statement is true.

A synthetic statement, by contrast, combines what emerges from analyzing the subject with additional information, such as: “This ball is heavy.” Weight is a property that does not follow from the mere fact that this is a ball, and therefore additional information is needed, beyond the definition of the concept ball, in order to determine the truth of this statement.

Kant also distinguished between a priori and a posteriori statements. An a priori statement is one that can be known without recourse to experience, such as: “Exactly one straight line passes through any two points.”¹ In that sense it is non-empirical. An a posteriori statement is one that can be known only by means of experience. An example is the statement: “The sun rises every morning.”

As can be seen from the definitions above, analytic statements do not make claims about the world. The analytic claim is an analysis of the subject of the claim, and therefore it contains no additional information about the world beyond what is already included in the definition of the subject under discussion. Thus, every statement that says something about the world is a synthetic statement.

Expanding the Concepts

In the first book I expanded these definitions, which in their original form concern the structure of a single statement, and I defined two modes of thought and argument. An argument is an inference, that is, the derivation of a conclusion from premises.

An analytic argument is an argument that analyzes its axioms, or the premises on which it rests, and derives conclusions from them in an analytic way alone. An example of an analytic argument is the following inference:

Premise A: All human beings are mortal.
Premise B: Socrates is a human being.
Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.

It should be noted that the conclusion of this argument tells us nothing new about the world beyond what was already known in the premises. Whoever knows the premises already knows the conclusion implicitly. The purpose of an analytic argument is to clarify the full content of the premises on which it rests.

By contrast, let us define a synthetic argument as follows: an argument that infers a conclusion that is not contained within the premises themselves, but expands our knowledge of the world beyond what is present in the premises. This is why it is called a synthetic argument: it says something about the world, or expands our knowledge of the world beyond what was known in the premises before the argument.

An example of such an argument is the following:

Premise A: Socrates is mortal.
Premise B: Plato is mortal.
Conclusion: All human beings are mortal.

Such an argument certainly adds to our knowledge of the world beyond what is known from the premises. Someone who knows that Socrates and Plato are mortal does not thereby know that all human beings are mortal. The conclusion is not fully and necessarily contained in the premises, and therefore this argument adds to our knowledge of the world beyond what was known within the framework of the premises.

It should be noted, as also emerges from the examples above, that an analytic argument usually uses deductive forms of inference, that is, necessary inference from the general to the particular, whereas a synthetic argument is based primarily on analogy, from one particular to another, and on induction, from the particular to the general. The difficulties involved in these forms of inference were presented in the previous book, and they will also be discussed below.

The Emptiness of the Analytic

The root of analyticity, which is the source both of its strength and of its weakness, is that an analytic argument reveals only what is already known to us. This is why an analytic argument is necessary: whoever accepts its premises is thereby compelled to accept its conclusions. But that is precisely its weakness as well: it cannot add new knowledge beyond what we already know. This is the essence of the phenomenon called in philosophy the emptiness of the analytic.² In contemporary philosophy the analytic is treated as empty, in the sense that it cannot teach us anything new beyond what is already implicitly present in premises known to us beforehand. The conclusion of such an argument is merely the actualization of knowledge already in our possession.

In fact, one can say more than this. An analytic argument does not really assert the truth of either its conclusion or its premises. It asserts only this: if we accept the premises, then we are compelled to accept the conclusion as well. This is another aspect of its emptiness. Not only does it fail to add knowledge about the world; it does not actually assert anything at all. In other words, not only can an analytic argument not add to our knowledge of the world, it does not even claim to do so.

By contrast, as we saw above, a synthetic argument expands our knowledge beyond what was previously known in the premises. This is also the reason for its relative weakness. It is not necessary, since it does not follow from the premises in an analytic and necessary way. Thus one may say that the synthetic is not empty, because it contains information about the world.

The Analytic and Synthetic Positions: Again, Two Wagons and a Hot-Air Balloon

So far we have discussed analytic and synthetic claims, and analytic and synthetic thought. In the first book we also defined two principled positions: analytic and synthetic. There those two philosophical positions were presented as locked in struggle throughout history, and all the more so in our own time.

On the one hand stands the analytic position, which upholds the principle that a true claim is only a factual-empirical claim or a proven claim. We will not define here the concept of proof; it is enough to say that it is a form of grounding that cannot be challenged, that is, an analytic grounding, akin to a mathematical proof. According to the analytic approach, all other claims are merely speculation or subjective feeling, and they have no real logical status. This position assumes that only analytic argument, or analytic thought, leads to truth. Hence it is called the analytic position.

In the first book we saw that manifestations of such a position in the world around us are very widespread. Among them are left-wing ideologies, postmodern ones, and usually also what is commonly but mistakenly called modernism, as well as the prevalent varieties of secularism.

Opposed to all these stands the synthetic position, which believes in the possible truth of unproven claims and of synthetic arguments, or synthetic thought. That is, this position believes in the possibility of adopting claims as true even though we possess no proof of their truth. In the first book we saw that the only possible grounding for such an approach is philosophical theism, that is, belief in the existence of God as a coordinating factor between human thought and cognition and the world as it is in itself, which in Kantian language means the objective world itself.

The first book in the trilogy is called Two Wagons and a Hot-Air Balloon because of the emptiness of the analytic. The two wagons represent the Chazon Ish’s remark to Ben-Gurion that the secular wagon is empty of value-laden cargo. It expresses an analytic position. The hot-air balloon represents the academic joke about the mathematician whose claims are indeed maximally precise, but are of no use to us whatever. The main point of the first book was the connection between these two points: the emptiness of mathematics, which says nothing about the world, stems from its maximal precision. The emptiness of secularism lies on the same plane: it is analytic, like mathematics, and therefore precise and demonstrable, yet empty.³ We also touched on these points in the introduction to this book, in relation to the quotations on the opening page.

An Epistemology of Objects and Concepts: Conventionalism and Essentialism

In the second gate of the first book we saw that the difference between these two positions, the analytic and the synthetic, does not lie only in the logical domain, concerning the question of what counts as a true claim, but extends also into the epistemological domain. The extreme analytic thinker is an idealist, that is, one who does not believe at all in the existence of objects in a world outside himself. Most analytic thinkers are more moderate, and accept the existence of everything that can be given in direct sensory observation. Bechler, in his book Three Copernican Revolutions, called this actualism. It is the acceptance of the existence of things that are actually present before the senses, and nothing more. Therefore we defined the analytic position more broadly as the position of one who accepts as true only direct sensory observation or a statement that has been analytically proven.

In the first book we also broadened the discussion in relation to concepts. According to the proponents of the analytic position, concepts are nothing more than agreed-upon abbreviations within the community of speakers for the sake of linguistic use. According to this view, a concept has use, but no referent, that is, no entity in the objective world corresponding to it. This is conventionalism, usually adopted by adherents of analytic positions, according to which a concept is nothing but a name, or linguistic shorthand, for the set of properties that characterize it. By contrast, the proponent of the synthetic position adopts an essentialist position, that is, an essentialist or Platonic position, according to which a concept is an existing entity, an idea, that of course also has characteristics.

Kant’s distinction between the thing as it is in itself, the noumenon, and the way it appears to us, the phenomenon, is applied here to concepts as well. Proponents of the synthetic position argue that there is a distinction between the concept in itself, its essence or substance, and its properties as they are revealed to us, its form.

We saw that analytic conventionalism sees in the concept two parts: essential properties, whose grouping is the definition of the concept, and accidental properties. Synthetic essentialism sees in the concept a third part as well: the concept in itself, the entity that bears all those properties.

We also saw that the possibility of changing the definition of a concept does not exist in the conventionalist-analytic picture. If we change an essential property, we in fact create a new concept, whereas if we change a non-essential property, it turns out that we have not changed the definition at all.⁴

Similarly, we saw that the possibility of arguing over the definition of concepts, for example, who is a Jew or what is good, depends upon an essentialist position. But according to the conventionalist, such an argument is pointless. If it concerns accidental properties, then it does not concern the definition of the concept, since only essential properties enter the definition. And if it concerns essential properties, then evidently the two sides are dealing with different concepts, for according to the conventionalist the concept is simply the set of its essential characteristics. On this view, the concept is nothing but a name, a linguistic abbreviation for the definition.

Implications

We saw the implications of this conflict for various values, such as equality, tolerance, democracy, and others. All of these were presented as usually reflecting a lack of confidence in certainties, from different aspects and with varying intensity. We also saw implications for further cultural dimensions, such as violence and alienation, and attitudes toward art, science, and mysticism.

An analytic person is one who argues against a given position merely because it rests on some first principles, or merely because it is unproven. Examples include radical feminism, which argues against modern science on the grounds that it is built on masculine assumptions, or Mizrahi thinkers, who argue against it that it is built on Western assumptions, and the like. As I noted in my previous book, such claims are widespread today, and the basic principle common to all of them is that the absence of proof is sufficient grounds for undermining a position. There is no need to raise arguments against the hegemonic principles, or in favor of alternative ones. It is enough to point out that the hegemonic position rests on first principles in order to expose its arbitrariness.

The root of the matter is that according to the analytic position, which underlies this new, postmodern critique, first principles are perceived as arbitrary principles, since they have no proof. That is the very definition of first principles, or axioms. As we saw, the essence of analyticity is an approach that regards every unproven principle, and axioms are by their nature unproven principles, as arbitrary.

In light of this conception, it is clear that every position, even one built on proven principles, cannot avoid relying on first principles for which there is no proof. There is no proof that does not rest on first principles. The conclusion the analytic thinker draws from this conception is that the adoption of different positions is a matter of convenience, interest, or the various schemes of power groups. This is the root of the postmodern outlook. Such an approach is sometimes called philosophical pragmatism, according to which we adopt positions because of their usefulness and not because of their truth.⁵ According to this view, there can be no essential reason to believe in any ideological or philosophical position.

The synthetic position presented in the previous book argues that first principles are not arbitrary. More than that, and perhaps the very opposite: first principles are principles whose certainty for us is beyond challenge, and therefore they do not require proof. Descartes called this evidence, that is, self-evident clarity. In a synthetic approach we accept a principle as an axiom only if we have no need at all to prove it.

An example is the statement: exactly one straight line passes through any two points. This is an axiom in plane geometry, and of course within that framework it has no proof. But would anyone claim that this is merely a subjective feeling, and that one may dispute this axiom because we have no proof for it? There is no doubt that this premise is correct, within plane geometry, and this is clear to every reasonable person. The fact that the claim has no proof does not trouble us in the least. On the contrary, this claim was chosen as an axiom of plane geometry precisely because it is so certain that we have no need to prove it. Other claims derived from it are proven by showing that they follow from it. This is the meaning of the concept of proof for a given statement: reducing that statement to self-evident first principles.

Thus, according to the synthetic position, the fact that a given claim has no proof does not make it arbitrary. If you wish to dispute a claim, you must point to flaws in it, or try to persuade your interlocutor that his position is unreasonable. It is not enough to make the trivial remark that his argument rests on first principles, or that he has no proof for his claim.

In the end, the conclusion that emerges from the first book is that one cannot maintain an extreme analytic position. Therefore each person must choose some dosage between the analytic and the synthetic. In this book we shall see this conclusion appear on scientific planes, and on that basis we shall discuss the relations among science, religion, and myth.

The Synthetic A Priori

According to Kant, synthetic statements, those that make claims about the world, may be divided into two main types: a priori and a posteriori. A posteriori statements are statements like: “The sun rose this morning,” a statement that obviously makes a claim about the world. Every a posteriori statement makes a claim about the world, and therefore it requires experiential observation of the world in order to be stated.

A priori statements, by contrast, may be of two kinds: those that do not make claims about the world, like the example above, “Exactly one straight line passes through any two points,” and those that do make claims about the world, such as: “Our space has three dimensions.” For Kant, this too is an a priori statement.

Kant’s chief innovation is the very existence of the category of the synthetic a priori. This is a type of statement that is both synthetic, that is, it makes claims about the world, and a priori, that is, it does not require grounding by experience or observation.

In the previous book we criticized the grounding Kant proposed for the truth of such statements, namely transcendental arguments, and we saw that in essence it smuggles in an analytic position. Therefore we proposed there a different grounding, synthetic in its very nature, which will be presented shortly, after we clarify the importance of the issue of the synthetic a priori.

The Meaning and Importance of Synthetic A Priori Statements

In human thought, and especially in the scientific world, synthetic a priori statements are of immense importance. In the first gate of the first book we explained this by way of Hume’s challenge to the principle of causality and the principle of induction, a challenge to which the Kantian distinction was meant to respond. Since this point is the point of departure for the present book, we will elaborate on it a little further.

Hume pointed out that no observation can discern a relation of causation between two events. For example, when we see a person kick a ball and then see that the ball flies away, we can observe that there was a kick, and we can observe that the ball then flew away. But none of our senses can show us the causal relation that exists between those two events.

In the same way, one can point out that we have no satisfactory grounding for scientific generalizations, that is, inductive processes. If we claim that every time a ball is kicked it will fly away, we cannot ground this on the fact that in our previous observations, when balls were kicked, they did indeed fly away. What happened in the past gives us no reasonable guarantee that this will continue to happen in the future.

Hume’s challenge to causality and induction poses a severe problem for the scientific world. The essence of scientific activity is the attempt to understand the causes of natural phenomena, and through them to predict what will happen under similar circumstances in the future. This is done by finding and formulating general principles for such phenomena, namely laws of nature. This will be discussed in greater detail in the next gate.

Such generalizations are, on the one hand, statements that say something about the world. That is, they are synthetic statements. On the other hand, they are general statements, and therefore they cannot be justified by analytic means, that is, by direct observations or by proofs from such observations. Thus they are a priori statements in the sense that they do not follow from experience.

Kant understood that the root of all the problems raised by Hume lies in the fact that we lack a mechanism for justifying synthetic a priori statements. The claim that the kick is the cause of the ball’s flight is not the result of observation, and therefore it is a priori. Yet at the same time it is a statement about the world, “When one kicks a ball, it flies,” that is, a statement containing information beyond what is given in direct experience. In other words, it is also synthetic.

Kant therefore reformulated the Humean problems in a different and more comprehensive way. He asked: how are synthetic a priori statements possible? In everyday language, this question means: how can we accumulate general knowledge about the world? Or, in other words: how is science possible? This is the root of the importance of synthetic a priori statements within science.

The example of kicking a ball is taken from everyday life, but one should note that the entire scientific process is based on drawing conclusions in similar ways. We observe various events, or produce them in the laboratory, and try to infer from this the causes of their occurrence, and to generalize our conclusions into universal laws of nature. Thus induction and causality are the cornerstones of science. If indeed we have no reasonable rational grounding for using them, then science, or at least the philosophy of science that is supposed to ground it, is in serious crisis.

In the second gate of the previous book this problem was connected to the level of epistemology, and finally, in the eleventh gate there, we saw that the problem can be generalized and formulated as a crisis in epistemology as such. Apparently, one cannot directly know principles or laws, which are general by their very nature. At most, and even that requires discussion, one can know simple and particular facts through empirical observation. There we saw that even such knowledge is not really possible without adequate grounding. We cannot know any general fact, such as: all ravens are black. We can know only the particular ravens we have observed, and therefore only with regard to their color do we have immediate data.

In the same way, we cannot know through direct empirical observation that event A is the cause of event B. We can know only that the two events exist, and that they generally occur one after the other.

In the next gate we shall sharpen further the meaning of these problems, and others, for our understanding of the process of scientific inquiry.

The Synthetic Resolution: Abolishing the Distinction Between Thought and Cognition

In the previous section we saw the importance of the problem, and now we return to the problem itself. In the first book we presented the problem raised by Hume, which Kant tried to address, as a problem concerning the relation between thought and cognition. We saw there that the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic belongs to the plane of thought, which ostensibly takes place within the human mind, whereas the distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori belongs to the epistemological plane, that is, it concerns the relation between the human subject and the world as object.

The question of the existence of synthetic a priori statements concerns the relation between these distinctions. On the one hand, synthetic statements give us new knowledge about the world. On the other hand, their being a priori means that they do not arise from experience, and therefore they are apparently products of pure thought. In other words, this can be presented as a search for justification of the assumption that there is a fit between the human mind and the world: how is it that conclusions of reason correspond to facts in the world?

There we presented three possible explanations of the fit between human beings and the world:

1. Empiricism, according to which the world is observed by the human being and determines the contents of his thought.
2. Transcendentalism, proposed by Kant, according to which the basic contents of thought are a priori, and they constitute a condition for every possibility of thought and cognition.
3. The synthetic approach, according to which there is a coordinating factor, namely God, between the human being and the world.

We rejected the first two possibilities, which are analytic, and arrived at the synthetic conclusion.

As we saw there, the heart of the synthetic solution is the justification of synthetic a priori statements by giving up the sharp distinction between thought and cognition. Synthetic statements tell us something new about the objective world, and therefore they ought to be the product of observation. Yet, as Hume showed, this cannot be ordinary observation by means of the senses. But synthetic statements cannot simply be the product of thought either, since there is no reason to assume that thought conducted entirely within the human being will yield a correct description of the external world.

We therefore concluded that the human being has an additional faculty, a kind of observation, a kind of listening to the world. The Nazir calls this faculty auditory logic, and it underlies faith. Husserl calls it eidetic seeing, although we saw in the previous book that he means something somewhat different, since Husserlian phenomenology is still Kantian, and therefore analytic.

There is room to regard this faculty as a priori, as a faculty of thought not derived from experience, since it is not really sensory observation. Yet at the same time it can certainly be regarded as a posteriori, since after all it is some kind of interaction with the world as it is in itself.

Thus, the root of the solution to the Humean problems lies in abolishing the distinction between thought and cognition. We shall encounter this point in detail below, in the second gate, when we discuss the synthetic solution to various problems in the methodology of science that will be presented there.

In fact, this conclusion is already implicit in Kant’s very formulation of the problem of the synthetic a priori. The problem is how to produce, by means of thought, that is, a priori means, cognitive results, that is, synthetic ones. The answer is that the distinction between thought and cognition is not dichotomous. There is an area of overlap between them.

We shall return several times to this point, the overlap between thought and cognition. As we shall see in the course of the book, it stands at the center of several of the main conclusions of the present work.

Chapter Two: The Analytic-Synthetic Conflict in Science and Other Realms

Actualism and Informativism

Ze’ev Bechler, in his book Three Copernican Revolutions, points to an ongoing conflict in the history of science and its philosophy. It is a conflict between two positions, which Bechler calls informativism and actualism.

Actualism is an approach that sees every abstraction as something non-existent. Only what is present before our eyes, that is, what is actual, exists; everything else is fiction. According to actualism, scientific laws and basic scientific concepts, and also the abstract scientific entities that are not visible in direct observation, do not really exist in the objective world outside the human spirit. For example, according to the actualist, physical forces are not entities that truly exist in the world as it is in itself, but convenient forms for describing observable phenomena, such as the position, velocity, and acceleration of bodies. Therefore scientific theory does not teach us about the world. Its principal function is to arrange the world of phenomena coherently within our cognition. This is a process of thought more than of cognition. Therefore it is an analytic conception of science.

Here we see an expression of the analytic position, which does not recognize statements about the world, that is, synthetic claims, as true. In other words, the analytic position sharply distinguishes between thought and cognition, and sees them as two separate and unrelated domains.

By contrast, informativism argues that abstractions too possess reality, and in particular that scientific abstractions possess reality, since it regards them as claims about the world. According to the informativist, physical forces are real entities in the world as it is in itself. According to Newton’s second law, these are the causes that produce the observed phenomena, for according to that law force is what causes the acceleration of a body with mass, and through the phenomena we discover them. Thus scientific laws are knowledge about the world, and therefore science teaches us about the world. Translating from Bechler’s language into our own terminology, one may say that informativism expresses a synthetic conception of science.

The substantive question under dispute is whether science discovers something about the world, as informativism maintains, or whether it is merely an internal human process, nothing more than the construction of a subjective picture. According to the actualist, the only requirement imposed on this picture is internal coherence, that is, consistency between its principles and its conclusions. This is the essence of analyticity, as presented in the previous chapter. See also the first gate of the first book.

Bechler’s book is nothing other than a description of the analytic-synthetic struggle in the field of the philosophy of science. What he calls informative is what we call synthetic, and what he calls actualist is what we call analytic. His account there is very detailed, and it also requires a certain scientific background, so this is not the place to add to it. The reader who wants a detailed account of the historical appearances of the analytic-synthetic struggle in the history and philosophy of science is referred to Bechler’s book.

Different Realms of the Analytic-Synthetic Conflict

Here I wish to point to an important issue that places the matter in a fuller context. Bechler’s book describes the analytic-synthetic struggle on the scientific plane. In the first book we saw parallel descriptions of the same struggle on the philosophical plane and on the literary-cultural plane.

This struggle, as it appears on the philosophical plane, is the subject of all of Yuval Steinitz’s books. In the appendix to the first book we showed that he senses the problematic nature of the emptiness of analytic philosophy, but does not propose any real alternative. As we saw there, for that reason Steinitz is caught in several philosophical traps. In his books Steinitz protests analyticity and the emptiness it imposes on philosophy, but he does not propose any way of confronting it, and therefore no genuine alternative either.

In the sixth gate of the first book there is a description of the struggle on the literary-cultural plane, as it is presented in Gadi Taub’s book The Slouching Rebellion.⁶ There the struggle between modernism and postmodernism is described as it manifests itself in the contemporary world of literature and culture. There too, as we saw, there is a critique of analyticity, but no real alternative is offered. The world of values that Taub presents as an alternative to the postmodern world is itself only an implicit postmodernity. As I showed there, Taub does not offer a solution to the problems raised by analyticity. That is, he does not offer a genuine cultural-ideological coordinate system that would be relevant in the age of the death of God.

In Bechler too, as in these other two, one can see the phenomenon of adopting a synthetic position without reasonable grounding. In several places Bechler himself speaks about the absurdity and paradoxes underlying the synthetic, that is, informativist, position that he himself espouses, consciously and despite the paradoxes. The main basis of those paradoxes is Hume’s critique described above. He does not propose alternatives that solve the Humean problems. He too senses the emptiness of analytic philosophy of science, but does not propose a way of confronting directly the actualist, that is, analytic, critiques and arguments.

As noted, throughout his book Bechler describes the conflict between informativism and actualism: how it is expressed in the positions of different scholars, in different scientific theories, and how it unfolds and develops through the history of science and its philosophy up to the present day. But the actualist and informativist ideas as such do not receive philosophical analysis and discussion in his work. Therefore the reader is not led to examine the meaning and coherence of these theoretical positions, and consequently cannot decide which of them to adopt, except perhaps by sharpening vague inclinations of the heart.⁷

The resulting picture is that in recent times a number of thinkers have felt that there is something problematic in analytic positions as they appear on different planes, but they usually go only half the distance, that is, they offer only a critique of analyticity. As we saw, all three of these writers sense the problematic character of the analytic position, each on the plane with which he deals, but none of them offers an alternative that grounds a synthetic position. They are content with describing the phenomenon, and two of them also engage in morally condemning it. None of them proposes a solution to the significant philosophical problems that produced this outlook.

It seems that the reason for this, as I showed at length in my first book as well, is that there is no solution to these problems unless one adopts a grounded synthetic position, and that means adopting a theistic philosophy. This is the most plausible basis that allows one to give up the distinction between thought and cognition, and only it can solve the problems that the analytic position identifies in the synthetic one. These two steps are not taken by those thinkers, and therefore they cannot offer a properly grounded alternative.

In the first book we tried to take the second half of the journey as well. We offered an alternative grounding for the synthetic position, without addressing one of those particular planes, science, culture, or art, apart from the philosophical plane. The grounding was general and philosophical, and as noted it rested on relinquishing the dichotomy between cognition and thought, and on the concept of the philosophical God. As we saw there, this is the only possible basis for the synthetic position that can answer the analytic critique.

The Aim of the Present Book

It should be noted that a synthetic position is a necessary but not sufficient condition for an informativist conception of science. One may hold a synthetic philosophy and at the same time believe that science is not informative, or at least not fully so.

Below an intermediate position of this kind will be presented, according to which in the scientific context one should adopt the analytic position to a certain extent. Even if one believes in the possibility of discovering general truths about the world, it does not follow that science is the way to do so, or that it always succeeds in doing so. As we shall see below, a proponent of the synthetic position can, in the scientific context, come closer to an actualist stance rather than an informativist one. We shall later see that the relation between these two, which will be described as the relation between semantics and syntax, is itself relative. In the final three gates we shall also point to the existence of a multi-layered hierarchy of planes of meaning and description, one after another.

Precisely because of this, we must clarify the relation between the role and essence of science, and essential understanding and discovery of the nature of the world by other means. Here we arrive at myth and religion, and at the relations between them and science.

Thus, the aim of the present book is not merely to offer an alternative foundation that will ground the informativist position and answer the actualist critique. Such a general foundation was already presented, in broad terms, in the first book. Here we want to indicate the implications of the synthetic position for the relations among science, myth, and religion, and to try to sketch the status and essence of science from within a synthetic conception, which, as noted, does not necessarily understand science in a purely informativist way.

For that purpose we must discuss, to some extent, the theoretical level of the philosophy and methodology of science, and not only the historical development of scientific thought and scientific positions, as Bechler does. Unlike Bechler, we shall try to examine actualism, that is, analyticity, over against informativism, that is, syntheticity, as distinct positions, and to discuss them in themselves, not only in their expression as interpretations of concrete scientific ideas.

Summary of the Discussion in This Gate

In this gate we presented the basic principles of the analytic and the synthetic, as they were proposed in the first book. The analytic position accepts as legitimate only a claim that has been analytically proven, or one that results from direct empirical observation. The synthetic position, by contrast, accepts other claims as legitimate as well.

We noted that the basis of the dispute concerns the possible grounding of synthetic a priori statements, which, as we saw, underlie all comprehensive human knowledge, and especially the laws of nature.

The Kantian grounding does not rescue us from the subjectivity to which David Hume pointed. Therefore the only possible way out is to give up the distinction between cognition and thought. Claims that are the product of thought can say something about the world, because thought itself has cognitive dimensions. This is the only route that makes a synthetic position possible, that is, a position that believes in our ability to learn about the world and accumulate knowledge of it.

This claim leads us to a discussion of the domain through which the most systematic and comprehensive knowledge about the world is accumulated, namely science. In this discussion we shall examine in greater detail the implications of an analytic position and a synthetic position for the understanding of the scientific process and its methodology.

Footnotes