Q&A: Synthetic Proposition
Synthetic Proposition
Question
Are you sure that a scientific generalization creates a synthetic proposition?
For example: every tree burns in fire.
Suppose that is true; if so, that would mean that a tree is, by definition, something that burns in fire. So that would be analytic (we just didn’t know it beforehand); you would only need to know what a tree is in order to know that it burns. In contrast to the statement, “This ball is heavy” — that is synthetic, because there are heavy balls and ones that aren’t.
Where am I missing something?
Answer
The question is whether a world is possible in which wood would not burn in fire. In my view, yes — if the laws of nature there were different. And that means this is not an analytic property of wood and fire, but of the laws of nature in our world. Therefore it is not analytic. Likewise, mass could remain suspended in the air in a world where there is no gravitational force. So again, the claim that bodies fall is synthetic and not analytic. If you also build the laws of nature into the statement, you will get an analytic claim, but that is not interesting.