Southampton scientists change the colour of gold (From the BBC)
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For this very reason all analytic judgments are a priori even when the concepts are empirical, as, for example, "Gold is a yellow metal," for to know this I require no experience beyond my concept of gold as a yellow metal. It is, in fact, the very concept, and I need only analyze it, without looking beyond it elsewhere.--Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics; Preamble, Section 2b, p. 267 http://web.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/phil%20306/kant_materials/prolegomena3.htm
See also Kripke's Naming and Necessity, p. 118-9
1 comment:
A belated note, on Kant's behalf.
I might stipulate that gold can be made red or green or a multitude of other hues. I'm thinking, though, that this misses Kant's point, that there are two kinds of judgment. Would you be fine with an argument that gold is not necessarily 'precious', in all possible worlds? Perhaps, and also, it is not necessarily yellow, in all possible worlds. But does the word have a definition at all? Just because you might change your mind about something later, doesn't mean that it's not going to be a logical paradox when you do that. The 'analytic' judgment is a judgment about what is or is not going to count as a logical paradox. What have you made up your mind about? Of course this is arbitrary, and of course you can always change your mind, but it's easy to change your mind, it's hard to be logical. Analytic judgment is 'logical'. There are, in the end, two kinds of judgment. I might, I suppose, admit that just seeing the words 'gold is yellow', I have to intrpret this as either a synthetic, hypothetical, theoretical sort of judgment, or an analytic, stipulative, logical sort of premise. But neverthess, I do have to interpret this one way or the other. Consider this: if I see something that is watery, but is not H20, do I call it water? The key point here is that I have to make up my mind. I have to make a choice. You can't just be provisional about what all your words mean, or they don't mean anything. That's fine, if you don't care about your words meaning anything, and then you don't use analytic judgment for anything, but there would still be both anlytic and synthetic judgement.
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