Analyticity and Katz’s New Intensionalism: or, If you Sever Sense from Reference, Analyticity is Cheap but Useless∗

Jerry Katz has observed that much of twentieth century philosophy of language turns on the Fregean thesis that sense determines reference. For example, he suggests that this thesis underwrites the widespread understanding of ‘analyticity’ (what he calls “the standard view”) as (necessary) truth in virtue of meaning alone. In addition, Katz argues that the Fregean thesis is a necessary premise in widely accepted arguments for externalist conclusions about the semantics of natural kind terms and semantic knowledge. But, precisely because it plays a pivotal role in arguments for these widelyheld positions, Katz thinks the Fregean thesis is an error of tremendous import. He argues that rejecting the Fregean thesis not only corrects a misimpression about the relationship between sense and reference shared by almost all semanticists in the post-Fregean tradition, but also clears the way for a novel understanding of ‘analyticity’ not vulnerable to Quinean attacks, and allows for a “rationalist/internalist” conception of reference and semantic knowledge of the kind Putnam and Kripke have convinced many is unattainable. As Katz is at pains to emphasize, these consequences challenge directly some of the most widelyand dearly-held positions in philosophy of language. For these reasons, it seems that quite a lot hangs on the viability of Katz’s proposal. Therefore, the question whether his program can be sustained is of considerable philosophical ∗Forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. †Department of Philosophy, Rutgers University, [email protected] 1Moreover, whether Katz’s internalist recasting of ‘analyticity’ is defensible will be of interest to theorists (including not only philosophers but also linguists and psychologists) attempting to explain the analyticity of sentences/thoughts solely in terms of what’s inside the heads of competent speakers/thinkers. Many theories of lexical and conceptual meaning would satisfy this description, including meaning-postulate accounts in the tradition of [Carnap, 1956], (cf., [Partee, 1995], 328), inferential-role accounts (e.g., [Block, 1986], [Harman, 1982], [Rosch, 1978], [Smith and Medin, 1981]), and so-called theory-theory accounts (e.g., [Keil, 1987], [Carey, 1991], [Gopnik, 1988]).