La riforma linguistica dell'a priori nei Philosophical Papers di Hilary Putnam

The paper presents the theory of analyticity proposed by Putnam in the famous essay entitled The Analytic and Synthetic of 1962. Such theory establishes the logical-linguistic support of the widest defence of the a priori knowledge against the main forms of epistemological reductionism, among which the neo positivistic conventionalism and the holism of Quine. According to Putnam, despite the important theoretical differences, the reduction of the analytical proposions to mere stipulations of meaning on one hand, as well as the explicit denial of their existence on the other, they suppose a common radical dualism between the analytic and the synthetic, unjustified and even self-contradictory talking about holism. On the contrary, we're going to see how Putnam, effectively accepting Quine's thesis about the impossibility of formally distinguish the analytical propositions from the synthetic ones, will get to recuperate the distinction by priority informal demonstrations tied to the practice, asserting so the irreducible value of the a priori knowledge.