ABSTRACT
Kant’s distinction can easily be extended to conditional propositions, which are analytic if the consequent is contained in the antecedent, e.g. ‘If this is a rose, it is a flower’, and otherwise synthetic. Some other kinds of propositions raise difficulties, for instance, existential propositions like ‘There exist black swans’, where containment does not seem to apply, and the notion of containment is anyway hard to analyse. In general in ‘Red roses are red’ the containment is straightforwardly verbal. But in what sense precisely is the predicate ‘contained’ in the subject in ‘Roses are flowers’, or the consequent in the antecedent in ‘If all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal’?
