In recent years the normativity of thought and meaning has been the subject of an extensive debate. What is at issue is whether intentionality has normative features, and if so, whether that constitutes a problem for naturalistic attempts to account for intentional phenomena. The origin of the debate is Saul Kripke’s interpretation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, published in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Kripke claimed, on behalf of Wittgenstein, that dispositional accounts of linguistic meaning - accounts, i.e., which attempt to reduce semantic phenomena to facts about how speakers are disposed to employ words - fail to ground the factuality of semantic statements. From this, and other arguments, the far reaching conclusion was drawn by Kripke’s Wittgenstein that there are no semantic facts, that every application of a word is “a leap in the dark”. This position has become known as meaning scepticism. In the present essay, it will be argued that meaning scepticism is incoherent, but that the normativity argument is interesting in its own right. The development of the debate will be traced, primarily through detailed consideration of the writings of Paul Boghossian, who has shifted the focus from the normativity of linguistic meaning to that of belief. It will be contended that even though Boghossian’s attempt to locate a normativity of belief fails, there is a related form of normativity that has to do with the intrinsic badness of false beliefs. Also, suggestions made by Kripke regarding the normativity of intentions will be investigated, and related to contemporary arguments in the philosophy of rationality. The tentative conclusion is that there are some interesting kinds of normativity associated with the intentional, but of a somewhat different variety than those usually discussed.

Distinktionen mellan analytiska och syntetiska sanningar spelade en viktig för filosofer som Leibniz, Hume och Kant. Men det var först med Frege som begreppet analyticitet fick en definition som inte bara tycks vara explicit utan som också hade en bred tillämpbarhet. Den förmodade distinktionen analytiskt/syntetiskt har dock senare ifrågasatts av filosofer såsom Quine. Denna uppsats avser i första hand att visa att Quines argument, i artikeln Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951), mot analyticitet inte är tillräckligt starka för att bevisa att den fregeanska definitionen av analyticitet är cirkulär. I detta sammanhang har uppsatsen även undersökt kronologiskt viktiga epoker där Quine engagerar sig i den analytiska/syntetiska distinktionen i sitt arbete före liksom efter 1951. Den mer moderna traditionen, som delar in analyticitet i två kategorier – metafysisk och epistemisk analyticitet – går tillbaka till Boghossian (1996). Boghossian försvarar en uppdaterad version av Wittgensteins och Carnaps åsikt att analyticitet skall anges i termer av implicita definitioner I motsats till Boghossian anser Williamson att det inte finns något sätt att uppfatta analytiska sanningar som gör analyticitet användbar inom filosofin. Inom ramen för uppsatsens syfte kommer även dessa ’post-quineanska’ försök att beskriva analyticitet och den analytiska förklaringen av a priori att redovisas och kritiskt granskas. / The distinction between analytic and synthetic truths has played an important role for philosophers such as Leibniz, Hume and Kant. However, it was Frege who gave the notion of analyticity a definition that not only appears to be unambiguous but is also widely applicable. However, the supposed analytic/synthetic distinction was later challenged by philosophers such as Quine. This thesis aims primarily to show that Quine’s arguments, in the article Two Dogmas of Empiricism (1951), against analyticity are not sufficient to show that Frege’s definition of analyticity is circular. In this context, the paper has also examined chronologically important periods where Quine is engaged in the analytic/synthetic distinction before and after 1951. The more modern tradition, which separates analyticity into two broad categories – metaphysical and epistemic analyticity – goes back to Boghossian (1996). Boghossian defends an updated version of Wittgenstein’s and Carnap’s view that analyticity should be stated in terms of implicit definitions. In contrast to Boghossian, Williamson believes that there is no way of understanding analytic truths that makes analyticity useful in philosophy. Within the scope of this thesis, these ‘post-Quinean’ attempts to describe analyticity and the analytic explanation of a priori will also be presented and critically reviewed.