In the first chapter of the Shanhaijing (3rd century bce 1st century ce; "The Classic of Mountains and Rivers"), the fenghuang appears to be a symbol of Confucian values, wearing the characters meaning virtue, duty, ritual, compassion, and trust on various parts of its body.
"[T]he people do not want virtue," Gerry said, meaning that he trusted their character.
Rather than understanding "analytic" to mean "known to be true by virtue of meaning," one might understand it merely as "justified by virtue of meaning," a prima facie justification that simply could be overridden by other, global theoretical considerations.
Mathematical theorems express truths, albeit in a special way: true by virtue of meaning alone.
The positivists instead treated analyticity as "truth by virtue of meaning".
And we still do not think it true, so it cannot be true in virtue of meaning.
This, however, is an unwelcome consequence because laws of the special sciences should be reconstructed as empirical statements—not as sentences being true in virtue of meaning.
To be an adequate formal representation of analyticity, L-truth must respect the basic idea behind analyticity: truth in virtue of meaning alone.
Philosophers have long thought that some truths were necessary while others were contingent; in the twentieth-century, under the influence of logical positivism, this was taken to be the distinction between those statements that were "true in virtue of meaning" (hence necessarily true) and those that were "true in virtue of fact" (hence only contingently true).
Since narrow contents have no truth values, "and hence have no truth conditions", they simply aren't the sort of thing that could be true in virtue of meaning, and thus "aren't even the sort of things that can be analytic" (Block 1993: 61).
