Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Of or relating to analysis or analytics.
  • adjective Expert in or using analysis, especially in thinking: synonym: logical.
  • adjective Dividing into elemental parts or basic principles.
  • adjective Reasoning or acting from a perception of the parts and interrelations of a subject.
  • adjective Logic Following necessarily; tautologous.
  • adjective Using, subjected to, or capable of being subjected to a methodology involving algebra or other methods of mathematical analysis.
  • adjective Proving a known truth by reasoning from that which is to be proved.
  • adjective Linguistics Expressing a grammatical function by using two or more words instead of an inflected form.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Relating to, of the nature of, or operating by analysis: opposed to synthetic, synthetical: as, an analytic mode of thought.
  • In the Kantian logic, explicatory; involving a mere analysis or explication of knowledge, and not any material addition to it.
  • In philology, deficient in inflections, and employing instead particles and auxiliary words to express modifications of meaning and to show the relations of words in a sentence: as, an analytic language.
  • noun (only in the first form).
  • noun One of the main divisions of logic, which treats of the criteria for distinguishing good and bad arguments.
  • noun Analysis in the mathematical sense.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • adjective Of or pertaining to analysis; resolving into elements or constituent parts; ; -- opposed to synthetic.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective of, or relating to any form of analysis, or to analytics
  • adjective of, or relating to division into elements or principles
  • adjective having the ability to analyse
  • adjective logic (of a proposition) that follows necessarily; tautologous
  • adjective mathematics of, or relating to algebra or a similar method of analysis
  • adjective analysis being defined in terms of objects of differential calculus such as derivatives
  • adjective linguistics using multiple simple words, instead of inflection

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • adjective using or skilled in using analysis (i.e., separating a whole--intellectual or substantial--into its elemental parts or basic principles)
  • adjective of a proposition that is necessarily true independent of fact or experience
  • adjective using or subjected to a methodology using algebra and calculus
  • adjective expressing a grammatical category by using two or more words rather than inflection

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Medieval Latin analyticus, from Greek analutikos, from analūein, to resolve; see analysis.]

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Examples

  • In particular, Professor Dyson concludes that I believe that only research which "reduces complicated phenomena to their simpler component parts," what he calls analytic science, "is worthy of the name of science."

    'The Fabric of the Cosmos' Feferman, Solomon 2004

  • I am by no means well-read enough in analytic philosophy to assess these posts in technical terms, although I do think I know enough to follow along and perhaps make a few comments from a purely literary perspective.

    Philosophy and Literature 2009

  • In order to explore these questions we must at least separate the clearly analytic from the synthetic propositions.

    Bunny and a Book 2008

  • In order to explore these questions we must at least separate the clearly analytic from the synthetic propositions.

    Bunny and a Book 2008

  • One thing that particularly bothers me is that the terms analytic philosophers usually use in their analyses -- intuition, proposition, property, sortal, etc. -- are in fact far more vague and ambiguous than the things they are usually analyzing.

    Links and Notes 2006

  • Several different senses of the word analytic are thus conflated in the designation analytic number theory

    Citizendium, the Citizens' Compendium - Recent changes [en] 2009

  • I think there’s quite a lot of room for foundational criticism in analytic philosophy.

    Matthew Yglesias » Richard Rorty 2007

  • And the DNI has created something called analytic space, or A space, for short.

    Is Director Of National Intelligence A Viable Post? 2010

  • The goal is to provide a general-purpose platform that can allow any number of so-called analytic tools to sift the structured data for patterns and trends.

    Internet News: Search Technology Archives 2009

  • I do not mean to imply that prior to the written word analytic thought was not possible.

    Does reading on the internet count as reading? Ann Althouse 2008

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