From Analyticity to Semantic Adjudication: AI, Translation, and the Historical Search for Inspectable Semantic Regulators

This paper argues that the analytic/synthetic distinction functioned, beneath its overt presentation as a theory of dual truth-conferral — meaning-conferred truth on one side, fact-conferred truth on the other — as an adjudicative device: a historically variable mechanism for deciding which inferential achievements count as legitimate semantic work. Although Quine's holism dissolved analyticity as a fixed epistemic boundary (Quine, 1951, p. 20–46), the underlying adjudicative need did not disappear with it. Formal semantics, translation theory, and current debates about AI-assisted writing all continue to presuppose some mechanism for distinguishing semantic work that survives transformation from semantic work that is merely relabeled. Rather than searching for a single "inspectable locus" where meaning resides—a search Quine's holism already forecloses—the paper proposes that we instead look for inspectable “regulators”: objective, if plural and non-foundational, ways of evaluating how semantic content survives translation, compression, formalization, and machine-assisted transformation. This reframing turns the project into a successor to Quine rather than a reversal of him.