the myth of a priori synthetic knowledge, and a side comment on analytic philosophy in general

I'm not sure why I bother, and I may be casting pearls before swine, but I've recently taken up my old passtime of arguing against the rationalists on real_philosophy who believe in so-called "a priori synthetic" truths.

Why the Standard Kilogram example is neither "a priori" nor "synthetic"

This particular post of mine was in followup to a previous thread, within which I explained to someone why Euclidean geometry is not "a priori" true. The strangest thing here is, he began by admitting that Euclidean geometry is false. And then--incredibly--still proceeded to argue that, even though it's false, if it weren't it would be true "a priori", in other words we would just know it was true and could be sure of that without ever having to measure anything or check whether it was really true. (It sure is a good thing not everyone accepted Kant's original argument for this, otherwise we would never have discovered it was false!)

Last night at a party, I had a great conversation with a previous philosophy grad student at Rutgers, regarding Philosophy of Mind. According to him, the point of view at Rutgers is that "Daniel Dennett is Satan, but Paul Churchland is the real Satan". This made me chuckle, as Dennett has a legendary "hero" status in my mind, and I see as one of the most brilliant philosophers alive. And Churchland is someone I've been wanting to read when I get a chance, and expecting to agree with much of what he says. Although later, he also mentioned that there was a much bigger difference between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, than the "intramural" disputes between East and West coast schools of analytic philosophy in the US. I commented that I was growing increasingly frustrated with analytic philosophy, particularly with the type of naive arguments I see on real_philosophy, because they rely far too heavily on a rigid system of logic and don't pay enough attention to the role of language and the ambiguity in the meaning of any statement or text. Logic is a very dangerous thing when used with vague and imprecise words, which is always the case outside of mathematics or hard science, and sometimes even the case inside these areas as well. The continental philosophers are conscious of these ambiguities and multiple meanings, and do not hide from it but instead openly admit and confront it. I guess it's mainly the rationalists I have a problem with. Although sometimes I feel like the only role of empiricist philosophers is simply to shoot down the misguided rationalists. If the rationalists didn't come up with so many cockameme arguments in the first place, perhaps the empiricists would have nothing left to write about. Then again, I'm probably just saying this because I get a very indirect experience of how things work in philosophy, mostly from online discussions and arguments with philosophy grad students, rarely from reading the philosophers themselves. Oh--one thing the former Rutgers guy mentioned was that he found it somewhat depressing that it is hard for analytic philosophers to argue that they have made any progress on anything yet--in other words, that there has been any real convergence in the opinions of the experts toward something. I actually have gotten the impression that there has been such a convergence on certain issues, although it happens more slowly than in the sciences. Nevertheless, he claimed that the only examples he could think of where there was strong support for such a convergence were in logic itself, for instance, Russell's overthrow of Cantor's naive set theory.