meaning postulate a sentence that specifies part or all of the meaning of a predicate. Meaning postulates would thus include explicit, contextual, and recursive definitions, reduction sentences for dispositional predicates, and, more generally, any sentences stating how the extensions of predicates are interrelated by virtue of the meanings of those predicates. For example, any reduction sentence of the form (x) (x has f / (x is malleable S x has y)) could be a meaning postulate for the predicate ‘is malleable’. The notion of a meaning postulate was introduced by Carnap, whose original interest stemmed from a desire to explicate sentences that are analytic (‘true by virtue of meaning’) but not logically true. Where G is a set of such postulates, one could say that A is analytic with respect to G if and only if A is a logical consequence of G. On this account, e.g., the sentence ‘Jake is not a married bachelor’ is analytic with respect to {‘All bachelors are unmarried’}. See also ANALYTIC – SYNTHETIC DISTINCTION , MEANING , REDUC – TION SENTENC. G.F.S.