3. It sometimes happens that a proposition is a part of a large body or system of propositions, and whether the individual proposition is considered analytic or not depends on its place in the entire system of propositions. This is often the case with laws of nature (which we shall consider in detail in Chapter particularly in well-developed sciences such as physics, in which we have entire systems of laws. It is not easy to give examples without going into a fairly long discussion of the science itself. But perhaps the following will suffice as an example: Newton's three laws of motion were important discoveries, yet each of the laws, taken alone, could be construed as analytic as definitions); but if they are analytic, how can they be regarded as discoveries about the universe? Each of Newton's laws could be construed as a definition relating several terms used in physics. Newton's second law of motion may be construed as a definition of "force," and the third law as a definition of "mass but if they are so construed, then other laws in the system are synthetic and not analytic. There is a variety of ways of construing these laws, each way imposing somewhat different definitional content upon the axioms. But in no case does such definitional content exhaust the entire meaning of the laws taken together systematically as a theory of motion. Even when the over-all system governed by these laws is so interpreted that some of the statements in it come out to be definitions (and therefore analytic), others remain non-definitional or synthetic statements having the character of empirical laws. Whether a statement in the context of a systematic body of statements is definitional (and therefore analytic) or non- definitional (and therefore synthetic) depends on this context and on the manner in which the entire system is construed for possible application to the orld of things