Category: Language, Philosophy of
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He Who Hesitates is Lost
Sometimes, however, it is better to look before you leap. Note this curious philo-lang point: 'he' above, though grammatically classifiable as a pronoun, does not function logically as a pronoun: it has no antecedent. It functions as a sex-neutral universal quantifier, or rather, it functions as an individual variable bound by a universal quantifier. Thus…
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Pluralities
To what does the plural referring expression, 'the cats in my house,' refer? Not to plurality, but to a plurality. A plurality is one item, not many items. It is one item with many members. 'The guitars in my house' refers to a numerically different plurality. It too refers to one item with many members. …
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Nominalism Presupposes What it Denies
What makes a pair of shoes a pair and not just two physical artifacts? Nominalist answer: nothing in reality. Our resident nominalist tells us that it is our use of 'a pair' that imports a unity, conventional and linguistic in nature, a unity that does not exist in reality apart from our conventional importation. We…
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Questions about Pronouns, Sex, and ‘Wokism’
Elliot Crozat writes, During my visit, one of our conversation topics was pronoun usage. If I recall, on one of the hikes, you gave the example "He who hesitates is lost” and asked about the function of ‘He.’ You then said that this pronoun seems to function as a universal quantifier such that, for any x,…
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Are the Names on Grave Stones Proper Names?
You will reflexively answer in the affirmative. But the names on grave stones are proper names for only so long as the memories of survivors are extant to supply reference-fixing context. With the passing of the survivors the names revert to commonality. After a while the dead may as well lie in a common grave. …
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I Know My Limits
I know my limits, but I also know that I have limits that I don't know. Complete self-knowledge would require both knowledge of my known limits and knowledge of my unknown limits. Complete self-knowledge, therefore, is impossible. (Note how 'I' is used above. It is not being used as the first-person singular pronoun. It is…
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The Fearful are Easy to Control
Is the sheep your totemic animal? A sheep in a mask? A dose of Emerson may help if it is not too late. "He has not learned the lesson of life who does not every day surmount a fear." (Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay "Courage") (I note that the pronoun as it functions in…
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Ernst Mach and the Shabby Pedagogue: On Belief De Se
1. In The Analysis of Sensations (Dover, 1959, p. 4, n. 1) Ernst Mach (1838-1916) offers the following anecdote: Not long ago, after a trying railway journey by night, when I was very tired, I got into an omnibus, just as another man appeared at the other end. 'What a shabby pedagogue that is, that…
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More on Pronouns: Reply to Claude Boisson
Claude Boisson writes, and I respond in blue: From a strictly linguistic point of view, this: 1) In the flow of discourse “pronouns” may indeed have anaphoric use, and sometimes cataphoric use (the “antecedent” being then what we should call a postcedent). Thus they are rightly called *pro*-nouns, or rather *pro*-noun phrases, given that they…
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A Pronoun Puzzle: “He who hesitates is lost”
Grammatically, 'he' is a pronoun. Pronouns have antecedents. What is the antecedent of 'he' in the folk saying supra? It does not have one. A Yogi Berra type joke is in the offing. We're hiking. We must go forward; we can't go back. But the path forward is perilous and requires a bold step over…
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Token, Type, Proposition: Write-Up of Some of Yesterday’s Dialog
I am enjoying the pleasure of a three-day visit from Dr. Elliot Crozat who drove out yesterday from San Diego. The following expands upon one of the topics we discussed yesterday. How many sentences immediately below, two or one? Snow is white Snow is white. Both answers are plausible, and indeed equally plausible; but they…
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Truthmaker Maximalism Questioned
0) What David Armstrong calls truthmaker maximalism is the thesis that every truth has a truthmaker. Although I find the basic truthmaker intuition well-nigh irresistible, I have difficulty with the notion that every truth has a truthmaker. Thus I question truthmaker maximalism (TM). Alan Rhoda has recently come out in favor of TM in a…
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Can a Sentence be Named?
One thing we do with words is make assertions, as when I assert that snow is white. I use those words, but I can also talk about them, refer to them, mention them. You are all familiar with the use-mention distinction. 'Boston' is disyllabic, but no city is. One way to mention an expression is…
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The Third Way of the Ostrich
In a comment, the Ostrich writes, Some early analytic types, including Russell, tried to analyse proper names as disguised descriptions, but Kripke put a lid on that. Thus, on what Devitt calls the Semantic Presupposition, namely that there are no other possible candidates for a name’s meaning other than a descriptive meaning, or the…
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Could Scollay Square be a Meinongian Nonexistent Object?
Bill, newly arrived in Boston, believes falsely that Scollay Square exists and he wants to visit it. Bill asks Kathleen where it is. Kathleen tells him truly that it no longer exists, and Bill believes her. Both use 'Scollay Square' to refer to the same thing, a physical place, one that does not exist. To…