Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Language, Philosophy of

  • Collective Inconsistency and Plural Predication

    We often say things like 1. The propositions p, q, r are inconsistent. Suppose, to keep things simple, that each of the three propositions is self-consistent.  It will then be false that each proposition is self-inconsistent. (1), then, is a plural predication that cannot be given a distributive paraphrase.  What (1) says is that the three…

  • A Problem With the Multiple Relations Approach to Plural Predication

    Consider 1. Sam and Dave are meeting together. 2. Al, Bill, and Carl are meeting together. 3. Some people are meeting together. Obviously, neither (1) nor (2) can be decomposed into a conjunction of singular predications.  Thus (2) cannot be analyzed as 'Al is meeting together & Bill is meeting together & Carl is meeting…

  • Irreducibly Plural Predication: ‘They are Surrounding the Building’

    Let's think about the perfectly ordinary and obviously intelligible sentence, 1. They are surrounding the building. I borrow the example from Thomas McKay, Plural Predication (Oxford 2006), p. 29.  They could be demonstrators.  And unless some of them have very long arms, there is no way that any one of them could satisfy the predicate,…

  • The Hatfields and the McCoys

    Whether or not it is true, the following  has a clear sense: 1. The Hatfields outnumber the McCoys. (1) says that the number of Hatfields is strictly greater than the number of McCoys.  It obviously does not say, of each Hatfield, that he outnumbers some McCoy.  If Gomer is a Hatfield and Goober a McCoy, it…

  • I Need to Study Plural Predication

    Here is a beautiful aphorism from Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913-1994), in Escolios a un Texto Implicito (1977), II, 80, tr. Gilleland:  Stupid ideas are immortal. Each new generation invents them anew. Clearly this does not mean: 1. Each stupid idea is immortal and is invented by each new generation anew. So we try: 2. The…

  • More on the God of the Philosophers

    Spencer Case, 'on the ground' in Afghanistan, e-mails: Your recent post discussing the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham and Isaac caught my interest. Having grown up in a religious home, I have always been of the opinion that arguments for theism argue for something different than what believers take themselves to…

  • Richard Gaskin on the Unity of the Proposition

    The current issue of Dialectica (vol. 64, no. 2, June 2010) includes a symposium on Richard Gaskin, The Unity of the Proposition (Oxford 2008).  Gaskin's precis of his work is followed by critical evaluations by William F. Vallicella ("Gaskin on the Unity of the Proposition"), Manuel Garcia-Carpintero ("Gaskin's Ideal Unity"), and Benjamin Schnieder ("Propositions United:…

  • Predicates and Properties

    We are warming up to an examination of deflationary theories of truth according to which truth is either not a property or not a metaphysically substantive property.  (I oppose deflationary theories of truth just as I oppose deflationary theories of existence.) But first some clarification of 'predicate' and 'property.' 1. I begin by resisting the traditional conflation…

  • Another Round on Assertoric Force

    William Woking comments: Logical argument is just like a chess game. We have a common understanding of the rules of inference. The game ends either in reaching disagreement about a principle that is demonstrably fundamental, i.e., it self-evidently admits of no proof or disproof (e.g., Bill hates carrots), in which case stalemate, or where both…

  • Is There a Paradox of Conjunction?

    There are supposed to be paradoxes of material and strict implication. If there are, why is there no paradox of conjunction? And if there is no paradox of conjunction, why are there paradoxes of material and strict implication? With apologies to the friends and family of Dennis Wilson, the ill-starred original drummer of the Beach…

  • Deflationism: Ramsey and Redundancy

    I am using 'deflationism' as an umbrella term subsuming several different deflationary theories of truth, among them Ramsey's redundancy theory, Quine's disquotationalism, Horwich's minimalist theory, and others. Deflationary theories contrast with what might be called 'robust' or substantive' theories of truth. It is not easy to focus the issue that divides these two types of…

  • Geach on Assertion

    The main point of Peter Geach's paper, "Assertion" (Logic Matters, Basil Blackwell, 1972, pp. 254-269) is what he calls the Frege point: A thought may have just the same content whether you assent to its truth or not; a proposition may occur in discourse now asserted, now unasserted; and yet be recognizably the same proposition.…

  • Sentence, Linguistic Meaning, Proposition

    I maintain that we must distinguish among declarative sentences, their linguistic meanings, and the propositions expressed by tokenings of declarative sentences by speakers in definite contexts. Furthermore, I maintain that propositions, not linguistic meanings, are the vehicles of the truth-values. Here are four declarative sentences in four different languages, English, German, Turkish, and Latin:  I…

  • The Elusive Assertoric Component

    William of Woking comments:  Consider again (1) Tom runs (2) that Tom runs (3) It is true that Tom runs We have agreed that (1) and (3) are semantically identical. Yes, they express the very same propositional content or thought. They have the very same meaning (Sinn).   We also agree that (2) is verbally more complex than…

  • Assertion Again

    The enigmatic William of Woking e-mails from London: Hardly a week passes by without my pondering over your objection to my position on assertion.  Would it help us if I try to clarify my position again?  And it would help me, if you clarified what your position is. My position is: 1. The semantics of…