Category: Language, Philosophy of
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Is Assertion Closed Under Entailment? Assertion and Presupposition
Suppose a person asserts that p. Suppose also that p entails q. Does it follow that the person asserting that p thereby asserts that q? If so, and if p and q are any propositions you like, then assertion is closed under entailment. If assertion is not closed under entailment, then there will be examples…
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A Weird ‘Fregean’ Ontological Argument
London Ed asks: Which step of the argument below do you disagree with? a) If a sentence containing a proper name is meaningful, then the proper name is meaningful, i.e. it designates. This is a standard assumption about compositionality. BV: I have a problem right here. I accept the compositionality of meaning. But a proper…
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A Christological and Mariological Query That Leads into the Philosophy of Language
Theme music: What If God Was One of Us (just a slob like one of us)? My favorite Oregonian luthier, Dave Bagwill, checks in: Karl White wrote in your post of 12-6-18: "If Jesus is a person of the Godhead then it must hold that his essence is immutable and above contingent change, particularly in…
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Literal and Figurative
Suppose I am giving an argument while leading a hike. The guy directly behind me says, "I'm not following you." The sentence is ambiguous. In one sense — call it the first — it is plainly false; in the other sense — call it the second — it could be true. If the hiker behind…
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Of ‘Shit’ and ‘S**t,’ Type and Token
How many words immediately below, two or one? cat cat. Both answers are plausible, and indeed equally plausible; but they can't both be right. There can't be both two words and one word. The obvious way to solve the problem is by distinguishing between token and type. We say: there are two tokens of the…
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Millianism and Presentism: An Aporetic Pentad
A Millian about proper names holds that the meaning of a proper name is exhausted by its referent. Thus the meaning of 'Socrates' is Socrates. The meaning just is the denotatum. Fregean sense and reasonable facsimiles thereof play no role in reference. If so, vacuous names, names without denotata, are meaningless. Presentism, roughly, is the…
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Does the Validity of an Argument Depend on the Order of its Premises?
Suppose you have a valid argument. Can you render the argument invalid by changing the display order of the premises? I should think never. The Dark Ostrich, however, offers the following putative counterexample. He says he got it from Sainsbury; I should like to see a reference. And if there is a literature on this,…
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A Most Remarkable Prophecy
The Question Suppose there had been a prophet among the ancient Athenians who prophesied the birth among them of a most remarkable man, a man having the properties we associate with Socrates, including the property of being named 'Socrates.' Suppose this prophet, now exceedingly old, is asked after having followed Socrates' career and having witnessed…
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Proper Names
The Ostrich maintains: 1. Proper names have a (context dependent) sense. Context dependent, because ‘Mars’ can mean the god, or the planet, depending on context. BV: Agreed. 2. The object itself cannot be part of the sense, although the mainstream view is that it is. BV: What is being called the mainstream view, I take…
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Use and Mention
You should never use 'progressives' without sneer quotes because 'progressives' are destructive leftists who confuse change with progress. The offensive term is mentioned in the first independent clause, and then used in the second, albeit in an altered sense. When I write that 'progressives' are destructive, mendacious, devoid of common sense, and so on, I…
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What is Ed’s Puzzle?
This just in from London: A man called ‘Socrates’ is running and Socrates is debating. Clearly if anyone verifies ‘a man called ‘Socrates’, and if ‘a man who is debating’ verifies that same person, then the conjunction appears to be true. And any number of men can be called…
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A Reference Puzzle
Ed submits the following: Suppose I am looking at a crowd of people and cry ‘there is a man in the crowd!’. Well very likely, and clearly I have some man in mind. But the predicate ‘is a man in the crowd’ is not just true of him, but of every man in the crowd.…
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On the Reference of Proper Names
London Ed writes and I respond in blue: Still thinking about how to frame the main argument, so please help me out here. There is a woman called ‘Clinton’. Clinton is a politician. I claim there is a semantic connection between the name ‘Clinton’ that is used in the second sentence, but mentioned in the first sentence. It…
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The Function-Argument Schema in the Analysis of Propositions, Part II
A second installment from the Ostrich of London. Another difficulty with the function-argument theory is staring us in the face, but generally unappreciated for what it is. As Geach says, the theory presupposes an absolute category-difference between names and predicables, which comes out in the choice of ‘fount’ [font] for the schematic letters corresponding to…
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The Function-Argument Schema in the Analysis of Propositions
The Ostrich of London sends the following to which I add some comments in blue. Vallicella: ‘One of Frege's great innovations was to employ the function-argument schema of mathematics in the analysis of propositions’. Peter Geach (‘History of the Corruptions of Logic’, in Logic Matters 1972, 44-61) thinks it actually originated with Aristotle, who suggests (Perihermenias 16b6)…