I asked, \u201cDon\u2019t potencies need to be grounded in something actual?\u201d Tom Carroll responded, “I think you meant that rhetorically, but yes \u2014 that is the way I understand it.”<\/p>\n
Two points.<\/p>\n
First, rhetorical questions should be used sparingly if at all in serious, non-polemical writing. If you have something to say, say it and use the indicative mood.\u00a0 So no, I did not mean the question about potencies rhetorically.\u00a0 When I write philosophy I avoid rhetorical questions.\u00a0 It is different when I write polemically. For example, “Whoever said that illegal aliens are illegal persons?”\u00a0 is an example of a rhetorical question. *<\/p>\n
Second, how should we define ‘rhetorical question’?\u00a0 A rhetorical\u00a0 question is a sentence, spoken or written, that is grammatically interrogative but logically indicative.\u00a0 It is a sentence in the form of a question used to make a statement or assert a proposition. A sentence is not the same as the proposition it is used, by someone on a given occasion, to express.\u00a0 We use ‘The sky is blue’ to express the same proposition a German speaker expresses when he\u00a0 says Der Himmel ist blau<\/em>.\u00a0 The two sentences, which express one and the same sense (Frege’s Sinn<\/em>) are both token-distinct and type-distinct. They are type-distinct because they belong to different languages.\u00a0 These facts point us in a Platonic direction.<\/p>\n Just what is the ontological status of this proposition (Frege’s Gedanke<\/em>)\u00a0 that is one to the many of its sentential expressions?\u00a0 And what about language-bound linguistic types, in particular sentence types, which are different for different languages? What is their<\/em> ontic and epistemic status? What is their mode of being and how do we know them?\u00a0 Do you eyeball (literally see) the type? No you don’t. These types too are one to the many of their tokens. These two questions pose quite the challenge to the nominalists among us and give aid and comfort to Platonists and other species of realists.<\/p>\n But I digress.<\/p>\n One more observation anent rhetorical uses of sentences. A father says to his teenaged daughter who borrowed the old man’s car and is seen yapping on a cell phone while driving: ” Do you have to talke on that blasted phone while driving?”<\/p>\n I’d say that that is a rhetorical question too despite the fact that the semantic content of the man’s grammatically interrogative sentence is not indicative but imperative.\u00a0 He is issuing a command, not making a statement, by the use of a grammatically interrogative sensentence.<\/p>\n ____________<\/p>\n *By the way, polemics has no place in philosophy proper, a topic for a separate post, wherein I would have to define ‘philosophy proper.’ This goes hand-in-hand with my deep conviction that to philosophize is to inquire, and not to promote or defend a ready-made worldview.\u00a0 It follows that an apology for philosophy is not a defense of any particular philosophy,\u00a0 but of the practice of philosophy-as-inquiry. Philosophies are many; philosophy is one. It also follows that a particular philosopher’s\u00a0 apologia pro vita sua<\/em> (apology for his life) such as the one Socrates offers in the eponymous Platonic dialogue, is a defense of the highest and most noble form of the life of inquiry.\u00a0 \u00a0The Latin phrase alludes to a title of an autobiographical word by John Henry Newman, which I haven’t read, but whose The Idea of the University<\/em> I have read and recommend that you read. If I were king of the world I would force ever leftist university admin to copy it out by hand.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I asked, \u201cDon\u2019t potencies need to be grounded in something actual?\u201d Tom Carroll responded, “I think you meant that rhetorically, but yes \u2014 that is the way I understand it.” Two points. First, rhetorical questions should be used sparingly if at all in serious, non-polemical writing. If you have something to say, say it and … Continue reading “Rhetorical Questions”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,408,20,893],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-language-matters","category-language-philosophy-of","category-metaphilosophy","category-potency-and-act"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14263"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14263\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14269,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14263\/revisions\/14269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}