Posted by zeugma on December 6, 2005, at 21:03:36
In reply to Re: Zeugma help!!!!!, posted by alexandra_k on December 4, 2005, at 14:53:35
> Ooh. I woke up at three in the morning...
> With the realisation that I messed this up rather...
>
> > 'the present king of france is bald'.
> > It is not T, so it must be F.
> > but to say it is F is to imply / logically entail that
> > 'there is a present king of france and that present king of france is bald' is T.
>
> LOL!!! No it isn't. to say that it is F is to imply / logically entail that 'there is a present king of france and that present king of france is bald' is F.>>it doesn't entail all that. to say that 'Z is bald' is F entails nothing about my quantificational status (although it may be very wishful thinking). 'the present king of france' is a possible existent and so contributes to the meaning of the whole (or so i would want to say to protect my precious principle of compositionality) but cannot be assigned to the extension of the predicate 'is bald,' because no tally of bald objects picks him out.
in fact there is no list that he appears on. what are we to make of him then? kaplan said that descriptions are always 'searching, searching, searching.' we are to imagine the description as a kind of identifiability rule, which we can use to range over all the objects in the universe. if it comes up empty as in the case of the present king of france, at least we knew where to look.
(this is more poetry than logic)
>> (oops)
>
> So...
>
> > but of course 'there is a present king of france' is F.
>
> Yep.
>
sentences with quantifiers are tricky.'there i am, in front of the computer' is T.
but i'd want to say that this conveys virtually no information without context.
'there are two planets inside the earth's orbit' is T thanks to the existence of Mercury and venus, and the fact that both can be paired with the concept 'planet inside the earth's orbit.'
'there is no present king of france' is T because nothing can be paired with the concept 'present king of france.'
i am assuming that existential statements involve pairings of objects with concepts, while descriptions do not. 'the second planet from the sun is smoggy' can be taken as ambiguous. someone ignorant of astronomy can say this and fail to identify venus as the second planet from the sun,in which case the language does the work for him, so to speak- the sentence is T in virtue of a concept-concept pairing, which strikes my logically untuned ear as meaning that 'the second planet from the sun' is a second-order predicate, which ranges over predicates- in this case the first-order predicate 'is smoggy,' which ranges over objects.
ok, that's all mangled.
if we accept possible worlds we can say that 'the present king of france' is an object.
but we can't say 'there is a present king of france' is T, because any identification of an object as the present king of france would be an error.
i don't like this however.
> > and thus 'there is a present king of france and that king of france is bald' is F.
>
> Yep.
>
> But there isn't a contradiction anymore...
>
> :-(
>
> Crap.
>
> I'm sure it was neither true nor false because it led to contradiction if we regarded it as false...
>
> Zeugma...
>
> help...
>
ok, i tried.now please help me sort out my own mess.
:-(-z
poster:zeugma
thread:585017
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20051203/msgs/586268.html