W&O: §§ 36-39
Pete Mandik
Chairman, Department of Philosophy
Coordinator, Cognitive Science Laboratory
William Paterson University, New Jersey USA
Regimentation of names
and times
I went to a movie. I’m going to eat
pizza. Fido had fleas. Mary and Fido
are very close. Mary is going to get
fleas.
How can regimentation handle the
above kinds of statements?
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Regimentation of times
Ordinary language encodes times with
tenses: I ran, I am running, I will
run
There is a way of using the present
tense to speak of eternal truths:
2 is larger than 3
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Regimentation of times
Regimentation adopts this use of the
present tense to speak of all times:
it treats the present tense as
timeless and dispenses with all other
tenses.
“This artifice frees us to omit temporal
information or, when we please, handle it like
spatial information. ‘I will not do it again’
becomes ‘I do not do it after now’, where ‘do’
is taken tenselessly and the future force of
‘will’ is translated into a phrase ‘after now’,
comparable to ‘west of here’.” p. 170
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“This adjustment lays [certain]
inferences…conveniently open to logical
inspection.” p. 170
‘George married Mary and Mary is a widow’
doesn’t entail that George had a wife at a
time when she was also a widow, as is
evidence when reparsed as:
‘George marries before now Mary and Mary is
a widow now; therefore George marries
before now (one who is) a widow now.’ p.
170
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Regimentation of names
Names lead to certain puzzling cases
and perhaps truth-value gaps.
Suppose no one is named “Mary
Lebowski”. Is “Mary Lebowski pets
puppies” true, false, or neither?
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Regimentation of names
The contribution of a name to a
sentence’s truth value depends on
there existing an object to which the
name refers. If there exists an
individual to which “Mary Lebowski”
refers, then “Mary Lebowski pets
puppies” is true if and only if Mary
Lebowski pets puppies and “Mary
Lebowski pets puppies” is false if
Mary Lebowski doesn’t pet puppies.
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Regimentation of names
A so-called name that refers to no
existing object has nothing to
contribute to its embedding
sentence. Thus, if Mary Lebowski
fails to exist, “Mary Lebowski pets
puppies” is neither true nor false.
Weird!
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Regimentation of names
We can relieve ourselves of the
weirdness of truth-value gaps by
abandoning the category of singular
terms and assimilating names to
predicates.
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Regimentation of names
Thus, instead of translating “Mary Lebowski
pets puppies” into the predicate calculus as
Pm
…where ‘m’ is a constant alleging to name an
individual and ‘Px’ is a predicate true of
petters of puppies, we can translate as
(x)(Mx & Px)
…where we ditch the alleged singular term in
favor of a general term equivalent to “is a
Mary Lebowski”.
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Regimentation of names
Regimenting “Mary Lebowski pets puppies” in the aforementioned
way dispenses with truth-value gaps. If we want to say that
there exists no such individual as Mary Lebowski, we can say
~(x)(Mx)
Or
It is not the case that there exists an object x such
that x is a Mary Lebowski
Thus “Mary Lebowski pets puppies” turns out to have a truth-value
after all. It is false since it is false that
There exists an object x such that x is a Mary Lebowski and x
is a petter of puppies
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There is only one Matt.
There exists at least one object x such
that x is a Matt and for each object y
if y is a Matt then y is identical to x.
(x)(y)(Mx & (My  x=y))
(x)(Mx & (y)(My  x=y))
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Study question:
Why regard as false sentences with
grammatical subjects that are singular
terms that fail to refer to any existing
entity?
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THE END
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