[lit-ideas] Re: Michael Dummett
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 09 Jan 2012 01:32:50 -0800
Quoting John McCreery wrote
One somewhere, or many? A question also raised by Stanley Cavell in
*Conditions
Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism. *
re
Remember what Aristotle said: all roads lead somewhere. Frege, as you
point out,
found this puzzling.
JL alluded to this earlier. It was not until Frege's great work that
formal notation was able to capture the difference between
All roads lead somewhere (e.g. to Rome); that is, there is a single
location to which all roads lead.
and
All roads lead somewhere (e.g. Bangkok, Albany NY--and a long,
sometimes overlapping list of different places to which various roads
lead.
The fallacy of moving from the second statement to the first, as
Elizabeth Anscombe once accused Aristotle of doing ('Everything is
thought to aim at some good; therefore, the Good is that at which all
things aim') was christened by her or by Peter Geach, the 'boy-girl
fallacy,' and illustrated by pointing out the difference between
Every boy loves some girl * (e.g Sally).
and
Every boy loves some girl * (or other).
The words before the asterisk are ambiguous as between the two. It's
easy to disambiguate them in ordinary language; but was impossible,
pre-Frege to do so
in any logical notation.
Anscombe spells out the fallacy in her 1958 book on the Tractatus, and
Geach does so in his 1962 (?) work, Reference and Generality.
Robert Paul
'Logic is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.'
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