[lit-ideas] minor note
- From: "Adriano Palma" <Palma@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2012 12:15:34 +0200
** Low Priority **
** Reply Requested by 6/25/2012 (Monday) **
English (or some natural language, arbitrarily chosen) is a "set of
symbols" only in the fantasy world of people such as saussure & co.
that it isn't is easy to understand since nobody simbolized it--
>>> Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> 25/06/2012 04:45 AM >>>
You don't really believe (I hope) that the English language is
'a set of symbols,' on all fours with the logical spinach one finds
in e.g. Frege, Russell, and elementary logic books.
If you did, the assignment 'put the following [some text with ands
and ors and thens and maybes] into symbolic notation would be (I think
this is the right term), otiose.
You say that 'All boys...' in English (e.g.) has an ambiguity of scope
that can be 'easily demonstrated (disambiguated?) in logical notation.
This is simply false. The ordinary language ambiguity makes it
impossible to know—without prompting—how to express it in 'logical
notational' terms. That is, until the ambiguity is removed in ordinary
language, i.e., whether
'Every boy loves some girl.'
means
'Every boy loves some girl, namely, Alice.'
or
'Every boy loves some girl or other.'
must be decided before anything can be put into the 'notation' of
e.g. Russell and Whitehead. The two disambiguated sentences need
to be logically-notationally different, and which one is to be
preferred is not decided by logical notation
I'm surprised you now want to take back, on Grice's behalf, what
he's reported as saying to Strawson. Surprised and puzzled because
I thought it was part of a fictional Grice's counter to something
Wittgenstein is falsely said to have believed.
Robert Paul,
channeling Lewis Carroll
> Re: the former, since the English language IS a set of symbols,
"Horses
> run swiftly" is already_symbolic_. Re: the latter, I agree with R.
Paul that
> there is a scope ambiguity, etc. -- and that it can be easily
> demonstrated in logical notational terms.
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