Phil wrote
This quote may be in the context of a discussion of what counts as scientific and what doesn't, surely a pointless discussion in and of itself since there is nothing that makes a statement scientific, but it is wrong, in several ways, to claim that the sentence 'All men are mortal' means 'there is a time t such that x dies at t'. First, it is sloppy in that the word 'mortal' has a meaning beyond simply dying.
I agree with Phil that an everyday sentence isn't't transformed into a 'philosophical sentence' by stipulation (and what would one stipulate, besides that?). Ordinary people like me don't like to have their language messed with; they're still worrying about which goes where in the case of 'this' and 'that,' which a man I met in a bar once said was a metaphysical question if there ever was one. He was right. It stumped both of us.
I was really worried though about Quine's definition. Surely, 'All men are mortal' doesn't readily translate into a proposition about only one x. One would hope that the original version there was a universal quantifier, 'For all x, if x is a man, and so on and so on…' Moreover, in the sentence provided by Phil, x might, for all we're told, range over rocks, books, or cheap plastic razors.
Robert Paul ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
