[lit-ideas] Re: Is 'All men are mortal' unscientific?
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 15 Mar 2008 18:29:55 -0230
Quoting Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>:
snip
> 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.
snip
For those of you wondering, what kind of a bar that was, and where on this
planet could it possibly be, allow me the conjecture of an empirical
hypothesis.
It must have been that pub right next to New College, Oxford, where RP, Gilbert
Ryle , Paul Heywood Hirst and their ilk would assemble, after a hard day of
lectures and administrivia, to bang their heads on the ridiculously low
ceilings, savour the extant exotic cheeses on offing, hoist a few cold ones
and, lest it go unmentioned, entertain the young female Rhodes scholars from
Canada and the U.S with questions to do with the cognitive significance of
moral judgements (we know what term A.J used here, but this is prime time,
after all). "Ordinary" indeed. About as "ordinary" as "ordinary language
philosophy."
Walter O.
The Rock of the Avalon
>
> 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
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