Isness, Nominata and Quantifiers
November 30th, 2008, search relatedRelated posts :: The Uses of ‘Is’ are not Quantifiers :: The Uses of ‘Is’ are not Quantifiers :: taking Care of Isness :: The Uses of ‘Is’ are not Quantifiers
Language vs Logic 1: Isness, Nominata and Quantifiers
GEVANS613 at aol.com wrote:
jPolanik at nc.rr.com writes:
>[Joe]: Jud, your recent posts concerning the natural language
>quantifiers ‘is’ and ‘exists’ display a fundamental confusion insofar
>as they suggest that there is a relationship between natural language
>quantifiers and logical quantifiers.
>[Jud]: Let me attempt to *de-confuse* you Joe. First of all there is no
>right which reserves the term *quantifier* exclusively for use by
>predicational logicians. The term was only introduced in the early
>nineteenth century as a term in logic. It has been in use in NL for
>centuries and comes from the Medieval Latin quantificre : Latin
>quantus, how great; see quantity + Latin -ficre, -fy. Literally in the
>sense of “determine the quantity of, the measure of* etc.
[Joe (new)]: logic formalized the relationship between premises
containing quantifiers and the conclusions that may be drawn from them.
>[Joe]: there are two uses of ‘is’ involved in this discussion: the is
>of predication and the is of isness.
>Jud: There is no *isness,* there is only *that which exists.*
[Joe (new)]: there is that which is. by arbitrarily translating ‘is’
into ‘exists’ and then defining ‘exists’ to mean ‘exists as matergy’
you:
(1): promote obvious absurdities; for example, ‘there is an even prime
number’ becomes ‘an even prime number exists’ becomes ‘an even prime
number exists as matergy’.
(2): have contradicted yourself. by restricting the use of the
existential quantifier to those uses consistent with your definition
of ‘exists’, you contradict your claim that “I am researching,
analysing and writing about NL Quantifiers which are not restricted
by the … language of logic”.
>[Jud]: We are discussing whether the subjects of sentences actually
>exist as objects (nominata) not the reification of human
>mentalisations.
[Joe (new)]: I’ve already established that we don’t always know this
before speaking; and, yet, we seem to get along fine. as I’ve indicated
with regard to the search for the magnetic monopole, in any debate
between physicists as to whether the magnetic monopole exists or does
not exist, we don’t know whether the word ‘monopole’ has a nominatum or
a designatum — and it doesn’t seem to matter. physicists can still
conduct their experiments and will one day find out whether there is a
magnetic monopole or not; and, on that day you will find out whether
‘magnetic monopole’ has a nominatum or a designatum. none of your
philosophical analysis will affect the outcome one iota. you have to
know whether an entity exists as matergy before you say whether you’ve
been referring to a nominatum or a designatum; and, you gain no further
knowledge by drawing that conclusion.
>[Jud]: The concept of *isness* is no more than a classificatory
>conception of the classifying human …
[Joe (new)]: I believe I mentioned this many moons ago. isness defines
the universe of discourse — that which is is not nothing; and,
therefore, is within the universe of discourse. obviously, I’ve just
spoken about that which is. when ‘isness’ is specified as the root
predicate of a given speaker’s choice, a classification scheme emerges
— a taxonomy of all that (allegedly) is.
>[Jud]: You are confusing the aware human’s sensing of *what exists* as
>some will o’ the wisp *property* of the object.
if someone *could* sense existence; then, existence *would* be a
property. ‘existent’ is a predicate; but, not a property. the same is
true of the root predicate.
the point here is that not everything that is is in the same way. [you
may recall this point as the thrust of Axiom 2 (not every reality has
the same reality type).]
there are modes of isness — what I call reality types; or, what (in a
linguistic frame of reference using ‘existent’ as its root predicate)
would be called modes of existence.
Joe
–
Philosophy is, after all, done ultimately in the first person for the
first person. — H-N Castaneda
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http://what-am-i.net
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