Heidegger

Review of Jud’s Essay.

I’ve read your essay, “Natural Language Universal and Existential
Quantifiers”. thank you for restating your position as an integrated
whole.

1. Unnecessary Adornments?

some aspects of your theory seem to have no obvious purpose; for
examples:

1.1: you have three different words (denotatum, designatum et nominatum)
to classify the referent of the word or phrase used as the grammatical
subject of a sentence. what purpose is served by such a classification?
are there even more words used to classify the referents of other parts
of a sentence such as the direct and indirect object of a verb?

1.2: you say that ‘is’ is not a verb; but, your definition of ‘verb’ (a
‘doing or action word’) arbitrarily excludes stative verbs. note that
“in languages where the copula is a verb, it is a stative verb, as is
the case in English *be*.”  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stative_ver…]

assuming the use and functioning of ‘is’ is to your liking, what
difference would it make how grammarians classify ‘is’ as a part of
speech?

if you object to the classification of ‘exists’ as a verb why not just
say ‘x is an existent’ instead of ‘x exists’? based on your own analysis
of this transformation, the suppressed copula is explicitized with no
alteration of meaning.

2. The Properties of the Copula

you adopt the traditional perspective that the copula indicates number
and tense; and, presumably, you would agree that copula is also
inflected to indicate grammatical person.

you also say that ‘is’ “allows the subject to act as a linguistically
universal instantiative operator” so that the subject word becomes
self-instantiating.

this theory seems unnecessarily convoluted. you make ‘is’ an operator
that has the power to give the subject the power of self-instantiation.
what is the advantage of this division of labor over the theory that
whatever work is done by the words themselves (if any) is done by ‘is’
alone?

3. Linguistic Operators and Logical Quantifiers

even if the admittedly minor points previously mentioned were cleared
up, one aspect of your theory would remain highly problematic: your
account of the relationship between the linguistic operators (’is’ and
‘exists’) and the quantifiers of predicate logic.

your account of ‘exists’ seems to be in partial conflict with
Heidegger’s 4th thesis as to being as stated in _The Basic Problems of
Phenomenology_ (Sec. 4). The 4th thesis is “the thesis of logic in the
broadest sense: every being, regardless of its particular way of being,
can be addressed and talked about by means of the ‘is’. The being of the
copula.”

you seem to define the use of ‘exists’ as a linguistic operator so that
it is a substitute for ‘is’ as a translation of the so-called
existential quantifier — but only for some classes of statements.

I hasten to point out that this is a vast improvement over the previous
version of your theory which insisted that the existential quantifier
asserted existence *as you defined that term* in all translations of
existentially quantified statements from a symbolic form into its
natural language equivalent. now, you seem to limit the use of ‘exists’
to situations where the restrictive definition you give it does not
conflict with the use of ‘is’ in such translations.

cases where the use of ‘exists’ in translating existentially quantified
statements would conflict with your definition of exists include:

3.1: an even prime number exists.

this statement conflicts with the restriction that exists only asserts
the existence of actual concrete objects.

3.2: magnetic monopoles exist.

this would seem to conflict with the restriction that one can only use
exists when one already knows the subject word actually exists. in this
example, the truth value of ‘magnetic monopoles exist’ is unknown. they
are predicted to exist but they haven’t been found yet. however, I see
no reason to ban the asserting of ‘magnetic monopoles exist’ or the
asserting of ‘magnetic monopoles do not exist’ as one’s opinions and
theories may be.

4. Conclusion

in the final analysis, Heidegger would say that more situations can be
described using ‘is’ than you allow to be described using ‘exists’ as
you restrictively define ‘exists’.

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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Posted on Sunday, November 23rd, 2008 at 7:00 am
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