The Ambiguity as to the Referent of ‘I’
November 16th, 2008, search relatedRelated posts :: The Simplest of Sentences? :: Words Have Changing Referents :: The Simplest of Sentences? :: The Oddness of the OD
[Joe]: however, it sounds like you have redefined ‘universal
quantifier’. a statement like ‘I am’ is more like an existentially
quantified statement; particulaly after one explicitizes the implicit
complement. ‘I am’ = ‘I am an existent’. this would be treated as an
existentially quantified statement: There is an x such that x is an
existent and I am that x.
[Jud]: I have already defined the so-called *universal quantifiers* of
natural language and have identified them as *is* and its fellow
conjugates. Below I spell out my position at greater length, rather than
in the fragmentary way that it has emerged in list-discourse.
[Joe (new)]:
Jud, I’m studying your clarification of quantifiers as you see them;
and, will reply to that soon. meanwhile, I’ll just take this opportunity
to comment on some extraneous issues that you raise in the same post so
that they need not distract us further.
1. Analysis of First-Person Existential Statements (eg ‘I am’)
summary of the discussion thus far:
it seems that we both accept that the naked copula has an implicit
complement; but, we disagree as to what that is.
I consider my approach minimalistic. if the statement ‘I am’ is expanded
to explicitize the implicit complement of the naked copula, we would get
a statement asserting the root predicate; meaning, we get *one* of the
following (depending on the root predicate chosen):
‘I am’ = ‘I am an existent (of some sort)’
‘I am’ = ‘I am a reality (of some sort)’
‘I am’ = ‘I am a being (of some sort)’
why is this is a minimalistic approach, you ask? because the root
predicate is defined to assert no more than what is asserted by the
‘is/am’ — that the subject of the assertion is ‘not nothing at all’.
[Joe (previously)]: we have to add the qualifier ‘(of some sort)’
because of the ambiguity as to the mode of being/existence/reality of
the referent of ‘I’.
[Jud (previously)]: The *of some sort* is total childish crap!!!
EVERYBODY ON EARTH KNOWS THEY ARE HUMAN - and whether they are male or
female (or somewhere in between, Chinese or Danish, white or black etc.
you are writing TOTAL CRAP!!! There is NOTHING at all *ambiguous* about
being human and knowing it.
[Joe (new)]:
try to remember that ‘what am I?’ is the first-person way to ask ‘what
is a human?’. so answering ‘a human’ to the question ‘what am I?’ is
like saying ‘a human is a human’. true; but, not informative at all.
‘human’ is just the name we give our species. the purpose of asking
‘what am I?’ is to discover the *structure* of the human individual.
[Jud (previously)]: I am all for any inquiry as to the structure of a
human. But there is nothing remotely *ambiguous* about a human
[Joe (new)]:
there are two popular theories as to the structure of a human.
1: a human is more than a human body
2: a human is no more than a human body
there is no ambiguity as to which physical objects are human bodies;
but, until one of these theories becomes a proven fact, there is an
ambiguity as to the referent of ‘I’. does ‘I’ refer to the body only or
to that something more (if any) or to the composite as a whole?
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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