In a message dated 3/3/2002 2:57:20 PM Central Standard Time, edward@webforhumans.com writes:Each object that is not identical with itself... Putting a generous interpretation on your remarks, I take it that you think all universals have their subject term in the antecedent of a conditional and are therefore true whenever nothing fits that subject term. A fairly large group of people (I think Zeno Vendler wrote a paper on this once that may be substantially in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy) even since the free quantifier became the norm have held that a sentence starting "each member of the empty set..." was ipso facto false, ditto for "every," but not for "any" and "all." Even if we have brainwashed most folk (not likely, I think), the long tradition in logic deserves some attention in a logical language. And notice that what makes your interpretation work is not the quantifier, but the conditional. <I believe that some Lojbanists have severely overinterpreted English semantics. English is ambiguous, and is used in quite different ways by different speakers and writers.> And we ought to be able in Lojban to match anything they say. |