Re: any

[Desmond Fearnley-Sander <dfs@HILBERT.MATHS.UTAS.EDU.AU>]

This may not help.

At  8:11 PM 27/9/94 +0100, ucleaar wrote:
Veijo:
>>   If I go out, kill 10 animals of the 50 and come to tell you about
>>   my deed, then until you go out and identify the animals (if you
>>   have some need for the identification) I can have killed any
>>   single one of them up to the count of 10.
>
And:
>This is the bit I don't understand. Suppose there are three animals,
>Alfie, Boris and Candy, and you kill Alfie. Thereafter you have
>killed Alfie, but I cannot see how (i) it is true that you can
>have killed any single one of them (since you can't have killed
>Boris or Candy), and (ii) why my subsequent identification of
>the animals has any effect on which was the one you so casually
>slaughtered for the sake of explaining semantics to us.
>
"And has slaughtered one of his three pigs."
"Oh!  I hope it wasn't Alfie."
"No.  It was Boris."
"That's a pity, Candy is the fattest."
"I was only kidding.  It was really Candy."
.......

This discourse is about information, not facts.  It makes sense
independently of the facts, and indeed, since it is all invented, there are
no associated facts.  (In case someone is concerned, I'm afraid I don't
even know which pig was killed.  If any.)

Even if there were facts, the discourse would still be about information.
The truth of the matter is external to the discourse.  You may choose to
believe the first speaker in the dialogue, or not, but to be sure you will
have to visit the pigpen.

lojbab:
>Staements about non-0existent things are meaningless (they may be defined
>as false because they are meaningless, but this is definitional).
>
"Well if it was Candy, we're in for a feast."

Meaningless?  False?

Desmond