Something to Consider: The "Elatically"

By J. L. Speranza

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I put this frivolously, but it's not meant to be!

Consider

i. Pirots karulize elatically.
A is a pirot
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Thus, A karulizes elatically.

The 'elatically' bit has given so many problems to logicians, that one has to adjudicate a lot of insight, foresight and sight to Carnap on _that_ one!

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This leads to:

i. Carnap held to be a pragmatist in matters of choosing a language.

ii. I don't think the same holds for Grice: leaving aside the issue of a scientific unified physicalist language to hold all the truths worth holding, there is for Grice (and indeed all logicians I met!) the problem that a System (G, C, what not) has to recover, testify, justify, model, retrieve, yield, all the arguments that we deem 'valid' in NL.

iii. "Elatically" in arguments:

Pirots karulize elatically
_____________________________

Thus, pirots karulize.

This seems blatantly valid, yet it _is_ a minor problem to get that 'valid' in first-order predicate calculus with identity!

iv. I pose the problem, if problem it is, to consider, reflect on, different aims at playing with Symbolo, or Systems C, or G. If one takes a mere pragmatist standpoint one is not putting oneself in a position to be held accountable if one's system fails to model an ordinary-language argument. And that _would_ be a problem (for some logicians, and indeed philosophers (of language, included)).

Cheers,

JL