A Reply to Boër

Abstract

In Steven E. Boer's criticism (Mind, this number, pp. 263-267 of my paper ' Exists'; Mind, 82 (1973), 56-72), there are two claims which he makes against me which are important, it seems to me. One is the claim that I confuse 'providing truth conditions . .. for a sentence' and 'providing a translation .. . of a sentence' (Boer, p. 265). The other is the claim that the notion of a 'language game' cannot be used to successfully explicate what I mean by saying that a name has no use in a language (Boer, p. 265). Boer draws his support for the first claim from two things I say. One is an acceptance by me of what is called the 'substitution interpretation of the quantifiers' (or 'SIQ'). I did not defend this interpretation in my original paper, and I will not do it here. It has survived a great deal of logical enquiry by such philosopher-logicians as Marcus, Dunn and Belnap, and Boer's unhappiness with it seems to me to be the result of a confusion over the nature of the artificial 'languages' of symbolic logic. He speaks of what '(3x)N(x>7)' means, as if it were a piece of ordinary English, and he were citing its uses. I may not be able to say 'It's hot in here' and mean 'It's cold in here' as Wittgenstein reminds us, but I can write '(3x)N(x>7)' and mean whatever I wish, as long as it is consistent with my rules of inference, interpretation, and syntax. Thus I do unite the two undertakings Boer mentions in the case of SIQ, but I do not think it is a confusion. It would be a confusion if inconsistency resulted, but it has been proven that the predicate calculus with SIQ is consistent. The other claim I make that leads Boer to his conclusion about my 'confusion' is the central theme of my paper which he quotes at the beginning of his criticism. I did not claim, and I deny now, that Boer's (i) is equivalent to his (7), that is, I think his (25) is false. After all since (A) 'Santa Claus' denotes Santa Claus, it follows that (B) it denotes something; so substituting 'Santa Claus' for 'a' in (25), the left side is false, and the right side is true. Therefore (25) is false. If Boer thinks (A) is false (I consider it to be analytic), we obviously have different notions about 'denotation', and if he accepts (A), but says (B) is false, then he cannot justify the inference from his (26) to (27). The difference between us concerning 'denotation' seems to be that I take it as an intensional property and as introducing an opaque context, whereas Boer does not. (He quantifies into the context in (6), for example.) But I did not speak of 'denotation' in my paper, and will not attempt an explication of the concept now. The problem concerning my use of 'language game' is more subtle and I can only point to the way I would like to go. First of all, Boer's claim that the difference (the only one?) between