The Slingshot Argument and Sentential Identity

Abstract

The famous “slingshot argument” developed by Church, Godel, Quine and Davidson is often considered to be a formally strict proof of the Fregean conception that all true sentences, as well as all false ones, have one and the same denotation, namely their corresponding truth value: the true or the false. In this paper we examine the analysis of the slingshot argument by means of a non-Fregean logic undertaken recently by A.Woitowicz and put to the test her claim that the slingshot argument is in fact circular and presupposes what it intends to prove. We show that this claim is untenable. Nevertheless, the language of non-Fregean logic can serve as a useful tool for representing the slingshot argument, and several versions of the slingshot argument in non-Fregean logics are presented. In particular, a new version of the slingshot argument is presented, which can be circumvented neither by an appeal to a Russellian theory of definite descriptions nor by resorting to an analogous “Russellian” theory of λ–terms.