WikiDiscuss

On 6/2/05, Arnt Richard Johansen <arj@nvg.org> wrote:
> You are
> quantifying over all the entities in the universe, unrestricted. Since
> there will always be non-swimming entities (such as myself, or that book
> on my table), such a universal claim will be false.
>
> Unless you want to invoke the concept of "universe of discourse", but this
> is dubious, since AFAIK we don't have any explicit way of picking out a
> universe of discourse.

It seems to me that it is much easier to pick out a
universe of discourse for a given discourse than
have "all the entities in the universe" determined once
and for all for every possible discourse. Who is going to
decide what does and what does not count as
such an "entity in the universe". I hope not the BPFK.

> > (from a given semantic perspecitve, outside BPFK scope, blah blah blah).
>
> I do not agree that the way quantification works is outside the BPFK
> scope.

How quantification works can be found in any introductory
Logic text. There is no need to have all entities in the
universe determined for all contexts in order to use
quantification.

mu'o mi'e xorxes