A budget of heresy

I have declared or argued for several quite heretical things. First, I declared in favour of the status of first-order modal logic as an artificial language. I then gave examples that show that the language of classical logic is unreliable for the evaluation of many arguments couched in ordinary language. It was urged that more attention should be paid to the logic–language relationship. Modal logic is more reliable for some argument evaluation than non-modal logic. But we saw that there is much beyond the scope of present modal logic – the present logic of boxes and diamonds.

I argued for a renewed look at the whole question of existential import for both quantifiers and names. An appeal was made to ordinary intuitions and sensible talk of the properties of nonexistent entities. McGinn effectively denies Parmenides' law as he writes: