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Pronouns, Quantifiers, and Relative Clauses (II): Appendix

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Gareth Evans
Gareth Evans*
Affiliation:
University College, Oxford
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Extract

It is occasionally tempting, after climbing a mountain, to use the elevation one has gained to dash up to the top of a connected peak which does not have sufficient interest to induce one to climb so high for its sake alone. It is in this spirit that I turn to Geach's Latin Prose theory of relative clauses. The matter itself is of no very great moment, and some new ground will have to be covered in dealing with Geach's arguments. Nevertheless we shall primarily be applying the theory constructed in the body of the paper, and when one is in a position to expose bad arguments relatively rapidly, it is perhaps a good idea not to leave them unchallenged, especially when they appear to be gaining currency.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 7 , Issue 4 , December 1977 , pp. 777 - 797
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1977

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Footnotes

*

This article is an appendix to “Pronouns, Quantifiers, and Relative Clauses (1),” Canadian journal of Philosophy VII, 3 (September, 1977). Many references given here are given in full only in that article.

References

1 See especially Quine, W. V. “Reply to Geach”, in Davidson and Hintikka (eds.) Words and Objections (Reidel, Dordrecht, 1969), pp. 331Google Scholar-32 and The Roots of Reference, pp. 90-91.

2 Rescher, N. ‘Plurality-quantification’, journal of Symbolic Logic 27 (1962) p. 374.Google Scholar

3 Wallace, J. Philosophical Grammar, Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1964 (University Microfilms: Ann Arbor, 1971), esp. pp. 136-54.Google Scholar

4 J.E.J. Altham and N.W. Tennant, op. cit. In saying that they propose a binary analysis, I am cutting through their confusing terminology, and regarding their ‘sortalizer’ as the first constituent in a binary structure. The contrast they have in mind between ‘sortal’ (or ‘restricted’) quantifiers on the one hand and binary quantifiers on the other is never adequately explained, and in my view is better dispensed with. This will help to clear up one contradiction in their paper; for on p. 52 ‘Many P's are Q's’ is said to be irreducibly sortal while on pp. 50 and 56 sortal quantifiers are said to be replaceable everywhere by non-sortal quantifiers. The point is that ‘Many P's are Q's’ is irreducibly binary, and it is not threatened by the replacement of Altham and Tennant's ‘sortal’ quantifiers by other n-ary (n >1) quantifiers.

5 D.K. Lewis, ‘Adverbs of Quantification’, in E. Keenan op. cit. pp.3-15.

6 M. Dummett, Frege, p. 162.1t is not so much a suggestion Dummett makes on his own account as one he offers to one who is impressed by Russell's theory of descriptions.

7 ‘Back Reference’, pp. 204-5. Geach offers a binary treatment of ‘Just one’ quantifier and also, with acknowledgement to Prior, to the ‘the’ quantifier. Presumably to maintain consistency with his views on relative clauses, the binary structure Geach assigns to the sentence ‘The only bachelor who was at the party was F’ is ‘The only bachelor x (x was at the party; x was F)’, rather than ‘The x (x was a bachelor at the party; x was F). But there is no getting around the fact that the property which is required to be uniquely exemplified for the truth of the sentence is ‘being a bachelor at the party’. In view of this, ‘bachelor’ “goes with” ‘was at the party’ in a way in which it plainly does not go with ‘was F ’,and it seems pointless not to have a notation which registers this fact. See e.g. Partee, B.H. ‘Some Transformational Extensions of Montague Grammar’, in Partee (ed.), Montague Grammar (Academic Press, 1976), p. 55:Google Scholar ‘Only by making the major syntactic division between “the” and “boy who lives in the park” can a uniform semantic treatment of the be given’.

8 Reference and Generality, p. 118.

9 Reference and Generality, p. 115.

10 ‘On Complex Terms’, Logic Matters, p. 104.

11 ‘Complex Terms Again’, Logic Matters, pp. 107-8.

12 Roots of Reference, p. 90. See Reference and Generality, p. 117. The longer argument in Reference and Generality contains a counter-argument against a way of trying to get out of this ‘difficulty’. Since I shall argue the ‘difficulty’ is quite spurious we do not have to go into these ramifications.

13 “Quine's Syntactical Insights”, Logic Matters, p. 122. See also ‘On Complex Terms’, pp. 102-5.

14 “On Complex Terms”, Logic Matters, p. 105.1 have changed the numbering and the constituents to make them appropriate to the examples we are considering.

15 ‘On the other hand, (20), is “G(one woman)”, where G is proxy for: Every true Englishman honours— above all other women, and— is his Queen.’ ‘Quine's Syntactical Insights’, Logic Matters, p. 124.

16 Reference and Generality, p. 113.

17 See p. 528, “Pronouns, Quantifiers, and Relative Clauses (1).”

18 Reference and Generality, p. 114.

19 ‘Complex Terms Again’, Logic Matters, p. 107; see also Reference and Generality, p. 118-19 and ‘Back Reference’, p. 202.

20 See Geach, P.T. ‘Good and Evil’, Analysis 17 (1956), p. 33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 For a discussion of a related sentence, ‘Only moderate students left’, see E.L. Keenan, ‘Quantifier Structures in English’ op. cit.

22 Reference and Generality, p. 116.

23 J.D. McCawley, ‘A Program for Logic’, in Davidson and Harman op. cit., p. 530.

24 Logic Matters, p. 125.

25 Geach should not be encouraged in his discovery of, for example, a hidden ‘if … then’ in the sentence ‘Any man who owns a donkey beats it’ by the natural English paraphrase ‘Any man, if he owns a donkey, beats it’. For after all, we have ‘Most men, if they are married, are happy’ where the ‘if’ is not a trace of the logician's conditional. See D.K. Lewis, ‘Adverbs of Quantification’, p. 11: ‘I conclude that the if of our restrictive if-clauses should not be regarded as a sentential connective … It serves merely to mark an argument-place in a polyadic construction’.