[FOM] re Plural Logic/Foundations

[Colin McLarty]

On Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 12:54 PM, Richard Heck <richard_heck at brown.edu>
wrote:


> Plural quantification is very common. Consider e.g.:
>
> (1) Some critics hate Shakespeare.
>
> It's true of course that we can formalize this using first-order
> logic, i.e.,
> without doing anything special about the plural "Some critics". But from
> the point of view of linguistic theory, this isn't terribly relevant.
> Moreover, note that (1) can reasonably be followed by:
>
> (2) Yeah, and they only listen to one another.
>
> Clearly, (2) has the force of a Geach-Kaplan sentence, which means that the
> plural pronoun "they" must really be understood as plural. Moreover, it
> needs
>

It seems to me that (2) says critics who hate Shakespeare only listen to
critics who hate Shakespeare.  This is plain first order quantification..

The sentence "Some critics only listen to one another" might make a better
case for plural quantification, where we have not specified which critics
it is who only listen to one another.  But I only see sentences like that
in papers on plural quantification.  I would like to see more naturally
occurring examples.

Colin
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