[FOM] re Plural Logic/Foundations

[W.Taylor at math.canterbury.ac.nz]

Quoting Colin McLarty <colin.mclarty at case.edu>:

> 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

There's a bunch of people in this town, a real clique, who only ever talk
to one another.

WFCT




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