cbostrum (08/04/82)
Well, "ark" may *really* be saying "good food is usually not cheap" when he says "good food is not cheap", but the statement itself is not really saying that, but in fact is saying that good food is not cheap. This comes down to the distinction first discussed by H.P Grice between sentence meaning and utterer meaning. Utterer meaning is not neccessarily closely related to setence meaning; sometimes it is radically different, such as when one says "thats a bright idea" and means "thats a dumb idea". But note it seems this sort of talk cant be done unless one concedes that there are sentence meanings of some sort. It is these sentence meanings of the two statements that are commonly acknowledged to be *logically* equivalent. Of course, since English is not logic, strictly speaking, the statements cannot be logically equivalent, but the commonly acknowledged translations can be. As far as "rhm" and smullyan and quantification goes, I would like to see specific examples of what he is talking about. Smullyan is a formal mathematical logician, so strictly speaking stuff about reasonable translations of English to logic is outside his professional field. But I dont understand rhms remarks about quantification. In the case of things like "good food" occuring as subjects and objects of sentences, this is generally considered to be a predication of an "attribute" to a mass term, and the translation would be as I gave earlier. Of course, this does ignore idiomatic usage, as one usually tries to do when speaking accurately. (However, speaking accurately is often not a very efficient thing to do.) In particular, rhm mentions "incorrect and insufficient [sic] quantizing [sic]" (Is insufficient quantification when there is a free variable one wanted bound? I dont understand.) I would say the problem in translating English sentences into logic are more often problems with observing correct modalites (eg "usually" as ark mentions) rather than with quantification. In fact, it is controversial what to do about modalities in logic, especially when quantifiers are involved (eg "quantifying in" (to modal conexts (cf: Quine, Word and Object Linsky, Reference and Modality))).