What's in a Name?
As those of you familiar with philosophy and logic already know, using quantifier terms as names is a really bad idea. In case you're not familiar with this, the problem is basically that, presumably, we wouldn't want the claim "Everybody loves tacos" to be true just because someone decided to name their kid 'Everybody' and he, in fact, loves tacos. So, this is pretty clear to those of us with backgrounds in even a little bit of logic. However, you may need to teach this to your students at some point and, in thinking about this today, I thought of a funny (and perhaps useful) way of looking at it.
In the Odyssey, there is a scene in which Odysseus and his crew are stranded on an island populated by hostile cyclopes. They are captured by a particular cyclops named Polyphemos, who intends to eat them, I think. Anyhow, when Polyphemos inquires after his name, Odysseus cleverly introduces himself as 'Nobody', which Polyphemos more-or-less uncritically accepts. When Polyphemos falls asleep, Odysseus and his men poke out his eye with a huge sharpened stick, and escape by tying themselves to the undersides of his sheep. Polyphemos cries out for help, and his fellow cyclopes reply by asking him who is hurting him. Now the real problem is apparent: Polyphemos replies by stating that "Nobody is hurting me." As a result, the other cyclopes are puzzled and fail to come to the aid of Polyphemos while Odysseus and his men escape.
So, the moral of the story is: If you interpret quantifier terms as names, you'll have your eye poked out, your sheep stolen, and your friends won't even help you. If that's not a Brandom-esque proto-norm, I don't know what is! (By "Brandom-esque proto-norm" I am referring to Brandom's picture of norms arising from non-normative sanctions--punishment basically--as described in Making It Explicit, which is an extraordinarily complex and interesting work.)
In the Odyssey, there is a scene in which Odysseus and his crew are stranded on an island populated by hostile cyclopes. They are captured by a particular cyclops named Polyphemos, who intends to eat them, I think. Anyhow, when Polyphemos inquires after his name, Odysseus cleverly introduces himself as 'Nobody', which Polyphemos more-or-less uncritically accepts. When Polyphemos falls asleep, Odysseus and his men poke out his eye with a huge sharpened stick, and escape by tying themselves to the undersides of his sheep. Polyphemos cries out for help, and his fellow cyclopes reply by asking him who is hurting him. Now the real problem is apparent: Polyphemos replies by stating that "Nobody is hurting me." As a result, the other cyclopes are puzzled and fail to come to the aid of Polyphemos while Odysseus and his men escape.
So, the moral of the story is: If you interpret quantifier terms as names, you'll have your eye poked out, your sheep stolen, and your friends won't even help you. If that's not a Brandom-esque proto-norm, I don't know what is! (By "Brandom-esque proto-norm" I am referring to Brandom's picture of norms arising from non-normative sanctions--punishment basically--as described in Making It Explicit, which is an extraordinarily complex and interesting work.)
posted by Matt Carlson at 8:43 PM
2 Comments:
Remember the "I always want a cookie" girl? Perhaps we misunderstood and what she was saying was, "I, Always, want a cookie!" Is this the same problem?
Yes, that's definitely a related problem, assuming at least that we can understand "Always" as being explicated by a universal quantifier (which we could if, e.g., our domain of discourse was points in time or something...). What an unfortunate name for a person, though.
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