Talk:Subjunctive possibility

Philosophy: Metaphysics / Logic Mid‑importance

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sense

"(you can infer that Jones does V the fact that Jones must logically V;" does not make sense.

""Dick Cheney is a married bachelor," on the other hand, is logically impossible; anyone who is a bachelor is therefore not married, so the sentence involves a logical contradiction."

There is nothing logically impossible at all about this sentence. It's quite possible that speakers of English, in 10 years, collectively decide that "bachelor" means "married." This was the whole point to Quine's "Two Dogmas" paper. Indeed, while Quine breaks down the analytic/synthetic distinction, he nonetheless concedes that analyticity holds for propositions in which one finds logical particles like "not." Thus, what would be logically impossible is the following sentence: "Dick Cheney is a married unmarried (or non-married) man." In this case it doesn't matter what "married" means, since (according to the law of non-contradiction) nothing is both X and not-X. This needs to be changed immediately. 140.247.236.160 (talk) 15:59, 3 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Don't be absurd. If the cited sentence is still present at such time as a convention is held which completely reverses the meaning of a well-defined term that's entrenched in philosophical literature, then we can talk about removing it. But if you sincerely believe it possible that the meaning of this basic term is liable to change, then you must also acknowledge that English speakers collectively could decide to stop using the "un-" prefix to indicate logical negation, meaning that "Dick Cheney is a married unmarried man" would need to be "changed immediately" as well. JSoules (talk) 00:36, 9 December 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I think it is wisest to keep to the mainstream examples such as the bachelor one even though some philosophers, perhaps a minority, denies analyticity.

As for meaning of words changing over time. That's irrelevant. It is not sentences that are true or false, it is propositions. Propositions does not change even though what proposition is expressed by a certain sentence does. The proposition currently expressed in normal english by the bachelor sentence is logically impossible. It will continue to be that forever even though the sentence changes it's meaning to express some other proposition or not proposition at all. Deleet (talk) 16:39, 18 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

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Why " entities " linked to this page in other wikkipages like events. The philosopher no. 2 (talk) 08:05, 24 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]