Current Philosophy

0013 George Englebretsen. "Semantic Considerations for Sommers' Logic," Philosophy Research Archives 11 (1985), pp. 281-318.

Englebretsen, using the roadmap of Fred Sommers's extensive work, finds a middle path between the nominalism of most contemporary semantic theories, and the Platonism of Frege and the early Russell. He rejects the nominalist policy of admitting only (concrete) objects, but also rejects the oversimplified Platonic semantics in which all expressions refer, either to objects or to properties. Englebretsen's method is to start neither with ontology nor semantics, although he realizes the critical importance of these, but to start instead with syntax.

Sommers's logical syntax is a further development of the Aristotelian/ Leibnizian (as opposed to the Fregean/Quinean) approach. There are no 'atomic' sentences for Sommers: all sentences are complex structures. The simplest sentences contain a subject and predicate, where the subject contains a subject-term and a quantifier, and the predicate contains a predicate-term and a qualifier, or a copula. The essential points are that all terms come in logically contrary pairs, and all sentences come in contradictory pairs.

Where Frege, Russell and Quine move from semantics to syntax, Englebretsen moves from syntax to semantics. He observes that all terms have both a denotation and a signification. The denotation is the member or members of a set of things within some domain. Thus, 'some logician', given the actual world for a domain, denotes Aristotle or Ockham or Leib niz or . . . . . The signification of a term refers or characterizes. Thus, 'wise' signifies the property of wisdom, and the subject term 'Socrates' is characterized as possessing that property. But while both subject term and predicate term have both a denotation and a signification, the signification of subject terms and the denotation of predicate terms is inert.

Using these basic concepts, Englebretsen demonstrates with various illustrations how both the syntactical and the semantic structures of sentences can be analyzed and diagrammed. Importantly, he shows this for negative, general and compound sentences.

He also recognizes that there are ontological implications to his analysis. His ontology takes the sentence 'Some A is B' to refer to some A, not merely some thing. The distinction here is that A's (unlike 'things') are propertied. They are singular entities with that property that makes them A's. Objects and properties are on an ontological par with one another.

If we take the sentence 'Every unicorn is green', we have posed a problem for nominalist semantics, which wants to interpret it as saying that the set of unicorns is included in the set of green things. Englebretsen's semantics does not fall into this trap, for it recognizes the domain of this sentence as the world of mythology. A Quinean analysis would also accommodate this sentence, but not the sentence 'Some swan is green', which it tries to interpret as saying that the concept 'green' is included in the concept 'swan'. Englebretsen recognizes the domain of this sentence as being the actual (as opposed to some other possible) world, and the negation causes no difficulty.

Englebretsen covers more ground than can be summarized here, and he recognizes that there is considerable ground beyond what he does cover. He virtually ignores pragmatic issues, and sees work to be done on modality, synonymy, propositional attitudes, and many other topics. But he believes that the perspective offered by Sommers' logical work provides the basis for completing this task.

 Contents     Index