3/29/2010

Do any languages mark the use/mention distinction in speech?

In written English, we mark the distinction between using an expression and mentioning it using quotation marks: 'Chicago' has 7 letters, but Chicago does not. In other words, we can use quotation marks to disambiguate between use and mention.

For various reasons, I am interested in ambiguity tests: ways to diagnose whether a particular expression really is ambiguous or not. One common, widely-accepted (I think) test appeals to different languages: if the e.g. English expression you're interested in is in fact ambiguous, then it should be translated by two unrelated words in at least some other languages. For example, 'bank' is ambiguous in English, and it is translated by 'Bank' and 'Ufer' in German.

After reading a batch of student papers about the definition of 'health,' I was struck by their complete lack of inclination to distinguish use and mention. So then I thought about the ambiguity test -- does any spoken language disambiguate use and mention morphologically (without saying 'the word...' or 'the sentence...')? I posted the question at Ask A Linguist, and the three people who responded said they did not know of any. Does anybody out there know of one? (And it would be strange if it were just one or two languages...)

If there aren't (m)any such languages, then it looks like this could be a counterexample to that particular ambiguity test.

3/14/2010

Carnap on the internets

There is no internet acronym that adequately captures my feelings about this post, which I found via my google alert for Carnap:


"There has never been a scientific scam in the history of mankind as big as the science swindle of "climate change." Nothing comes close. Modern scientific hustles like mesmerism, phrenology, eugenics, the Piltdown man, and even Lysenkoism, pale in comparison to the flimflam of anthropomorphic global warming (AGW).

There was, however, one astonishing episode in the early part of the 20th century in mathematics and logic which conceptually roughly parallels the current crisis of science behind AGW. It was the destruction of the dream of the Vienna Circle of the completion of logic. Kurt Gödel, the German mathematician and philosopher, put the philosophical fantasy of "the elimination of metaphysics through the logical analysis of language" to rest[i].

Gödel's two "Incompleteness Theorems" exposed fundamental flaws in the foundations of a school of philosophy known as Logical Positivism. In a somewhat similar vein, the release of the e-mails for the University of East Anglia precipitated the collapse of the house of cards of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the "science" behind AGW. ..."


If that's not enough enlightenment for you, the original post continues for several more paragraphs.

3/12/2010

Name that quote, plus a request for history of analytic literature

Name the author and work for the following two quotes:

(1) "that is a priori which we can maintain in the face of all experience, come what will."

(2) "the whole body of our conceptual interpretations form a sort of hierarchy or pyramid with the most comprehensive, such as those of logic, at the top, and the least general, such as 'swans' etc. at the bottom; that with the complex system of interrelated concepts, we approach particular experiences and attempt to fit them, somewhere and somehow... Persistent failure leads to readjustment... The higher up a concept stands in our pyramid, the more reluctant we are to disturb it, because the more radical and far-reaching the results will be if we abandon it..."


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Answer: C.I. Lewis, Mind and the World-Order (1929): p. 231 and pp.305-6.

Now for the request. Quote (1) sounds very similar to Quine's 'an analytic sentence is one held true come what may' (especially because for Lewis the analytic and the a priori are coextensive). Quote (2) echoes Quine's description of the web of belief (with the major difference that the nodes of Quine's web are claims, not concepts). Does anyone know of a paper or book chapter that describes in detail the relationship between Quine and C.I. Lewis -- specifically Lewis's influence on Quine? Thanks in advance!