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04 Ferejohn (1980) Aristotle On Focal Meaning
04 Ferejohn (1980) Aristotle On Focal Meaning
04 Ferejohn (1980) Aristotle On Focal Meaning
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Two critical pieces of new information are divulged in these lines. The first is
that the "'one"9towards which the various significata of a urposievterm all
point is not something external to them, but is drawn from their own
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(FM) A term T hasfocal meaningiff (i) T is "said in many ways",and (ii) one of
T's many logoi is non-reciprocally contained in T's remaining logoi (i.e. its
significataare logically priorto theirs).
Now in the case of i'aTpLx6v,(FM) dictates that the things most properly
called "'medical"(i.e. doctors) are logically prior to every other kind of
"medical",and in fact the remainderof the passageunderstudy(a 22-3) is
aimed at showingjust that.
During this procedure,Aristotle'sanalysis develops a slight wrinkle
which will become importantlaterbecausethe device he uses to smoothit
over will be crucialto the parallelanalysisof "existent"developedin the
next section.By relyingon the generalintersubstitutivity betweenterm(i.e.
"name"[5vopa])and logos,Aristotleactuallyundertakesto show at a 22-3
that the name ratherthan the logos of the logicallyprimary"medicals"is
containedin the non-primarylogoi of the term. But this shift presentsan
immediate difficulty. Since kaTpLxOv is after all an ambiguous term, it
would appearthat all of its significatashare a common name, and that is
LavrpLxvitself. But if this is so, it would seem to be impossible,on Aristot-
le's strategy,to isolate any logicallyprimary"medicals"becauseany logos
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WashingtonState University
NOTES
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