PY4804 Philosophy of Logic

Week 11: Etchemendy’s critique of Tarski (part 2)

Agustı́n Rayo
ar29@st-andrews.ac.uk
December 10, 2003

Cross-term restrictions
1. Recap
Last class we said that a sentence is L-true if—leaving the world fixed—the sentence
would express a truth no matter what its non-logical vocabulary meant.
It became apparent that the notion of L-truth and the notion of logical truth come
apart. But I suggested that L-truth might be counted as a necessary condition for
logical truth.

2. A caveat
One would like to have it that ‘Susan runs ⊃ Susan runs’ counts as a logical truth.
But—as people noticed in class—there is a caveat.
For suppose one interprets occurrences of ‘runs’ as ‘is the prime minister’, but in-
terprets the first occurrence of ‘Susan’ as ‘Tony Blair’ and the second occurrence of
‘Susan’ as ‘George Bush’.
What one gets is a false sentence. But if being an L-truth is a necessary condition
for being a logical truth, doesn’t this show that ‘Susan runs ⊃ Susan runs’ isn’t a
logical truth after all?

3. The solution?
The obvious way of to solving the problem it to insist on uniform interpretations the
relevant vocabulary.
However, as Etchemendy emphasizes, it isn’t so obvious how one might motivate the
additional constraint.

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Logical Form
1. What is logical form?
It is a truism the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meanings of its parts.
Think of the logical form of a sentence as the structure that holds together its parts
and determines how the meanings of the parts determine its meaning.

2. Logical form and surface grammatical structure

The following two sentences have very different grammatical structures:

• John loves Mary

• Mary is loved by John

To see that their surface grammatical structures are different note, for example, that
whereas the subject of the first is ‘John’, the subject of the second is ‘Mary’.
But it is natural to suppose that these differences are irrelevant from a semantic point
of view. Thus, one might think that the logical form of both these sentences is the
following:

S
P2 N N

loves John Mary

(‘S’, ‘P2 ’ and ‘N’ stand for ‘sentence’, ‘two-place predicate’ and ‘name’, respectively.)

3. Logical connectives
The logical form of ‘(p ∧ q) ∨ ¬r’ is given by the following tree:

S
C2 S S
∨ C2 S S C1 S
∧ p q ¬ r

(‘S’, ‘C1 ’ and ‘C2 ’ stand for ‘sentence’, ‘one-place connective’ and ‘two-place connec-
tive’, respectively.)
And, of course, if one takes ‘p’ to be ‘John loves Mary’, ‘q’ to be ‘Harry is bald’ and
‘r’ to be ‘Susan runs’, what one gets is the following:

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 S
C2 S S
∨ C2 S S C1 S
∧ P2 N N P1 N ¬ P1 N

loves John Mary Bald Harry Runs Susan

4. Back to the puzzle about cross-term restrictions

We are now in a position to represent the logical form of ‘Susan runs ⊃ Susan runs’
as:

S
C2 S S
⊃ P1 N P1 N
runs Susan runs Susan

‘⊃’, ‘runs’ and ‘Susan’ should be thought of, not as words occurring in a sentence,
but as items in a basic semantic lexicon. An assignment of meaning to a sentence
should therefore be thought of as an assignment of meaning to items in the basic
semantic lexicon, which are in turn assigned to terminal nodes in the tree.
One’s characterization of L-truth can then be reformulated as follows:

A sentence is L-true if—leaving the world fixed, and leaving the sentence’s
logical form fixed—the sentence would express a truth no matter what the
non-logical items in the basic semantic lexicon of the relevant language
were taken to mean.

Our problem is solved because we may assume that there is only one item ‘Susan’
and one item ‘runs’ in the basic semantic lexicon.

Quantifiers
1. Recap
We noticed that, if one did’t want ‘∃x∃y(x 6= y)’ to count as L-true, one could cash
it out as follows:

[∃x : Thing(x)][∃y : Thing(y)](x 6= y)

where ‘Thing’ is treated as a non-logical term. But when ‘Thing’ is interpreted as

‘unicorn’, we get

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 [∃x : Unicorn(x)][∃y : Unicorn(y)](x 6= y)

which is false. So ‘∃x∃y(x 6= y)’ isn’t L-true. So far so good, since we don’t want
‘∃x∃y(x 6= y)’ to count as logically true.

2. A further puzzle, due to Etchemendy

But now consider the sentence ‘Runs(Susan) ⊃ ∃x Runs(x)’. If one uses the same
trick as above, one should cash it out as follows:

Runs(Susan) ⊃ [∃x : Thing(x)](Runs(x))

But when ‘Thing’ is interpreted as ‘Elephant’, we get

Runs(Susan) ⊃ [∃x : Elephant(x)](Runs(x))

which is false (since elephants can’t run). So ‘Runs(Susan) ⊃ ∃x Runs(x)’ isn’t L-

true. This is bad, at least insofar as we’d like the notion of L-truth to serve as a
necessary condition for logical truth.
The problem is especially serious because it’s not clear that it can be resolved by
appeal to the notion of logical form.

Further Reading
1. There is a required reading for Friday’s seminar:

• Chapter 5 of Etchemendy, J The Concept of Logical Consequence, Harvard Uni-

versity Press, 1990.

2. Enthusiasts could also look at:

• Lewis, D. ‘General Semantics’, Synthese 22 (1970), pp. 18-67