Criticism
Philippe de Rouilhan (2000) has argued that Boolos relied on the assumption, never defended in detail, that plural expressions in ordinary language are "manifestly and obviously" free of existential commitment. But when I utter "there are critics who admire only one another" is it manifest and obvious that I am only committing myself with respect to critics? Or is Boolos victim of a "grammatical illusion" (p. 10)? Consider
- There is at least one critic who admires only himself.
- There are critics who admire only one another
The first case is clearly "innocent". But what about the second? There is an obvious logical difference, since in the first case the plural is distributive, in the second, it is collective, and irreducibly so. How is it obvious that this difference is innocent? Also, the second is equivalent to
- Some group (or collection) of critics is such that they admire only one another
But what is a "group" or "collection" in this sense? "That is the whole problem". Perhaps Boolos has accorded a kind of innocence to that would actually belong only to the first.
Read more about this topic: Plural Quantification
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“A tailor can adapt to any medium, be it poetry, be it criticism. As a poet, he can mend, and with the scissors of criticism he can divide.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)