A Revival
Some philosophers have complained that predicate logic:
- Is unnatural in a sense, in that its syntax does not follow the syntax of the sentences that figure in our everyday reasoning. It is, as Quine acknowledged, "Procrustean," employing an artificial language of function and argument, quantifier and bound variable.
- Suffers from theoretical problems, probably the most serious being empty names and identity statements.
Even academic philosophers entirely in the mainstream, such as Gareth Evans, have written as follows:
- "I come to semantic investigations with a preference for homophonic theories; theories which try to take serious account of the syntactic and semantic devices which actually exist in the language ...I would prefer a theory ... over a theory which is only able to deal with by "discovering" hidden logical constants ... The objection would not be that such truth conditions are not correct, but that, in a sense which we would all dearly love to have more exactly explained, the syntactic shape of the sentence is treated as so much misleading surface structure" (Evans 1977)
Read more about this topic: Term Logic
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