Re: Existence and presupposition


The German "Bedeutung" means "signify" or "mean". As in "Die
Bedeutung des Todes in der Gesellschaft heute" ("The Meaning of Death
in Society Today).

Before the 3d edition of Gach and Black, they translated "Bedeutung" by
"reference". After that, they translated it by "meaning". Hence
"sense and reference" becomes "sense and meaning". Modern translators
just use the word "Bedeutung".

george:
> Presupposition" is already in the natural
> language dictionary and it already has a meaning.

That's like saying "cardinal number" and "set" are already in the
dictionary. There is a well-established philosophical theory-laden
meaning to the term "presupposition" of which you seem to be unaware.

Holbach ---
In (negative) free logic all sentences containing irreferential
singular terms do have a truth value: false.
---

But doesn't negative free logic also deny particularisation for
negative singular statements? I.e deny there is a valid inference from
"Planet Vulcan has no atmosphere" to "some planet hs no atmosphere".
That seems wrong. If you say "every planet has an atmosphere" then I
might say "Wrong. Vulcan has no atmosphere". But in negative free
logic, both statements can be true. Yes?

Davis: "Following Frege (1892), Strawson defined a presupposition ..."

This suggests Strawson *said* he was following Frege. At the time
Strawson was writing in the 1950's, it was assumed by most writers that
Frege held a version of Russell's theory of descriptions - a proper
name is a disguised description, hence we can, in theory, distinguish
between sentence negation "not: a is F" and predicate negation "a is
not F". It's fairly clear in the passage above that Frege did not hold
such a theory. Frege does equate proper names to definite descriptions
but then he puts them both in the category of logically singular terms.

Gareth Evans was the first to suggest that Frege held something more
like a "direct reference" view of proper names, but the issue is still
controversial.

The idea of presupposition is in any case much older, for the German
logicians at least. Drobisch (Logik, 3d edition) says that the subject
of a categorical proposition is presupposed (vorausgesetzt). He was
describing the theory of Herbart, who was a student of Kant, so it goes
way back.

.

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