Quine has been mainly opposed to sentences that feature
cross-quantification. That is, he is critical of sentences that
involve quantifying into a context that Quine labels 'opaque1.
Quine's opposition to cross-quantification grew out of an
earlier attack on the notion of combining quantification theory
and modal logic. Quine initially dismissed, in 1943, cases of
quantifying into modal contexts as meaningless. Later in the
same year, Alonzo Church argued that there was a meaningful way
to quantify into modal contexts, thus vindicating the notion
that quantification theory could be merged with modal logic.
In 1956, in "Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes,"
Quine pointed out that quantification into belief contexts,
though indispensable, also features the improper quantification
into opaque contexts. In the same paper, Quine introduced the
distinction between a relational and a notional sense of
propositional attitude ascriptions. The former sense concerns
the problematic sentences that feature cross-quantification. In
the thesis that follows, I appropriate Quine's terminology and
critically evaluate his reasons for rejecting the relational
idiom in both modal and doxastic contexts. Such an evaluation
reveals some startling results in the philosophy of language.
One of the major problems that Quine sought to address was
that of reconciling the evident significance of instances of the
relational idiom with their many alleged difficulties. Quine
restricted himself to acknowledging the idiom's meaningfulness in doxastic contexts.
Most of Quine's criticisms of the relational idiom are
argued by me to be unsound. It is contended that some of Quine's
criticisms involve the improper exploitation of ambiguities
inherent in such sentences. This fallacy is exposed and
subjected to a critical evaluation. The exposure of this
fallacy, which I term 'the relational fallacy' is a novel
contribution to the philosophy of language. Another novel
contribution to the philosophy of language is my critique of
Quine's use of semantic ascent to account for intuitively
meaningful relational modal sentences. A third, slightly less
novel, contribution to the philosophy of language involves
extending Quine's temporary view that there are meaningful
relational sentences in doxastic contents to the analogous
observation that there are meaningful relational sentences in
modal contexts.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/7280 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Dickson, Mark William |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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