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Philosophers and linguists have explored the implications (or presuppositions, or implicatures) of "everything" in such sentences — I'll leave it to commenters to fill out an annotated bibliography…
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Phillip Helbig said,
June 19, 2024 @ 3:04 pm
Somewhat related: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8481742-just-look-down-the-road-and-tell-me-if-you
Paul Clapham said,
June 19, 2024 @ 3:10 pm
The mathematicians are clear on this subject: everything on the (empty) summer reading list is in German. Everything on the list was written by Trump. Everything on the list is 633 pages long. No matter what you say about those things, it's true.
However I've noticed that non-mathematicians rebel against this concept, so I would be interested to see what the linguists have to say about it.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
June 19, 2024 @ 3:27 pm
Within the set of [non-mathematicians] is the subset [philosophy majors who took a course in first order logic]. We're down with empty sets too!
AntC said,
June 19, 2024 @ 3:50 pm
Ok, I'll be the tedious Philosophy major …
everything on the (empty) summer reading list …
But that isn't the situation: "I haven't made it yet."; there is no reading list, empty or otherwise; Frazz's NP has failed to refer; there is no King of France to be bald or otherwise.
The Carroll example is different: there is a road; we can all look down it; to see the lack of walkers. 'The lack of walkers' is a NP used successfully; phrasing it that way (rather than 'nobody') avoids it seeming to refer to any person, walking quickly or otherwise.
Philip Anderson said,
June 20, 2024 @ 1:35 am
All mathematicians are logicians, but there exist logicians who are not mathematicians.
Three logicians walk into a bar.
The bartender asks “Do you all want beer?”
The first one says “I don’t know”.
The second one says “I don’t know”.
The third one says “Yes”.
Karl Weber said,
June 20, 2024 @ 6:39 pm
"I can tell you the score of today's ballgame even before it starts."
"Really? What is it?"
"The score of every ballgame before it starts is 0-0."
Nat said,
June 20, 2024 @ 11:21 pm
Well, as long as we're being tedious (there is no greater joy than the discreet charm of philosophical tedium)….
if I remember correctly, for Russell, the reading list does exist and can be referred, assuming that it ever gets made. It simply doesn't exist in the temporal locations referred to in the comic and the comments. (Unless I'm misremembering. It's possible that he argued that there is no atemporal existential quantifier. But I *think* that was someone else.)
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
June 21, 2024 @ 7:44 am
No! Stop! I want to get off! I've seen this happen before! Any second now, someone is going to ask if the copular verb "to be" logically implies existence, and then we'll be digging into Husserl and Heidegger and maybe even Umberto Eco's take on Pierce. I prefer:
stephen said,
June 21, 2024 @ 2:41 pm
Does Captain Kirk exist? Yes and no, he's a character on Star Trek, which was a real TV series a while ago.
Does his twin sister Becca exist? No, not until she's portrayed in a movie or a
TV spinoff. Maybe in a novel, we aren't sure about that. Or if she's portrayed in fan fiction, but that's debatable. Or she exists now that I've posited the possibility that she might exist.
There are varying degrees and levels of existence.
Do the characters in an unproduced movie or TV series exist?
Philip Anderson said,
June 21, 2024 @ 5:03 pm
Is Captain Kirk bald? He may not be real, but I would say he has enough existence for that question to have an answer.
JPL said,
June 21, 2024 @ 5:53 pm
@Benjamin E. Orsatti:
Nice! I like this one:
To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity,
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgeware Road.
Men's curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint —
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
The apprehension of the relation of logical dependency and the apprehension of the relation of causal dependency: Which came first, and which is more basic in the task of understanding the world?
RfP said,
June 21, 2024 @ 9:36 pm
And then there were the “unactualized possibles,” as discussed by W.V.O. Quine.
JPL said,
June 22, 2024 @ 7:32 pm
I haven't read any of the literature on the "pragmatics" of assertions and assumed premises involving "existence" (so I can't give any relevant readings), but this is probably an example of the kind of thing that annoyed Wittgenstein, when he complained that the customary ways of expressing themselves that philosophers use gets in the way of their understanding the problems they are trying to solve. In the second panel of the comic, instead of saying what he said, the adult could just as well have said, "You've done no such thing. There is no list." In the third panel, he could have said, "Finish what? You've done nothing." Given that the reading list has not been brought into existence by the act of making it up, the adult's claims would be necessarily true, and the kid's assertions would be necessarily false. Alice could just as well have said. "I don't see anybody on the road." No event of Alice visually noticing a person on the road has occurred. Given the normal conditions of visual perception, sane and rational observers can conclude that there is no person on the road. Ordinary language tends to develop effort-saving and casual ways of expressing things that might require greater care to be expressed clearly, if that needs to be done.
JPL said,
June 22, 2024 @ 8:53 pm
Correction:
"'You've done nothing'" should be: "You haven't done anything". (I was called away urgently and pressed :submit" prematurely.)
Philip Taylor said,
June 23, 2024 @ 3:01 am
JPL — "In the third panel, he could have said […]". That statement brought me up short — although no great fan of comic art, I had looked at the cartoon that introduced the discussion, and immediately assumed that the teacher ("the adult", in your terminology) was a woman, based primarily on the hairstyle but also on more subtle clues (ear decoration, breasts); what leads you to believe that he/she is a man ?
JPL said,
June 23, 2024 @ 6:12 pm
@Philip Taylor:
Probably the size and shape of the nose (large, bulbous, with what looks like nose hair coming out), size and shape of the chin (large, "jutting out"), grotesquely broad upper lip. But now that you bring to my attention those other features, which I had missed (I think I noticed the bun, but thought he could be a hipster gone to seed), I think you're right. I think the drawing was intended to depict a woman. I hadn't even noticed cues that would suggest that the person was a teacher. (I didn't embiggen.) BTW, I just noticed another error that remained because I didn't have a chance to go over it: "… ways … gets in the way …." should be, "ways … get in the way …." Or it could be "way" instead of "ways". There might be others. What about the analysis of the puzzle? Detectives trying to solve a crime would reason in this way. Ambiguous expressions can be clarified. Why translate ambiguous expressions into a formal language context when you have not clarified the notions of 'existence' and 'individual'?
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
June 24, 2024 @ 9:24 am
(since we seem to be running on parallel poetical / analytical tracks, why not throw down another couple railroad ties 'pon the poetical?)
JPL [quoted some more great stuff from T. S. Eliot's "Four Quarters", including:]
Is this the "mystical nugget" of the poem? That perception of ultimate reality, the unification of time with timelessness, can only be achieved with spiritual perfection?
If so, then there is no "trick" to OP's cartoon — the child, not yet having achieved saintly enlightenment, has simply experienced a failure of apprehension (of ultimate reality)?
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
June 24, 2024 @ 9:57 am
Edit. "Four QUARTETS", not "Four *Quarters" — see what you math people have done to my memory?!
JPL said,
June 25, 2024 @ 5:36 pm
@Benjamin E. Orsatti: "Is this the "mystical nugget" of the poem?"
That's a great question. I don't know if it's THEE "mystical nugget", but I think you could say that at least it's A "mystical nugget".
Eliot was probably thinking about the relation between "God the father" and "God the son", the incarnation, but maybe thinking about it as a good way of thinking about the relation between, e.g., the ideal ethical principles that came into "Platonic" existence along with the creation of life in the world (principles not having been constructed and not having evolved bit by bit over time, but outside of time, coming with the intended idea of life), and our understanding of ethical principles, which is constructed and does evolve (hopefully) over historical time. But clearly he is also concerned with epistemological questions, such as the relation between the laws and principles governing the physical world, (e.g., principles of symmetry and equivalence) which do not change and do not "evolve" and are constant for all observers, etc., and our constructed and evolving understanding of these laws and principles, which we try to figure out in our concrete interactions with the world. As physical laws are instantiated in concrete physical events in time, so the life of Jesus is an instantiation of the timeless ideal ethical principles in concrete actions in interaction with the world. This is possibly connected (remotely) to the comic through the idea that the property of "existence" applies properly to instantiations, including actions and events of bringing or coming into existence and change in properties; but the relation between the "meaning" of a word (i.e., a lexeme, a category) and the objects in the world that "belong" to the category is a different relation, not the same as "instantiation" in the above sense. The latter is the class of all possible referents of the lexeme in acts of language use, a relation which linguists call "denotation".
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
June 26, 2024 @ 9:27 am
JPL said:
I've always wondered about the "complicated" relationship between Platonism and Christianity — at times they can be seen holding hands and strolling gaily into the sunset; at others, they pretend not to recognize each other. And then you have their "rebellious offspring", like Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose "big idea" was that, not only do life and ethical principles "evolve", but the entire _kosmos_, from the time of the Big Bang, proceeds in a teleological "development", which still continues and is not yet finished (i.e. nihil==>plasma==>nebulae==>stars==>planets==>life==>humanity==>???). Not sure I "buy" it, but it's fun to think about.
I'd never really thought about either poetics or religion in terms of epistemology (apart from Heidegger's musings on, say, Rilke), but it makes a lot of sense to do so. For example, Indo-European and non-IE epic myths (e.g. the Finnish Karevala) all seem to keep returning to the question — "what to do, how to be" — with much of the myth centering around how the "hero" learns how to learn exactly that (though often in mystical or allegorical terms).
So, "denotation" is the process of creating progressively-smaller telescoping subsets from the set of referents {ref1, ref2…refn} through things like Gricean expectations, context, etc., until you get a set of just a few referents? And if the hearer picks the "right" one, we have communication, and if not, semiotic failure? Heady stuff. Makes one think that there is something distinctly "human" about language, which can't be replicated with AI. There is something "there" where a human couple exchanges thoughts over a bottle of wine at a café that isn't "there" in a large language model or whatsit, which is more like ants or bees shooting pheromones at each other. There's something in the Caravaggio painting that isn't "in" the can of paint.
Bill Fisher said,
July 2, 2024 @ 2:08 pm
I'm a great fan of kidisms, as in Art Linkletter's book "Kids Sure Rite Funny". One that's sort of relevant is: "Hannibal had a great stroke of luck in his arch toward Rome. For if the Alps had not happened to be there, he would never have been able to cross them."