Quote: Archibald A. Hill (maybe)
"A speaker of the language should be able to pronounce correctly any sequence of letters that he may meet, even if they were previously unknown, and secondarily, to be able…
“More desirable” and “less undesirable”
“In sharp contrast, men more than women tended to rate egoistic dominant acts as more socially desirable, including “Managing to get one's own way,” “Flattering to get one's own way,”…
Stephen Law and Nigel Warburton's "Five Questions About Clarity"
This essay on clarity is great and short. Read it.
Semantic Analysis and meaning
Again I'm quoting Paul Ziff's Semantic Analysis: 41. [...] Consequently, if my contention about meaning is correct, then the first 'do' in 'Please do not do it!', unlike the second…
Paul Ziff's Semantic Analysis and Onomatopoeia
Onomatopoeia You may wonder what the word “Onomatopoeia” means, and so did I when I first saw it. It's one of those unnecessarily long foreign words which meaning is unguessable…
Logical interpretation of subjects, the utterer and the utterance situation
Interpretation I earlier wrote of the logical interpretation of subjects.1 There I suggested, following Russell, that the subject of a descriptive, active, meaningful (DAM) sentence should be interpreted as an…
Quote: Paul Ziff
[Discussing the type/token distinction or ambiguity] "I shall not in general try to eliminate these ambiguities by explicitly stating which sense is intended. Sometimes both senses are intended, sometimes not.…
Negating sentences in english
Abstract I invent and explore a terminology about degrees of sentences, I explore how to negate sentences and sentence parts in english, I distinguish between verbs that can be used…
The current king of France, propositions, sentences, and missing subjects
Consider this set of propositions: P1. The sentence “The current king of France is bald.” expresses a proposition. P2. The sentence “The current king of France is not bald.” expresses…
Language, the modal fallacy and the symbolic representation of a conditional
"[W]hat follows from a true premiss must be true" (The Problems of Philosophy, p. 60, link) Wrote Russell as an example of a principle of logic that is more self-evident…