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Single Idea 18921

[filed under theme 7. Existence / E. Categories / 4. Category Realism ]

Full Idea

The natural categories of individuals are arranged in a hierarchy of inclusion relations that is isomorphic with the linguistic semantic structure.

Gist of Idea

Individuals are arranged in inclusion categories that match our semantics

Source

George Engelbretsen (Trees, Terms and Truth [2005], 5)

Book Ref

'The Old New Logic', ed/tr. Oderberg,David S. [MIT 2005], p.47

A Reaction

This is the conclusion of a summary of modern Term Logic. The claim is that Sommers discerned this structure in our semantics (via the study of 'terms'), and was pleasantly surprised to find that it matched a plausible structure of natural categories.

The 14 ideas from 'Trees, Terms and Truth'

18913 Traditional term logic struggled to express relations [Engelbretsen]
18906 Negating a predicate term and denying its unnegated version are quite different [Engelbretsen]
18905 Propositions can be analysed as pairs of terms glued together by predication [Engelbretsen]
18907 Term logic rests on negated terms or denial, and that propositions are tied pairs [Engelbretsen]
18908 Standard logic only negates sentences, even via negated general terms or predicates [Engelbretsen]
18912 Was logic a branch of mathematics, or mathematics a branch of logic? [Engelbretsen]
18915 If facts are the truthmakers, they are not in the world [Engelbretsen]
18919 There are no 'falsifying' facts, only an absence of truthmakers [Engelbretsen]
18917 Existence and nonexistence are characteristics of the world, not of objects [Engelbretsen]
18916 Facts are not in the world - they are properties of the world [Engelbretsen]
18918 Terms denote objects with properties, and statements denote the world with that property [Engelbretsen]
18920 'Socrates is wise' denotes a sentence; 'that Socrates is wise' denotes a proposition [Engelbretsen]
18921 Individuals are arranged in inclusion categories that match our semantics [Engelbretsen]
18922 Logical syntax is actually close to surface linguistic form [Engelbretsen]