Re: reply: (1) veridicality; (2) plurality

[Chris Bogart <cbogart@quetzal.com>]

And says:
>Returning to "the king of France is bald", referring to entity A.
>I see no reason to stop believing that English grammar derives from this
>phrase the following:
>   Ex x is king of France & x=A & x/A is bald

But in Lojbab's and my proposed contexts (a play or a mental hospital), the
phrase "the king of france" is used to refer to real people (a character in
a play, a mental patient).  The speaker and the listener both know this.
They also both know the referrent isn't actually the king of France.  Thus
it's a "reference" (speaker and listener know what's being referred to, even
if you claim not to :-)) but it's not "veridicial", and they both know that
too.  If this is not a "non-veridicial reference" then I'm afraid I don't
know what the term means (which is a distinct possibility!)

>But the truth or falsity makes little difference to the communicative
>efficacy of an utterance. Considering truth is a method employed by
>some semanticists, not by speakers and addressees.

I disagree.  If the character/patient in our examples was in fact *not*
bald, the addressees would have objected.  Semantics is about the meanings
of utterances, and meaning has to to with what's been communicated.  If A
tells B, using sentence S, that C is bald, and C is in fact bald, then it's
the semanticist's job to analyze S and see how it communicated the fact, not
to assign an independent and arbitrary truth value to S and claim that A and
B are uninterested in the truth.  You're defining "truth" in an odd way that
makes obviously true statements "false to semanticists".
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 Chris Bogart
 cbogart@quetzal.com
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