TRADITIONALLY, I AM ENTITLED TO A LAST MEAL

• Authors: Bjorn Jespersen
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Nunberg maintains that there are cases like 'I am traditionally entitled to a last meal', as uttered by a condemned prisoner facing the firing squad, which suggest that an indexical like 'I' does double duty as a vehicle of singular and general reference. The author argues against this claim. His position is that the sentence should be factored out into two: 'Traditionally, a condemned prisoner is entitled to a last meal' and 'I am a condemned prisoner'. Nunberg's sentence is generated by means of an illicit substitution of 'I' for 'a condemned prisoner' inside the scope of 'traditionally'. The morale is that sloppy or literally nonsensical speech like Nunberg's sentence is not suitable as a data for logical analysis of natural language. What is the suitable data is the two-premise argument he puts forward.

Keywords

EN

CONDEMNED PRISONER; INDEXICALS; LOGICAL ANALYSIS; NATURAL LANGUAGE; NUNBERG GEOFFREY

Discipline

• PHILOSOPHY: PHILOSOPHY

• Publisher: Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Institute of Philosophy of Academy of Sciences of Czech Republic
• Journal: Organon F. medzinárodný časopis pre analytickú filozofiu
• Year: 2011
• Volume: 18
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 5-13
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Bjorn Jespersen

• Bjorn Jespersen, Filosoficky ustav AV CR, Jilska 1, 110 00 Praha, Czech Republic

Identifiers

CEJSH db identifier

11SKAAAA09691