“The
words ‘to imply’ in the English language mean the same as ‘to
contain’ or ‘to involve’…[note the] confusion of implication
with the consequence relation…” - Rudolf
Carnap
(1937), The
Logical Syntax of Language.
If
A
has no meaning (or
intension),
then how can it imply
or entail
B?
If A
is just an inscription (or is self-referential
– an autonym),
then what connection could it have to B?...
On
one reading, A
implies B
because B
“contains” (or “involves”) something that's also in A.
This is the standard Kantian
view of conceptual analyticity.
B,
on the other hand, can be a consequence
of A
without B
containing (or involving) something that's common to A.
We
can ask what exactly does it mean to say that “B
is contained within A”.
W.V.O.
Quine
accused Immanuel
Kant
of speaking at a metaphorical level when he used the word
“containment”. However, what non-metaphorical way of describing
what's at issue here have we got? If A
is simply an inscription (or syntactic
form),
then of course it can’t contain B
– it can’t contain anything
except itself.
A
will require semantic
content
if it's to imply B.
In that case, it all depends on what the symbol A
stands for. Does it stand for a concept, sentence, statement or a
proposition? All these possibilities have content.
If
the symbol A
stands
for the concept [politician], then what content will it have? We can
say that contained within the concept [politician] are the
macro-concepts [human being], [person], etc; as well as the
micro-concepts [professional], [Member of Parliament], etc.
In
a certain sense it's quite arbitrary to categorise certain concepts
as micro-concepts
and
others as macro-concepts
because it all depends on context. However, we can say that in one
context we can categorise the concept [politician] as a
micro-concept.
There's
a simple way to decide what's what. We can ask this question:
Is
it necessary for a politician to be a person or a human being?
The
answer is
yes.
Then
we can ask this question:
Is
it necessary for a human being or person to be a politician?
The
answer is no.
Thus,
in this simple sense, the macro-concepts encompass the
micro-concepts. Of course there are also yet higher levels of
concept.
Take
the concept [animal]. This includes the concepts [human being] and
[person]. And there are yet higher order concepts than that: e.g.,
[living thing]. This could go on until we reach the concepts
[object], [thing], [entity], [spatiotemporal slice] and so on.
If
A
is taken to be a concept, then it may well have a large amount of
content. Thus it could imply
all sorts of things. Indeed it's a strange thing to take A
as
simply standing for a single concept. (It's hard to make sense of a
concept all on its own.) Thus we need to fill in the dots ourselves.
On
the other hand, if the symbol A
stands for a sentence, then things become a little clearer and not as
broad-ranging. The sentence may/will of course include concepts;
though concepts within a sentential framework will probably be more
finely delineated and circumscribed. Something will be said about the
concepts contained and they'll also be contextualised.
To
say that the concept [politician] alone
implies the concepts [human being] and [person] sounds strange. In a
sense, the bare concept [politician] isn't actually saying
or implying
anything. Thus the idea of containment must be taken more literally
in the case of concepts standing for A
than if A
stands for a statement or a sentence.
How
would B,
therefore, be a consequence of A
if the relation between A
and B
weren't
that of conceptual containment? In nature, B
can be
caused by A
without sharing anything with A.
Perhaps B
can also be deduced from A
without sharing anything with A.
If this is so, then how would that deduction actually come about?
No comments:
Post a comment