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John E. Clifford, On 11/09/2012 15:19:
In one suntans we are told we are sticking to the syntactic rules, in the next we are dealing with the universe or a situation that fluctuates from word to word ( so deep in semantics)
Obviously you've misunderstood, but I'm not sure what, because you don't make that clear.
and the we suddenly have presuppositions (pragmatics).
I consider presuppositions to be part of logical form, outside the scope of illocutinary operators. Definitely not pragmatics. In Yourban it can work however you say it works.
So far as I can make out the situation in &'s mind is that there is a quantifier l, which picks out an object from the reference class (or maybe a bunch oh objects from the reference class, but that introduces new problems). No problem here for l as either long scope or shortscope s or even as requiring that it picks out exactly one thing. At this point, there is, it appears, an unprecedented move the universe, which is traditionally taken as fixed, or the situation, which is traditionally taken as capable of expansion only, contracts so that the reference class is now reduced to this one selected item. This is accomplished apparently by a presupposition of using l that la Ra Pa <=> ra Ra Pa <=> sa Ra Pa holds. Now aside from the impropriety of the move and the inherent unlikelihood of the presupposition, the real question is why all this work, what is supposed to be accomplished? I get the idea from the talk of myopic singulars, that the object selected by l is meant to be a reliable guide about the whole reference class -- before the collapse. This the jump I cannot fathom: the object is singular, but not myopic. It is a good (indeed the only) representative of the collapsed reference class, but not necessarily of the real reference class we thought we were dealing with and presumably wii be dealing with again. Where is the missing piece (unlikely as it is).
"la bcda" presupposes that there is only one bcd. End of story. That's all the grammar says. The rest is up to the users. There's nothing more to say about the language design. We can discuss the pragmatics of it, but I'd rather focus on design issues for the time being. If you found the rest of what I wrote confusing, set it aside, and consider me only to have said: ""la bcda" presupposes that there is only one bcd; that's all the grammar says." --And.