I’ve been beating up on philosophy a lot here over the past few months, but if there’s one thing studying philosophy has taught me, it’s the importance of quantifiers. Consider an example sentence from Lester Hunt (a former philosophy professor of mine, incidentally): “Why do environmentalists seem unfazed by their mistaken, even grossly and absurdly mistaken, predictions of disaster?” Now what is this sentence meant to imply?:
- “All environmentalists seem unfazed by their mistaken, even grossly and absurdly mistaken, predictions of disaster”?
- “Most environmentalists seem unfazed by their mistaken, even grossly and absurdly mistaken, predictions of disaster”?
- “Many environmentalists seem unfazed by their mistaken, even grossly and absurdly mistaken, predictions of disaster”?
- “A few environmentalists seem unfazed by their mistaken, even grossly and absurdly mistaken, predictions of disaster”?
- “Two environmentalists, somewhere in the world, seem unfazed by their mistaken, even grossly and absurdly mistaken, predictions of disaster”?*
Ever single one of these possible clarifications damages the rhetorical impact of the sentence. 1, 2, and 5 are too ridiculous to comment on; 3 invites the question “what’s the evidence that the number of environmentalists who do this is all that significant?”; and 4 invites the retort “I guess a few environmentalists are crazy, so what?”
What’s frustrating about such sentences is that they appear to say something very significant, but the speaker can respond any challenge by retreating to some more modest interpretation of the sentence. What do we do about them, then? I saw we just point and laugh whenever we see them.
*As a philosophy student, I’m tempted to throw in “there exists an environmentalist…” but this is ruled out by the plural.
Of course, the number or percentage of predictions is that fall into this category is unspecified, too.
These sorts of errors are often exhibited by people with mental problems, relationship problems, etc. “People hate me”. “You never listen to me”. The NLP metamodel has the most comprehensive listing of these linguistic errors that I know of.
Hey, random question- is Peter Kirby still an agnostic? I read up that he was an atheist who became a Catholic in 2007. Than, he became an agnostic in 2008. Anyone know wht he is now?
I am just a casual observer, and have only read a few posts, so please excuse my ignorance in not being a philosophy student or a professorial candidate.
Would you then suggest that the English language never describe a generality? Should every learned or educated or non-ignorant person, in your opinion, have to do empirical research to determine the exact number of environmentalists by a impartial (if that even exists) body of researchers and only after paying for the research and spending years compiling the evidence should a number or representation be used in a publication or every day speech? Is there a body politic or group that is not of the environmentalist community that has already done the research that charges a modest fee to be able to say “[some number] of environmentalists say [x] or are [y]”? In what case is a generality ok? Such as in physics, one might say, solids tend to not be fluid. In the previous phrase, I am not naming a type of solid, a electrochemical composition, a bounded or unbounded substance; yet the phrase holds true. Furthermore, in Isaac Asimov’s Understanding Physics by Dorset Press, Chapter 12 page 162, Asimov writes, “This means we will generally expect that of two similar objects the larger and more massive will have the longer period of vibration.” I know the examples I use are a bit to the extreme, but I wonder when, if at any time, a generality rings true?
What do we do about them, then? I saw we just point and laugh whenever we see them.
I say we ask the speaker to clarify.