The Black Swan of Words

[kiaer.ts]

Every time I use "swan" and "white," I mean all instances of swans and all instances of whiteness, and I mean them the same way each time. I cannot do that with "this." There isn't any universal reference to it. If I use "this" in a sentence, I don't mean all instances of whatever items close to me or to the context for all times and places, past, present, and future. I only mean this item one time, here, in this context, and nothing else. Each evocation of "this" stands for and corresponds one-to-one to a concrete

Sorry, no. When you say "I was bitten by a white swan" you are most emphatically not refering to all instances of swans and all instances of whiteness.

I will grant you that there is a difference between deictic concepts and concepts of kinds. Nouns are concepts of entities andd substances. Adjectives are concepts of qualities. Verbs are concepts of states and of actions. Prepositions are concepts of (usually physical) relationship. Conjunctions are concepts of logical relation. And deictics are concepts of contextual reference. I still fail to see both the validity and the point of denying that deictics are concepts at all.

[thomtg]

Every time I use "swan" and "white," I mean all instances of swans and all instances of whiteness, and I mean them the same way each time. I cannot do that with "this." There isn't any universal reference to it. If I use "this" in a sentence, I don't mean all instances of whatever items close to me or to the context for all times and places, past, present, and future. I only mean this item one time, here, in this context, and nothing else. Each evocation of "this" stands for and corresponds one-to-one to a concrete

Sorry, no. When you say "I was bitten by a white swan" you are most emphatically not refering to all instances of swans and all instances of whiteness.

I will grant you that there is a difference between deictic concepts and concepts of kinds. Nouns are concepts of entities andd substances. Adjectives are concepts of qualities. Verbs are concepts of states and of actions. Prepositions are concepts of (usually physical) relationship. Conjunctions are concepts of logical relation. And deictics are concepts of contextual reference. I still fail to see both the validity and the point of denying that deictics are concepts at all.

No, the sentence still makes use of the meanings of "white" and "swan" universally. It is only due to the article "a" that syncategorematically reduces their combined universality to a smaller subset. Unless you know a specific swan by name or by deictic means, the equivalent sentence is, "Some white swans bit me." Regimented into logical form, it is clear that "whiteness" and "swans" continue to be referenced universally: Ez(Wz & Sz & Bza) where a==Ted.

Why do I want to make the point of denying deictics to be concepts? Because their denial explains better other aspects of cognition. For example, why is "This statement is false" a meaningless grammatical construction? On the thesis that deictics were concepts, the explanation would have to show why the unit-contents of the involved concepts in the subject term fail to be empty. (E.g., "So and so are statements and are this.") I counterclaim that this cannot be done. On the other hand, if deictics are not concepts, the explanation involves showing it to be a concrete existent whose resultant thoughtmaking production fails to produce a concrete reference (for the subject term of the grammatical construction).