To be fair, is this obvious? — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is obviously false. — Leontiskos

Suppose the target language involves contradictions: a phenomenon all too common among anthropologists and that Evans-Pritchard faced when studying the Azande in Africa. The very idea of a proper translation would require one to preserve the inconsistencies when translating the target language into the home language. Otherwise, rather than translating the target discourse, one would be amending, correcting, and distorting it. — Quantifier Variance Dissolved

Conceptual relativism on stilts. Which honestly I'm not absolutely against (unlike both Banno and @Leontiskos) but I'm unsympathetic with the whole approach and nothing I've read was at all persuasive. — Srap Tasmaner

I don't think quantifiers have much of anything to do with existence or being or any of that. — Srap Tasmaner

Elsewhere:
DKL: “There exist tables”
PVI: “There do not exist tables”
The deflationist: “something is wrong with the debate”
— p.3
DKL includes tables in his domain. PVI does not. Both make use of the very same rule for quantifier introduction.

No case has been presented for a variance in the quantifier introduction rules, as opposed to a variance in the domain. — Banno

DKL: “There exist tables”
PVI: “There do not exist tables”
The deflationist: “something is wrong with the debate” — p.3

Never seen one. — fdrake

But you do so in natural language. So you don't care about the underlying formal logic. — fdrake

Since if even mathematical reasoning has both ambiguity and commonality regarding the underlying logic and its quantifier introduction rules, why would we expect logic to behave as more than a prop, crutch or model of quantification in natural language? Never mind ontology! — fdrake

that is, "...for arbitrary a..." just is "for any a you might pick", or "for any a" - it's introducing a quantifier. — Banno

How would you account for people's differences in use? — fdrake

You haven't interacted with any of this. — Leontiskos

I think this is the first time that paper has been quoted in this thread. — Leontiskos

In what salient way is logic like chess? Why would we assume such a thing? Chess is just a made-up game we created to have some fun and amusement. — Leontiskos

fdrake has been consistently talking about intensional differences in quantifiers, namely by way of introduction and elimination rules for quantifiers. — Leontiskos

If our domain is {a,b,c} then "U(x)fx" is just "fa & fb & fc"; and "∃(x)fx" is just "fa v fb v fc". — Banno

How does translation play into it here? — fdrake

The challenge I see that presenting is that people can believe statements that block applications of inference rules, or otherwise not believe in appropriate inference rules. Even when two people share the theorems of the underlying logic... You just have to hope that every person innately believes every theorem. If they don't use the quantifiers in the same way, they don't have the same intensions over people. — fdrake

How would you account for people's differences in use? — fdrake

You can introduce the quantifier onto (Pa->Qa) to get (for all x P(x)->Q(x) ) if you made no assumptions about a anywhere in your reasoning. — fdrake

The challenge I see that presenting are that people can believe statements that block applications of inference rules, or otherwise not believe in appropriate inference rules. Even when two people share the theorems of the underlying logic... You just have to hope that every person innately believes every theorem. — fdrake

(P(x)=>Q(x) where x is arbitrary lets you derive (for all x P( x ) => Q( x ) ), and they can'd do that). — fdrake

Logic is not just a stipulative game, like chess. The analogy doesn't work. — Leontiskos

And as I said, if you embrace logical pluralism then it doesn't matter how you quantify or which logic you use, for everything is stipulation and no one stipulation is any better than any other. — Leontiskos

...within a single logic qualitative differences of domain reflect qualitatively different understandings of quantification — Leontiskos

Quantifiers are not subject to second-order equivocation; therefore QV fails — Leontiskos

Those quantifiers are introduced differently, and as the paper "Quantifier Variance Dissolved" notes that provides a strong argument for a form quantifier variance without a reduction of quantifier meaning to underlying entity type it quantifies over, and without committing yourself to the claim that there's a whole bunch of equally correct logics for the purposes of ontology. — fdrake

the sort of assertions you get when you try to squeeze a big set of phenomena into a tiny box of explanation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

No doubt the inferential role of “there is” or “exists” in natural language is more complex than the role of “∃” in formal logical languages, but the formal-syntactic role of “∃” provides a tidy approximation of the informal inferential role of “exists” or “there is” in English. The expression “there is” is an existential quantifier, in English, roughly because for name “a” and predicate “F”, from “a is F”, “there is an F” follows; and if a non-“a” claim follows from “a is F”, with no auxiliary assumptions made about “a”, then that same thing also follows from “there is an F”. Expressions that obey this role unrestrictedly, for all names and predicates that could be introduced into the language, express the language’s unrestricted concept of existence.

We argue that ∃ always has this role, as it invariably has the function of ranging over the domain and signaling that some, rather than none, of its members satisfy the relevant formula. Yet the quantifier-variance theorist requires ∃ to have multiple meanings. — Quantifier Variance

I think we are largely on common ground then. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I dunno OLP heads, "is" sure crops up in a lot of language games with different grammars. Almost as if there are different uses of it! — fdrake

This piece originally began life as a symbol of the elephants in the Indian army. It's original movement was 2 squares diagonally in any direction. It was a piece of only moderate power.

It was only when the game was carried to Europe that it's fortunes began to improve. The Europeans were not as familiar with the elephant as the Indians so they needed to change the piece to something that people in Europe could relate to. The church was very powerful in Europe when these changes were going on. It's influence on political life in the Middle Ages was recognized when the piece became a Bishop.

The Europeans also wanted to speed the game up as they found it laboriously slow. The Bishop was one of a number of pieces to see it's powers increase, gaining unlimited range on the diagonals.

if one attempts to quantify over all mammals but omits unicorns because they were not known to exist (or vice versa) then a quantitative difference of domain results in a merely artificial difference of quantifier-qua-extension. But if one attempts to quantify over all things but omits universals because they are a nominalist (cf. QVD 295) then a qualitative difference of domain results in a substantial difference of quantifier-qua-extension. — Leontiskos

Use itself doesn't float free of the rest of the world. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Now how exactly do we manage that? Attributing a predicate to an identified individual looks straightforward, but in ordinary life we only reach for the existential quantifier in the absence of such an individual. (One of you drank the last beer. Someone left these footprints. There's something really heavy in this box.) — Srap Tasmaner

What is your point? — Srap Tasmaner

Something is B — Srap Tasmaner

Can you think of an edge case where it's not clear whether something counts as a berry? — Srap Tasmaner

As it happens, this is what the thread should be about. — Srap Tasmaner

What I am objecting to is an explanation that seems to say that prior to an act of counting there is nothing that affects how counting is done. — Count Timothy von Icarus

what explains this? — Count Timothy von Icarus

If some society somehow stipulated that 8/2 = 5, we tend to feel we could give them a good demonstration of why this is not the correct way to do division. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The attempt to reduce mathematics to 'speech acts' is inadequate to account for the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences' — Wayfarer

But just stating the trivial fact that "numbers are something humans use," or "words are things we say," as if this pivot to activity makes the explanation an unanalyzable primitive strikes me as essentially a non-explanation. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It is unclear that there is a coherent way of formulating any such quantification and the resulting maximal domain. If the maximal domain is a set, then unrestricted quantification would require quantifying over everything, and there would have to be a set of everything, including, in particular, a set of all sets, among other inconsistent totalities, since all of these things are in the scope of an unrestricted quantifier: everything is in its scope, after all! But that is clearly inconsistent. — p.294

Maybe the proponent would take each person, sit them in the same room, and ask them to evaluate the sentence < Ǝx(R(x) ^ A(x)) > (“There exists an x such that x is in the room and x is an apple”). In the corner of the room is a painting by Cézanne, and within the painting is depicted a paradigmatic red apple. One person says that the sentence is true and the second person says that it is false. Upon inspection we realize that the disagreement is not over whether the painting depicts an apple, but is instead over whether the quantifier captures it as an apple. Specifically, it is over whether an imaged thing exists through the image. This is an extensional evidence for quantifier equivocation, different from fdrake's intensional evidence. The paper itself admits this possibility. It begins an argument: — Leontiskos