An oddity about philosophers, and especially logicians, is that when they talk about “quantity” they are not talking about numbers, or numerical counts. Rather, they are talking about the ways things can be gathered together (or singled out) using words like “all” or “some.” These ideas are called “quantifiers.” I want to do three things (briefly, as always) here: say a little about the “basic” quantifiers (“all” and “some”), say a little about how they get dropped from common discourse and argument – whether from laziness or deliberate obfuscation – leading to much gratuitous confusion. Finally, I want to say something about quantifiers that typically do not make it onto philosophers’ or logicians’ lists, yet are at least as common in ordinary discourse and argument as the “principal” two are. My purpose here (as always) is not to lead you onto the path of righteous proof making, but simply alert the reader to the importance of these operators so that they might not slip by quite so stealthily in the future.

The second greatest sin in logic is to allow things to pass implicitly; the greatest sin is to block the road of inquiry, which is one of the things that happens when concepts are allowed to pass implicitly. Allowing things to remain implicit means that vague statements are permitted, by innuendo, to become concrete, thus leading us astray (blocking inquiry) from the directly stated vagueness. Sometimes things really are ambiguous, and they must be allowed to stay that way until real data, rather than jumping at conclusions, enables us to clear up the ambiguity. That, or recognize that the ambiguity is not – or, at least, not yet – cleared. Continue reading →