Friday, July 13, 2012

One is the Loneliest Number and is Natural but Odd

There is an interesting post at the "Maverick Philosopher" on van Inwagen's argument for the univocity of 'exists'. I think Vallicella goes way too easy on the first premise of the argument:

Number-words are univocal in sense: they mean the same regardless of the sorts of object they are used to count.

This seems to me to need more precision to avoid a common misunderstanding of what it is to be univocal or equivocal; words are univocal or equivocal in use, not in the abstract. Taken strictly as stated, this premise would require us to say that number-words are never reasonably used in a metaphorical or in an ironic sense. But this is certainly not true. I can count ironically, e.g., if I were making fun of somebody for miscounting something. Those will not be univocal with ordinary counting uses, which are really being presupposed here. More seriously, however: while it involves a count in some form, and the use of the word can clearly be linked to ordinary counting uses, it is simply not at all obvious that 'one' in "One is the loneliest number" is univocal with 'one' in "One is the first odd natural number". Actually, it's pretty obvious that it isn't. We know, for instance, that the two do not have the same scope: you can have one item in a couple, but not in the sense in which it is the loneliest number.

The rest of the post is quite good, though.