Abstract
The problem I address in this essay is whether the existence of the exclusive ‘or’ in actual discourse really is a myth. To avoid even the appearance of bad faith, I should say at the outset that nothing much seems to turn on the answer to this question. Moreover, I am hesitant to enter into a dispute from which I feel excluded because of my differences from those engaged in the fight. However, I am emboldened by the fact no one else seems to have my concerns, despite the many current critical discussions of, for example, the truth-functional analysis of the conditional, or of negation, or my topic, alternation.
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Notes
Was Jones often ill? Not ill today for once? And why? And Smith so often gone. Where?“ (Nye 1990, p. 1). These questions underscore how contrived the example is and how little interest Quine (or any other logician) has in bringing the example to life.
Jennings (1994) offers an exhaustive survey of what textbooks in logic have to say about disjunction.. He draws attention to differences in what is said to be distinguished (’senses’, ‘meanings’, ‘uses’, ‘interpretations’ and ’ways of using’), and he remarks on the presence or absence of modal qualifiers, such as ’possibly both’ or ’perhaps both’. Jennings is very resourceful in pointing out many examples of the use of ’or’ that are not to be confused with examples of truth functional alternation, whether exclusive or inclusive.
Jennings disagrees. Bert’s reply may be understood, he says, as “a refusal to be committed” (1994, p. 51). However, as I have imagined it, Joe is being asked to make a choice. “We won’t go to both places,” he is saying. “You must choose.”
Barrett and Stenner (1971) discuss what happens when the components are treated as promises (pp. 119–20). When a compound is constructed out of these components, we get: ‘I promise that we will go to the beach or I promise that we will go to the movie’. As Barrett and Stenner point out, this wording is awkward enough to raise questions about when someone would ever speak this way. Moreover, if he really is leaving it up to Bert to choose then Fred is not promising to go to the beach and he is not promising to go to the movie. So, the restatement is not inclusive alternation because both disjuncts seem false.
When the ambiguous ‘or’ of ordinary language appears hereafter in the book (my italics), let us agree to construe it in this exclusive sense“ (Quine 1982, p. 12). Quine is making clear to his readers that their construal of alternation is to apply to the logic propositions in his book. The question I am raising is whether there is any reason for thinking that what he says about this construal also applies to actual discourse.
Among Barrett and Stenner’s (1971) four necessary conditions for a truth-functional use of ‘or’ is the condition that if the ‘or’ in the original statement, S, is not flanked by statements then there must be a restatement, S’, which captures the meaning of the original statement where the ‘or’ is flanked by statements (1971, 116). If S is to be understood as a promise, then S’ cannot be understood as a promise unless some reference to a promise is somehow incorporated into S’.
The last two essays of this book have more to say about the position being taken here, namely, that a sentence (or any other part of language) is discourse that is being looked at from a certain point of view.
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© 2000 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Levi, D.S. (2000). The Application of Logic to Fields Other Than Itself. In: In Defense of Informal Logic. Argumentation Library, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1850-9_10
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