Friday, May 02, 2014

Poem about W.V.O. Quine

(modelled on Leonard Cohen's poem about Irving Layton in The Energy of Slaves, as if written by David Kaplan, based on Wikipedia)

Quine was wrong
about quantification
He was right
about words and objects
But he was wrong
in thinking that
substitution failure
implies existential
generalization failure for
clauses that exhibit it.

_______
Update (29-09-16): I did not realize when I wrote this poem how much it was related to my "Notes on the Practice of Deference".

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