The Road to Universal Logic by Arnold Koslow & Arthur Buchsbaum

Author:Arnold Koslow & Arthur Buchsbaum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

This syntactic rule reduces a sentence to the combination of a syntactic name with a syntactic verb. Yet, De Interpretatione [24] never makes such a claim. Boger is ready to meet the objection, as he adds that Aristotle’s arguments are too confusing, which prevents Aristotle himself from clearly distinguishing syntax from semantics.2 In other words, we are asked to suppose that Aristotle genuinely aims to separate syntax from semantics, even though he is unable to spell out a syntactic rule explicitly. Boger reconstructs the argument in order to make it compatible with his main claim that there is a divide between syntax and semantics in Aristotle’s underlying logic. Yet, is it really Aristotle’s original position?

The view that Aristotle resorts to a syntactic rule faces a serious objection, since De Interpretatione has no reason to introduce a syntactic language. Indeed, Aristotle does not think of syntactic entities as belonging to linguistics. He deals with a spoken language, based on meaningful spoken sounds. A name (onoma) is a “meaningful spoken sound” (phônê sêmantikê) (2, 16a19), along with a verb (rhêma) that is also a meaningful spoken sound (3, 16b19–20). Names cannot be syntactic entities, since their linguistic status derives from their meaning by convention: A name is a spoken sound meaningful by convention (kata sunthêkên)… I say ‘by convention’ because no name is a name by nature (phusei) but only when it has become a symbol (sumbolon). (De Interpretatione, 2, 16a19, a26–28)3

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