I am new to the set of those who have discovered Elucidations, a pleasant fact indeed. Please continue this stimulating broadcast.

The episode concerning modal syllogistic prompts these comments: as a lay person I found the discussion difficult to follow. While I intend to read further on the subject presented, please accept this initial remark; perhaps the discussion can benefit from structure enforced by the host(s). I draw your attention to the brilliant work of Alan Saunders with his Philosopher’s Zone. Saunders is expert at restating and at clarifying the statements of his guests, at establishing a priori the exposition of particularly opaque concepts.

Please understand, I intend as praise this comparison to Alan Saunders. I believe through conscious practice Elucidations can attain the brilliance of Philosopher’s Zone. I am eager to follow your successful maturation.

Many thanks indeed for your broadcast.

Generic statements are loose generalizations: they hold for the most part, but can have the occasional exception here and there without that exception making them false. For example, most people would say that the statement ‘Birds fly’ is true, even though we all know that penguins are birds and that penguins don’t fly. There’s a huge discussion in philosophy and linguistics about how it’s possible for those three statements to be consistent. What are statements like ‘birds fly’ really saying?

Anyway, there’s a lot we could say about that, but let’s get back to Aristotle. One hypothesis that’s consistent with what Aristotle says is that for him, ‘Every A is B’ means something like ‘As are B’ (in the relevant sense of ‘birds fly,’ given above). Of course, this is only one possibility among many. But if it’s correct, then it fits nicely with the last two points you made. There’s some recent research at the border between psychology and philosophy which suggests that generic statements are the natural home for inductive reasoning in young children. Children only get good at reasoning with quantifiers starting at a later age.

So if Aristotle indeed meant ‘As are B’ by ‘Every A is B,’ then perhaps universal statements in syllogistic have even more of a claim to being the endpoint of inductive reasoning than universal statements in modern logic!

Re: giraffes, a number of people who listen to both Elucidations and The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps have asked me whether the two of us have a mind meld. I’ve been using them as examples in papers, conversations, lectures, and grant applications for many years! But here’s a question: how did yours come to be named Hiawatha?

A couple of thoughts about extensionality and Aristotelian logic: I think there’s reasonably good evidence that Aristotle does think that part of the truth conditions for “All A are B” is that there be at least one A. Thus, there is what Prof Malink was calling (I think) “existential import” for such predications. This kind of makes sense: how could we know/how could it be true that all A are B if there aren’t any A things to be B? And I would also say that for him a universal predication is “made true” by the existence of individuals, this would be part of his rejection of Platonic Forms (we see it at work in his characterization in the Categories of individuals as primary substances).

That relates to another issue which is Aristotle’s epistemology: his theory of induction suggests that we do somehow get to universal predications on the basis of looking at individual instances. It’s an interesting question whether Aristotle keeps clearly apart, as we’d want him to, the issues of truth conditions and of epistemic access. In other words, he may be assuming that the truth conditions of a predication are intimately related to the possibility of knowing the predication to be true.

Keep up the good work!