I just want to make the point that I support the positions
that Pat Hayes and Ingvar Johansson have been making. (01)
I also agree with Jack Park when he said that everything
in his note was an opinion. But that does not mean that
Jack and others have not made an enormous number of objective
statements every day of their lives. (02)
What makes a statement objective is whether its truth or
falsity can be tested by methods available to people other
than the speaker. Therefore, false, approximate, or mistaken
statements can also be objective. When Newtonian mechanics
was corrected by relativity and quantum mechanics, it did not
lose its objective status. (03)
Other examples of objective statements: (04)
"It's raining outside." (05)
"There's a sandwich shop around the corner." (06)
"A squirrel just ran through the yard." (07)
IJ> There is a class of entities such as perceptions, opinions,
> assertions, statements, and propositions that can be characterized
> by saying that (normally) they have *aboutness* (alternatively,
> *directedness* or *intentionality*). There is another class of
> entities that can be characterized by saying that they lack
> this feature of *aboutness*. (08)
I'd like to point out that the word 'aboutness' is not a
newfangled philosophical term. It has a long and honorable
history that goes back at least 6 or 7 centuries to the
medieval scholastics, who worked out the details in great
depth. They used the term 'first intention' (prima intentio)
for language about ordinary things and 'second intention'
(secunda intentio) for language (and concepts) about first
intentions. (09)
Franz Brentano adopted and extended their ideas for his work
on intentionality. (010)
C. S. Peirce also adopted the term for his 1885 paper on logic,
in which he used the term 'first intentional logic' for logic
in which the quantifiers range over ordinary physical or
mathematical entities and 'second intentional logic' for logic
in which the quantifiers range over relations. (011)
Ernst Schröder adopted Peirce's distinction, but he used
the German terms 'erste Ordnung' and 'zweite Ordnung'.
Then Bertrand Russell translated those terms back into
English as 'first-order logic' and 'second-order logic'. (012)
John Sowa (013)
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