It's hard to know where to draw the boundaries on this sort of thing, and we need to distinguish questions. Is the claim that the working class will themselves be offended by use of the term "vulgar"? Or is the claim that, by using the term, you are showing them disrespect (that is, showing disrespect for them), even if they are not themselves offended? Different cases will be different. Consider the verb "gyp", meaning to defraud or swindle. As the spelling indicates, the term comes from "gypsy". I expect few people, other than gypsies, know this. So, in that sense, people who use the term are probably not trying to offend gypsies. But, if I were a gypsy, I'd find it offensive and so, by using it, one may be offending such people, even if one does not mean to do so. One would not be blameworthy for that usage, but, once informed of its consequences, one should stop using the term. A similar case might be "Indian summer". The history of this term is closely related to the more obviously derogatory ...

Well said. And, as an empirical matter, there is no evidence whatsoever that it is any more difficult for children to learn Chinese or German than it is for them to learn English or Spanish.

Vagueness has been much discussed in recent years, and pretty much every possible view has been held. Let me just try to clarify a few things, and then I'll suggest some additional reading. First, I'm not absolutely sure, but the last few sentences seem to express a worry of the following form: If there's "a problem with our very notion of what it is to be fat", and if, therefore, "there is no fact of the matter about whether Frank is fat", then there will be such a problem even in "the cases where it seems so intuitively clear that Frank is fat". This kind of view is usually called "nihilism", and it certainly has been held. One form of it, which derives from Gottlob Frege, holds that predicates that exhibit this sort of vagueness are semantically defective, that is, not properly meaningful. But nihilism is a pretty desperate view, and most philosophers would regard it as a last resort. A more common view would break the train of thought here and say that we need to distinguish sorts of cases...

Quine's views on this matter vary over the years. Early (meaning in "Two Dogmas" and related works of that period), he was prepared to deny that there are any analytic statements. Later, especially in Philosophy of Logic , Quine's view mellows a bit, and he is prepared to recognize a very limited class of such statements, namely, truths of sentential logic, such as "It is raining or it is not raining" and the like. That's still a pretty limited set, as Quine seems unprepared to regard even what one would normally regard as truths of predicate logic as analytic (e.g., "If someone loves everyone, then everyone is loved by someone"). But mostly this is because Quine thinks there's no clear sense in which that sentence is properly analyzed as a truth of predicate logic. This is connected with the doctrine of ontological relativity. In so far as it is properly so analyzed, I think Quine would regard it as analytic. So mathematics, for Quine, is quite definitely out as analytic. There are going to...

Suppose I ask, pointing out into empty space: What color is that apple? I take it that the question cannot be answered, that, to borrow a phrase from Sir Peter Strawson, "the question just doesn't arise". This is because the word "that" is not, in this utterance, used to refer to anything, so there isn't anything of which it has been asked what its color is. It is like asking: What color is OobaDooba? The ruler case is the same: If there is no ruler, than you can't ask how long "it" is, because there is no "it" about which to ask. I take it that this means the answer, in your terms, is "N/A". I can see why you might think it could also be 0. After all, couldn't there be a ruler with no length? In principle (though not in fact), I suppose there could be: But it would have to be a ruler nonetheless, which might mean that it had width and breadth, but no length. (Think of a plane stood on end.)

With all due respect to Professor Green (hi, Mitch!), even that is not the final word. I think perhaps Professor Nahmias was assuming that John knows perfectly well that Mushmush is a green person, Mushmush being his neighbor and all that, and that John has some minimal degree of logical competence. Still in that case, most people would hold that it does not logically follow that John believes that Mushmush should be killed. There are two quite different reasons for this. One involves the fact that we cannot, even in principle, actually deduce all the logical consequences of everything we believe. It seems extremely plausible, in fact, that there are propositions of the form "All F are G" and "x is an F" that I believe, where I do NOT believe the corresponding proposition of the form "x is G", simply because I have never gotten around to inferring it. Note carefully that the claim is not that I believe that x is NOT G, just that I fail to believe that it is. In this kind of case, though, you...

If I remember correctly, and I may well not, David Lewis explicitly argues that there are uncountably many propositions in Plurality of Worlds and uses this as an argument against any view that would try to reduce propositions to sentences. At the very least, he does consider this issue. So here's an argument that I think I remember from that book that we can consider, anyway. It is based upon the claim that, for any real number x , there ought to be a proposition---a possible content of thought---that I am shorter than x inches tall. Indeed, each such proposition could be expressed by a sentence. All we have to do is give the real number x a name, say, "Fred", and then the proposition will be expressed by the sentence "I am shorter than Fred inches tall". But if so, then there are at least as many propositions as there are reals. The key to this argument, note, is the observation that the claim "For every proposition p , there could be a sentence S that expressed it" is...

I couldn't agree more with what Miriam says here. But let me add a bit. First, the common talk one hears about the "definition of marriage" seems to me to be confused. One might reasonably speak of a definition of the word "marriage", but marriage, the civil or cultural or religious institution, is not something that is "defined" in the way a word is defined. For this reason, among many others, the common refrain one hears, that we can look in a dictionary to find out what marriage is, and in particular to find out whether two men can marry, is just silly. (And, if it weren't silly enough, of course dictionaries change.) That said, one might seek something like a characterization of the institution of marriage, as it has existed in (say) American society over the last few hundred years. One might want to know what marriage is, as one might want to know what goldenrods are. As Miriam says, such an investigation would likely find that there was a good deal of variation, across religious groups...

Well, I don't know if it could be quite like that, but one dominant approach to contemporary linguistic theory holds that questions like, "How do descriptions work in natural language?" are ultimately questions about the psychology of competent speakers. Assuming that (cognitive) psychology in some sense or other ultimately reduces to facts about the brain, it follows that the question how descriptions work in natural language is, in some sense, a question about the brain. But the nature of the relation between psychology and brain-facts is the difficult question here.

I take it that by "bivalence", you mean the principle that every proposition is either true or false. And if we take that principle in unrestricted form---we really do mean every proposition---then, well, it's hard to see how it could fail to imply that the proposition expressed by "There will be a riot in London on 13 January 2076" is either true or false. If you don't like that conclusion, then you have to abandon bivalence---or, perhaps, the claim that the sentence in question expresses a proposition, though that seems rather worse. But note that you do not have to abandon bivalence, so to speak, across the board. You might still think that every mathematical proposition is either true or false, or that every proposition about the past is either true or false, or.... Perhaps there is something special about the future here. As you probably know, Michael Dummett argued that one way to understand debates over "realism" takes them to turn upon our attitude towards bivalence regarding...