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Note on Professor Leonard's Analysis of Interrogatives, etc.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

J. M. O. Wheatley
J. M. O. Wheatley*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Extract

Professor Leonard proposes that imperative and interrogative sentences be classified, together with declarative ones, as true and false. The interesting analysis he gives in connection with this proposal points out that these three types of utterance have something in common and has the merit of evincing the identity of this common element. Also it may seem to offer attractive possibilities of integrating various types of discourse in its promise of partial assimilation of interrogatives and imperatives to the model of truth-valuable language. Even so, Leonard's account is not altogether satisfactory. I shall not discuss his treatment of imperatives but shall argue that his conception of interrogatives has unacceptable consequences.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , January 1961 , pp. 52 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1961

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Footnotes

1

Henry S. Leonard, “Interrogatives, Imperatives, Truth, Falsity and Lies”, Philosophy of Science 26 (1959): 172-86.

References

2 Leonard makes it clear that he is concerned not with sentence-types but with sentence-tokens, i.e., “certain bits of ink or throbs of noise” (op. cit., p. 173), and in the present note I shall follow suit. Further, like him, I use the terms “interrogative sentences,” “interrogatives”, and “questions” interchangeably.

3 Some questions, which Leonard calls “invalid”, are neither true nor false because they are, e.g., too vague.

4 “Given that p, then q” must here, of course, be distinguished from “If p then q” in the sense of material implication. Quine might call the former a conditional affirmation as distinct from an affirmation of a conditional. (See Methods of Logic, p. 12.) But it is proper to regard such conditional affirmations as true and false.