Abstract

FERGUSON, Thomas Macaulay. Secrecy, Content, and Quantification. Anal. filos. [online]. 2021, vol.41, n.2, pp.285-320. ISSN 1851-9636.  http://dx.doi.org/10.36446/af.2021.457.

While participating in a symposium on Dave Ripley’s forthcoming book Uncut, I had proposed that employing a strict-tolerant interpretation of the weak Kleene matrices provided a content-theoretical conception of the bounds of conversational norms that enjoyed advantages over Ripley’s use of the strong Kleene matrices. During discussion, I used the case of sentences that are taken to be out-of-bounds for being secrets as an example of a case in which the setting of conversational bounds in practice diverged from the account championed by Ripley. In this paper, I consider an objection that my treatment of quantifiers was mistaken insofar as the confidentiality of a sentence φ(t) may not lift to the sentence ∃xφ(x) and draw from this objection that neither the strong nor the weak Kleene interpretation of quantifiers suffices, but that a novel interpretation may do so.

Keywords : Weak Kleene Logic; Strict-Tolerant Logic; Immune Logic; Quantifiers.