I may be wrong, but I think philosophers of language tend to interpret "the" statements as saying, first of all, that what follows the "the" exists and is unique, and then whatever further is said the "the" thing. So if we agree to this, any statement about "the" King of France (presuming a current time frame) is just false. –Dan
On Jan 20, 2016, at 2:19 PM, Allan Wechsler <acwacw@gmail.com> wrote:
These discussions about properties of a nonexistent object require nontrivial interpretation, which can't be done mathematically. Better, I think, to say that some "propositions" have no truth value (perhaps because they are not actually propositions). The classic example is "The present King of France is bald." Reasoning about the empty set cannot help us here. One can defend the proposition by saying, "Show me one hair from the present King of France's head!" One can attack it by saying, "Show me his shiny scalp!"
I think "propositions" like "So-and-so's husband is not married" have the same problem. The statement "Chris has no husband" does not straightforwardly imply "Chris's husband is unmarried"; it can only have that implication under some fairly gnarly rule of interpretation, which I challenge anybody to verbalize.