Several days ago, Ms Sullivan asked me to explain a comment I made concerning Cheerskep's general strategy of argumentation. She wrote,
I keep thinking about [the claim that Cheerskep inverts major and minor > premises] in between dodging the heat, and I am afraid I still can't figure > it out. what are the major and minor premises of this argument set out in > Aristotelian logic please, or if you feel you can't do that, a later logic. > I responded to her privately, but now think the matter is sufficiently important to post to the list directly. So far as I understand him, Cheerskep uses two basic arguments to justify his claim that there is no meaning of singular terms (proper names, mass terms, natural kinds etc). The first is essentially a variation on what is called a pessimistic meta-induction (effectively: since we have yet to reach 'the meaning of xxx, we will never reach such a meaning, ergo no such thing exists') The second argument, which is the one I alluded to previously, has the form of an Aristotelean syllogism: (1) the notion I have associated with some lexical entity, xxx, is IIMT (2) every lexical entity is IIMT Therefore, there is no 'the meaning of' any lexical entity. Were the inference valid, (1) would be the major premise (it is in fact a minor premise), (2) would be the minor one (which ought to be the major premise). Cheerskep has inverted them in order to move from a particular claim concerning his phenomenological description to a universal negative conclusion. Compare Cheerskeps argument with the classical example of Aristotle's syllogism: (1) All men are mortal (2) Socrates is a man Therefore Socrates is mortal The major premise is a universal or general claim, established independently of the argument (inductively or by stipulative definition, in the case of 'All men are mortal'). The minor premise is an instance of the general claim. inverting their order effectively begs the question. In contemporary logical calculus, one would say that Cheerskep has illicitly introduced a universal quantifier, where all he is licensed to introduce on the basis of his first person assertion is a existential one. He simply cannot make the claim that _all_ Notion is IIMT based on his first person description of his mental states.
