Quine’s Syntactical Insights

Abstract

Jokes about ‘no man’ as a name are now some three millennia old; an understanding of the syntactical difference between such a phrase and a name is both much more recent and much less available. To take ‘no man’ as naming, or even referring to, some man appears patently contradictory; but many beginners in logic take ‘no man’ as referring to non- men (each of whom, admittedly, is no man), or again to a null class of men; and the second mistake has been known to appear in textbooks too. On either view ‘no man’ would be something like a name, only not a name of a man. And what about ‘some man’? Certainly this is not some man’s name (to christen a child ‘Some Man’ would merely create homonymy); but it causes us no shock (many of us) if we read that at least in some of its uses this phrase refers to some man. I shall not pursue this question through the copious recent literature. Propositions about referring to are there framed in a material too malleable and ductile to bear any argumentative strain.