The daily papers are posted. Sadly, both the new NDPR reviews are positive, breaking a rather amusing trend. (And it means I might actually have to go and read one of the newly reviewed books.) And I think we have a new winner in the prize for longest abstract for a Stanford Encyclopaedia entry.
In other news, I was chatting with my philosophy of language class about the King of France, as one naturally does, and about the apparent asymmetry in our reactions to these sentences.
(7) The King of France is wise.
(8) Last week, my friend went driving with the King of France.
Strawson noted way back when that while it is odd to call the first false, it is perfectly natural to call the second false. When flipping through the semantics archive I had noticed that Kai von Fintel argued that the same asymmetry in intuitions is generated by (33) and (34). (The numbering is taken from his paper.)
(33) The King of France is wise.
(34) The King of France is on a state visit to Australia.
The idea is that while (34) is intuitively false, (33) is still just icky. Since I learned the Russellian account so long ago, I have no intuitions on these matters, so I couldnt tell whether this was going to be an intuition people shared. But they all did. So that seemed like reason enough to look at the von Fintel paper as a sort of contemporary successor to Strawson, which should be fun.
The point of posting this here is just to see if other readers have the same asymmetric response. Maybe there will be a few others out there like me whove had all their semantic intuitions beaten out of them, or maybe Im alone in this predicament.
It should be noted that von Fintel does not think that (33) and (34) differ in truth value, he thinks they are both false, the point is just that we have different intuitive reactions to each of them.