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Singular term

 

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Singular term



 
 
There is no really adequate definition of singular term. Here are some definitions proposed by different writers:

  1. A term that tells us which individual is being talked about. (John Stuart Mill
    John Stuart Mill

    John Stuart Mill , United Kingdom philosopher, political economy, civil servant and Parliament of the United Kingdom, was an influential liberalism thinker of the 19th century....
    , Arthur Prior
    Arthur Prior

    Arthur Norman Prior was a noted logic. Prior founded tense logic, now also known as temporal logic, and made important contributions to intensional logic, particularly in Prior ....
    , P. F. Strawson
    P. F. Strawson

    Sir Peter Frederick Strawson British Academy was an England Philosophy. He was the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1968 to 1987....
    )
  2. A term that is grammatically singular, i.e. a proper name
    Proper name

    "A proper name [is] a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about" writes John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic , "but not of telling anything about it"....
     (proprium nomen), a demonstrative pronoun (pronomen demonstrativum) or a demonstrative pronoun with a common name (cum termino communi).






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    There is no really adequate definition of singular term. Here are some definitions proposed by different writers:

    1. A term that tells us which individual is being talked about. (John Stuart Mill
      John Stuart Mill

      John Stuart Mill , United Kingdom philosopher, political economy, civil servant and Parliament of the United Kingdom, was an influential liberalism thinker of the 19th century....
      , Arthur Prior
      Arthur Prior

      Arthur Norman Prior was a noted logic. Prior founded tense logic, now also known as temporal logic, and made important contributions to intensional logic, particularly in Prior ....
      , P. F. Strawson
      P. F. Strawson

      Sir Peter Frederick Strawson British Academy was an England Philosophy. He was the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford from 1968 to 1987....
      )
    2. A term that is grammatically singular, i.e. a proper name
      Proper name

      "A proper name [is] a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about" writes John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic , "but not of telling anything about it"....
       (proprium nomen), a demonstrative pronoun (pronomen demonstrativum) or a demonstrative pronoun with a common name (cum termino communi). (William of Ockham
      William of Ockham

      William of Ockham was an England Franciscan friar and Scholasticism philosopher, from Ockham, Surrey, a small village in Surrey, near East Horsley....
      )
    3. A term that is inherently about the object to which it applies or refers
      Reference

      A reference is a relation between Object in which one object designates by linking to another object. Such relations as these may occur in a variety of domains, including logic, computer science, time, art and scholarship....
      . (Gottlob Frege
      Gottlob Frege

      Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a Germany mathematics who became a logician and philosophy. He helped found both modern mathematical logic and analytic philosophy....
      )
    4. A term that is true "in the same sense" of only one object. (Peter of Spain
      Peter of Spain

      Peter of Spain or, in Latin, Petrus Hispanus is the Middle Ages author of Tractatus, a standard textbook on logic, and often credited with a number of works on medicine....
      )


    Works cited


    • Frege, G. (1892) "On Sense and Reference", originally published as " Über Sinn und Bedeutung" in Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, vol. 100, pp. 25-50. Transl. Geach & Black 56-78.
    • Mill, J.S., A System of Logic, London 1908 (8th edition).
    • Petrus Hispanus, Summulae Logicales, ed. I. M. Bochenski (Turin, 1947) – also quoted in Prior 1976
    • Prior, A.N. The Doctrine of Propositions & Terms London 1976
    • Strawson, P.F. "On Referring", Mind 1950 pp. 320-44.
    • William of Ockham, Summa logicae
      Sum of Logic

      The Summa Logicae is a textbook on logic by William of Ockham. It was written around 1323.Systematically, it resembles other works of medieval logic, organised under the basic headings of the Aristotelian Predicables, category , terms, propositions, and syllogisms....
       Paris 1448, Bologna 1498, Venice 1508, Oxford 1675