Confused terms in ordinary language (Q783673)

As the authors themselves declare at the end of the Introduction, ``this article is a contribution to the growing sub-field David Ripley has dubbed `experimental philosophical logic''' (p. 199). Accordingly, the core of the article relies on a survey of logico-semantical accounts of ``confused terms'' in ordinary language followed by an empirical study designed to assess the formal theories against their ability to describe how humans actually deal with confused terms. The subject-matter which is investigated from both the logical and the experimental perspectives is the presence of confused terms in sentences taken from ordinary language. In the Introduction, the authors aptly circumscribe the topic to the following more precise question: ``What semantics should be used for sentences containing multiply-signifying names?'' (p. 199), where ``multiply-signifying names'' are defined as ``any linguistic item that grammatically or syntactically behaves like a proper name, yet conflates distinct things'' (p. 198). In order to apply both logical and experimental methods to this classical problem in philosophy of language, the authors introduce the following story (p. 198) as a case-study for the subsequent discussions: ``Fred goes to the pet store and purchases an ant colony in a box. The owner of the pet store tells Fred that every ant colony comes with many small ants but only one big ant. After Fred gets home and begins unpacking his new purchase, he says ``I'm going to call the big ant in this colony `Charley.''' Unbeknownst to Fred, however, there are actually two large ants in this colony. Call them `Ant A' and `Ant B.''' In Section 2, without attempting to be exhaustive, the authors survey several semantic proposals for `Charley' intended as a multiply-signifying term. The proposals, articulated under the labels of ``neutral'', ``negative'', and ``positive'' semantics are: weak and strong Kleene schemes in their internal and external negation versions (neutral semantics); Burge semantics (negative); supervaluational, contextualist, and ``at-least-one'' semantics in both its Lewis-Priest's and McLeish's versions (positive). For each proposal, the authors briefly reports pros and cons taken from the logico-philosophical literature. In Section 3, the authors present the empirical study, based on a test constituted by eleven sentences which involve the term `Charley' and which are presumed to make corresponding statements about Fred's story. The participants -- a population of about two hundred undergraduates -- are asked to assign to each sentence a judgment selected among the following: ``True'', ``False'', ``Both true and false'', ``Neither true nor false'', ``Don't know/can't tell''. Some other instructions are given to the participants, sophisticating a bit the experiment. After describing the experiment, the authors move on to elaborate the results. First, they discuss, for each one of the semantic proposals surveyed in Section 2, which answers to the test should be expected according to the theory. The theoretical answers are then contrasted with those given by the participants to the test, drawing some conclusions about how accurately each formal theory predicts ordinary speakers' judgements. They conclude that the results seem to favour positive over negative or neutral semantics. This is a very-well-structured article contributing by a specific experiment a topic in philosophical logic where there is no abundance of empirical data. The empirical study is cleverly and purposefully designed and certainly provides interesting findings though, probably, not strong enough to draw definite conclusions on the subject, as the authors themselves honestly warn the reader (see, for instance, footnote 27 on page 217).