Against the topic-transparency of logical operators
There are some problematic cases for defenders of the hypothesis that logical form is topic-transparent, i.e. the claim that two statements that differ only in the logical composition off its atomic components cannot differ in topic: On the one hand, many people, myself included, claim that tautologies are not about anything in the content of the atomic components that occur in them, but about the logical operators themselves. Presumably, sentences of the form ( P → ( Q → P )) are not about whatever P and Q are about, but about material implication: in particular, they tell us that if the consequent of an implication is true, the whole implication is true as well. The basic argument for this later claim is that whatever P and Q are about makes no difference to the content of the tautology. Based on Wittgenstein, Lazerowitz and Ambrose, and myself , we have argued that even though sentences like “Triangles are my favorite geometrical figures” are about triangles, i...