Natural language is neither pure nor innocent. It contains concepts that have
inferential liaisons preventing us from applying those concepts directly to anything
in the world. Think, for example, of a concept from a discarded scientific theory,
such as that of phlogiston. Someone might reasonably deny that anything contains
phlogiston. However, if instead we were to say that nothing has phlogiston, then
by the very meaning of the term (namely that phlogiston is necessary to support
combustion), that would seem to imply that nothing is combustible. Thus, one
might wish to deny of anything that it either has or doesn’t have phlogiston. My
goal here is to introduce a new kind of propositional content, formally symbolized
by striking through a candidate atomic formula, which is meant to capture, at least
in part, the rejection of the actual application of some portion of the subsentential
conceptual content of that formula. Oscar Wilde’s prosecutor is said to have posed
the following charge, “I put it to you, Mr. Wilde, that this is blasphemy. Is it or is
it not?” To elide an obvious trap set up for him, Oscar Wilde is said to have replied,
“Sir, ‘blasphemy’ is not one of my words.” My project is to provide an initial step
towards a formal understanding of the logic of attitudes like that of Mr. Wilde’s
toward blasphemy.
