I have read Wikipedia's term logic entry, and the quote by Gareth Evans in the Revival section that's supposed to argue for term logic's advantages over predicate logic:
"I come to semantic investigations with a preference for homophonic theories; theories which try to take serious account of the syntactic and semantic devices which actually exist in the language ...I would prefer [such] a theory ... over a theory which is only able to deal with [sentences of the form "all A's are B's"] by "discovering" hidden logical constants ... The objection would not be that such [Fregean] truth conditions are not correct, but that, in a sense which we would all dearly love to have more exactly explained, the syntactic shape of the sentence is treated as so much misleading surface structure" (Evans 1977)
However, I don't understand those arguments at all. Isn't term logic merely a different syntax for a very restricted subset of predicate logic?
Instead of writing
∀x philosopher(x) ⟶ mortal(x)
we would use a shorthand like
philosopher ⊂ mortal
(or whatever the actual syntax is), and similarly for the rest of the four kinds of propositions.
Is this just a question of shorter syntax?
∀boy ∃girl loves(boy, girl)
and∃girl ∀boy loves(boy, girl)
? Looking at the examples, it would seem SETL encodes both as-boy + (loves + girl)
. Are there distinct expressions for them? – MaxB Oct 3 '20 at 22:13