Editing Term logic (section)

== Revival ==
Some philosophers have complained that predicate logic:
* Is unnatural in a sense, in that its syntax does not follow the syntax of the sentences that figure in our everyday reasoning. It is, as [[Willard Van Orman Quine|Quine]] acknowledged, "[[Procrustean]]," employing an [[artificial language]] of [[function (mathematics)|function]] and [[Logical argument|argument]], [[Quantifier (logic)|quantifier]], and [[bound variable]].
* Suffers from theoretical problems, probably the most serious being [[empty name]]s and identity statements.

Even academic philosophers entirely in the mainstream, such as [[Gareth Evans (philosopher)|Gareth Evans]], have written as follows:
:"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)