The Present King of France Wears Hypothetical Shoes with Categorical Laces

The first period (1) of the title of this paper is a conflation of the well-known Russellian example (2) ‘The present king of France is bald’ and a medieval example (3) ‘Socrates wears hypothetical shoes with categorical laces’. ² The common problem raised by (1–3) is where to draw the border between ill-formed and well-formed sentences, and between nonsensical and significant sentences, the latter being such as must be true or false. In other words, the demarcation between logic and grammar is part of the problem, for – as one thirteenth-century grammarian said – the grammarian studies well-formedness and ill-formedness, while the logician studies truth and falsity. ³