Parmenides: The First President Of The United States

200 Words1 Pages
“his picture, and say to ourselves “yes, that man.” We may think “the first President of the United States.” If we are very ignorant, he may be to us merely “The man who was called ‘George Washington.’ ” Whatever the name suggests to us, it must be not the man himself, since we never knew him, but something now present to sense or memory or thought. This shows the fallacy of the argument of Parmenides.
This perpetual change in the meanings of words is concealed by the fact that, in general, the change makes no difference to the truth or falsehood of the propositions in which the words occur. If you take any true sentence in which the name “George Washington” occurs, it will, as a rule, remain true if you substitute the phrase “the first President