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Logic and a flower bed



My quote from Brandom about inferentialism earlier this week has me thinking. 

Consider the following inference. 

If a flower bed contains only geraniums and violas then it contains no roses.

This flower bed contains only geraniums and violas.

Thus, this flower bed contains no roses.  

That seems straightforward although it is more Stoic than Aristotelean, and to some minds the "if ... then" of Stoi logic sounds question begging.  Could we put it in more categorical syllogistic form if we wanted to? I suppose so.  We would want to make explicit the premise that the different types of flowers are mutually exclusive: that is, a geranium is reliably not a rose.

Couldn't there be a hybrid?  I have no idea, but I'm presuming any hybrid gera-rose would be neither geranium nor rose. Even with a gera-rose, every flower in this flower bed has been identified as to type, and in each case the type is non-rose.  Reasoning as process of elimination.

Just thinking aloud here. And this might have something to do with inferentialism.  Or not.  But does the meaning of the word "geranium" for me turn on my understanding that, whatever a geranium is exactly, it cannot be a rose? There are different types of geraniums, even pure no-hybridization-involved geraniums, including the hardy cransesbills. If you tell me that the garden contains only geraniums and violas it would be wrong for me to draw the inference that there are no cranesbills.  Yet it is not obvious to me that my error would be such as to justify the conclusion "Faille attaches no proper meaning to the word 'geranium'."  

 


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