The slingshot argument is a family of arguments in logic and the philosophy of language, named by Jon Barwise and John Perry in 1981 for its surprising economy of means, with versions attributed to Gottlob Frege, Alonzo Church, Willard Van Orman Quine and Donald Davidson. Using only a small number of individually plausible logical principles, among them that substituting co-referential terms and logically equivalent sentences preserves what a sentence stands for, the argument derives the striking conclusion that any two true sentences must stand for the very same thing, collapsing what looked like many distinct facts or states of affairs into one. Because this conclusion is deeply counterintuitive, the slingshot argument is most often discussed not as a result to be accepted but as a challenge that theories of facts, propositions or sentential reference must find some principled way to block.
Facts
Origin YearSourced to the subject's own accountAttribution contested: the name slingshot was coined later by Barwise and Perry (1981); Stephen Neale (1995) attributes the earliest version to Kurt Godel (1944); other scholars trace elements to Frege, Church, Quine and Davidson at various dates. Classification
Position KindSourced to the subject's own account Sources
1. Slingshot Argument (Wikipedia)
WikipediaSlingshot argument (Wikipedia), on Neale and Godel
Stephen Neale (1995) claims, controversially, that the most compelling version was suggested by Kurt Godel (1944).
Slingshot argument (Wikipedia), introduction
In philosophical logic, a slingshot argument is one of a group of arguments claiming to show that all true sentences stand for the same thing.
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