There are, of course, categories of sentences in which you can use
words like ‘all’, but they’re more restricted than we generally acknowl-
edge. Either they’re sentences describing a particular known group of
things: ‘all of my friends’, or ‘all of the coins in my pocket’, or they’re
trivially true, that is they’re true a priori, by virtue of the meaning of
their constituent parts.
For example, it would be quite correct to say that ‘All bachelors are
unmarried men, ’ or that ‘All cats are animals,’ or that ‘All bicycles have
two wheels,’ because this is what we mean by these terms. These sen-
tences are true by virtue of what we agree to put into them in the first
place. The fact that we agree the word ‘bachelor ’ shall mean ‘male’ and
‘unmarried’, makes the sentence true. In the same way, when we
unwrap the meaning of other words like ‘cat’ or ‘bicycle’, we find that
their meaning too links two or more characteristics in ‘all’ cases.
Beyond these ‘analytic’ truths, we’re faced with the problem of using
simple absolutes, like ‘all’, in empirical propositions, that is prop-
ositions that go beyond the meaning of the terms they use, to make
statements about the real world. As we’ve already seen, it’s safe to
use words like ‘all’ in sentences that make a claim about a particular
known group of things, like your friends or the coins in your pocket.
So you could safely say that ‘All the people in this room are male’,
or ‘All the members of the party voted for Mr X as their candidate’,
because the evidence for these claims is easy to verify.
But most of the claims we make are not like this: they involve an
element of judgement on our part; they cannot be verified either by
demonstrable fact or by analysis of the meaning of their constituent
parts. They’re claims like ‘Nobody believes it’s right to kill dolphins,’
‘Everybody agrees that terrorists should receive capital punishment,’
or ‘At no time over the last seventy years has anybody seriously doubted
the value of the automobile.’ Each of these claims is too strong for the
evidence we have, or even could have. You need find only one person
who believes dolphins should be killed, or that terrorists should be sen-
tenced to life imprisonment, or that the automobile has damaged the
quality of our lives, to have disproved them.
Another sign worth sticking to your computer screen or pinning
above your desk might read:226 WritingThe more difficult I make it for the examiner to
dismiss my arguments, the higher my marks.HTW29 7/27/01 8:42 AM Page 226