Indeed, if we assume that Parmenides is arguing for an ‘epistemological disjunctivism’ – such that the veridical and truthful state and the erroneous and deceptive state are essentially different – it will be clear that he is further arguing for what could be defined as a ‘semantic disjunctivism’, so that true speech and false speech are essentially different as well. More specifically, Parmenides’ epistemology has to be taken into account. DielsKranz (DK) numbering is the standard system for referencing the works of the ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosophers, based on the collection of quotations from and reports of their work, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (The Fragments of the Pre-Socratics), by Hermann Alexander Diels. He was a pupil of Xenophanes as well as a Pythagorean. Within that context, the referent of ‘it’ is indeterminate: ‘it’ can pick out anything you like (witness premise 3 in the argument above). A Greek philosopher who lived between the second half of the sixth century bce and the first half of the fifth century bce, Parmenides was born in and lived in Elea, an Ionic colony on the coast of Campania, in an area then inhabited by the Lucani, who called the city Velia. My suggestion is that in order to explain the Eleatic philosophy of language (and the Eleatic account of names) a step back is required. The first stage of the Way of Truth seeks to establish Parmenides’s thesis that it is, and it is not possible for it not to be. In view of this, what is Parmenides’ account of names? As many scholars have emphasised, because it is fair neither to conclude that mortals’ names are ‘empty names’ nor dismiss Opinion's account (i.e., broadly speaking, the mortals’ account of reality) itself as meaningless, it seems that Parmenides is suggesting that some kind of distinction between what names refer to and what names mean must be drawn. Nonetheless, Parmenides claims more than once (B 8.53, B 9.1) that mortals do name reality, although incorrectly. Heidegger says: thinking means taking into consideration what is. Parmenides main truth is: We cannot think nor say not-being. the distinction between ‘naming’ and ‘meaning’. The poem has two parts: the first is the way of Truth, the second, the way of Opinion. A well-established tradition has argued that it is not legitimate to attribute to Parmenides a Fregean semantics, i.e.
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