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A diagnostic property is one allowing me to single out without ambiguity the class of individuals I am referring to within a given co-textual world (see also Putnam, 1970).
In chapter 2 the dominant topic is that our heroes are quarreling. The subtopic is that they are going home. What is implicit (and must be inferred by resorting to common and intertextual frames) is that Raoul and Marguerite, being a decent bourgeois couple, must solve their problems privately. What they need is a closed bourgeois carriage. The position of the driver's seat is irrelevant. A cabriolet (with its folding top) is excluded, a brougham is not. The translator of Drame (see Appendix 2) has translated /coupé/ as «hansom cab»a carriage which has more or less the same properties as a brougham.
8.5.2. Entailment as a Metalinguistic Device
Nevertheless, there is a difference between having four (or two) wheels and being a carriage:
This is a coupé but it is not a carriage
sounds semantically odd, while
This is a coupé but it does not have four wheels
is acceptable.
It seems that there is a difference between logically necessary properties and factual or 'accidental' properties. One can say that, once certain meaning postulates (Carnap, 1952) have been accepted, a brougham is necessarily a carriage while whether it has two or four wheels is only an accidental property (see Figure 8.4). 11
This difference depends, however, on a linguistic trompe-l'oeil. If one wonders why dictionaries never record among the properties of a brougham those of being able to move and being horse-drawn, the obvious answer is that these properties are semantically included in the definition of carriage and of vehicle. Without this process of inclusion, a
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Figure 8.4

 
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