Having military skills is not exactly a predicate

In this recent post I looked at Prince Henry, a medieval warrior ruling a hermit kingdom who had the misfortune to be discovered - and fall out with - the Russians. Prince Henry's armoured cavalry did not fare well against Russian gunships, artillery, tanks and spetsnaz troops.

So did Prince Henry have military skills .. or not?

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This question masquerades as a property question. If we had asked whether Henry had red hair, we could define a predicate

red-haired(henry)

which would have the boolean value true or false. Similarly, it seems we are asking for the truth-value of the predicate:

has-military-skills(henry)

but that isn't right, because it doesn't capture the environmental context.

Instead we should write:

λx.has-military-skills(henry, x),

a boolean-valued function with dummy variable x which needs to be bound to a specific opponent before a truth value can be assigned. So

λx.has-military-skills(henry, x)(knight) = has-military-skills(henry, knight)

which evaluates to true.

λx.has-military-skills(henry, x)(russians) = has-military-skills(henry, russians)

which turns out to be false.

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This is the approach Richard Montague took in his natural language semantics.