And it may even be that semantic ascent (that is, the device of making a sentence the topic, instead of what the sentence purports to refer to) succeeds in demystifying much of what goes on in certain quarters of philosophy.
If so, although the sentence purports to refer to the king of France, it is not about him; the king of France is not the topic of discourse, nor part of the topic.
Note, however, that Alien, the sentence two paragraphs above purported to capture our intuitions concerning the contingency of existence, is false on this view, as every individual is a necessary existent.
But, editorializing aside, this sentence does what you purported to find so disturbing about the use of the of the term 'survivor' by some campus activists--it makes a claim on the basis of allegations which are as of yet unsupported.
While Khotan has experienced unrest in the past, June 2012 alone witnessed a police raid on a religious school, house-to-house searches in the Gujanbagh district of the city, the posting of discriminatory regulations on Islamic dress and an alleged hijacking for which the purported offenders received death or life sentences in December 2012.
Questions were also raised about a purported suicide attempt by Mr. Whitacre last week, when his sentencing was originally scheduled.
He was sentenced to 10 years in prison for purported "connections with a hostile government" after a televised trial that, according to Amnesty International, violated his basic rights to presumption of innocence and legal representation.
When a sentence S purports to refer or quantify in a certain way, this means that for S to be true, S must succeed in referring or quantifying in this way.
Purported Trotskyites – many of whom had no idea what Trotskyism meant – were frequently sentenced to labor camps or executed.
A court in Egypt has sentenced eight men to three years in prison for appearing in a video that purported to show a gay wedding.
This time the former prime minister, wearing grey, sat in court to hear a nervous judge reading out a sentence of seven years' jail, a three-year ban on public office and a fine of $190m as purported compensation for damage allegedly caused when she struck a gas deal with Russia in 2009.
