“All bachelors are unmarried men.”

Seems true enough at first glace. Statements like these are the foundation of analytic thought and logic. Analytic evaluation, however, has a way of playing with its own toys too seriously. A big way.

So it isn’t true, and what’s more… cannot be — for a plethora of reasons. Amongst them, it does not refer to any man at all, or to any actual marriage, but to the word ‘bachelor’ and its most common denotations to a given abstract referent.

Thus the word ‘bachelor’ (not a man at all, and incapable of marriage), is a ‘pointer’ to ‘a condition’ which has been abstracted from any actual instance, and thus become a abstract statement of status/identity.

“All barns are structures.”

No they are not. Barns exist all over the place without the classification ‘structure’ necessarily attached to them. That all barns qualify for this classification under some schemas does not render it implicitly true or factual — except in such schemas as have pre-ordained this. Similarly, all males begin in a classificatory state of provisional bachelorhood yet this status is purely representational, and tells us nothing of men or some man.

“We often employ the term bachelor to point at a specific ‘social status’ characteristic of an actual man whose status is, in some communications act, for some purpose or purposes, proposed as unmarried.”

This is a bit more like ‘truth’. It declares where and what language it is representationally encoding, without making universal proclamations of truth or identity.