Standardly, a one-level criterion of identity 1 is given in the form: ∀ x∀ y )where ‘ K’ denotes the kind of thing for which the criterion is being given and ‘ R’ denotes the criterial relation.Thus, we have, for example, the criterion of identity for sets: ∀ x∀ y))and for composites: ∀ x∀ y))and for events: ∀ x∀ y)). is equivalent to the conjunction of: ∀ x and ∀ x )),which just give two necessary 2 conditions for application of (...) the predicate ‘ K’. 3Consider now the reading of ‘ Kx’ as ‘ x is a member of the Theology Department’ and ‘ Rxy’ as ‘ x admires y and y admires x’. On this reading says that every theologian admires himself and admires no other member of the department. In other words it tells us that the theologians are a bunch of narcissists bound together only by mutual contempt or indifference . Suppose that this is 4 true of the theologians. It might also be …. (shrink)

Since Kaplan’s "Demonstratives", it has become a common-place to distinguish between the character and content of an expression, where the content of an expression is what it contributes to "what is said" by sentences containing that expression, and the character gives a rule for determining, in a context, the content of an expression. A tacit assumption of theories of character has been that character is autonomous from content – that semantic evaluation starts with character, adds context, and then derives content. (...) One consequence of this autonomy thesis is that the rules for character can contain no variables bound by content-level operators elsewhere in the sentence. Tacit appeal to this consequence features essentially both in Jason Stanley’s recent argument that all contextual ambiguity must be linked to "elements in the actual syntactic structure of the sentence uttered" in his "Context and Logical Form" and in my arguments against character-based theories of complex demonstratives in my "Complex Demonstratives". However, I argue here that the autonomy thesis is unmotivated, and show that we can separate Kaplan’s notion of character into two independent components: an aspect of meaning which is context-sensitive, and an aspect of meaning that is exempted from scopal interactions with other operators. The resulting semantic framework allows constructions similar to Kaplan’s rejected notion of "monsters begat by elegance", but which are both more empirically adequate and more theoretically versatile. Having made the distinction between context-sensitivity and autonomy from scopal interaction, I show how it allows binding into the character of expressions and hence undermines the immediate success of both Stanley’s argument and my former argument against character-based theories of complex demonstratives, and discuss briefly the prospects for reinstating modified versions of those arguments. Finally, I show how that same distinction allows a defusing of Kripke’s modal argument against a descriptive theory of names. Once autonomy from semantic interaction is separated from context-sensitivity, the first of those two alone can be used to capture the modal rigidity of proper names.. (shrink)

I argue that maps do not feature predication, as analyzed by Frege and Tarski. I take as my foil (Casati and Varzi, Parts and places, 1999), which attributes predication to maps. I argue that the details of Casati and Varzi’s own semantics militate against this attribution. Casati and Varzi emphasize what I call the Absence Intuition: if a marker representing some property (such as mountainous terrain) appears on a map, then absence of that marker from a map coordinate signifies absence (...) of the corresponding property from the corresponding location. Predication elicits nothing like the Absence Intuition. “F(a)” does not, in general, signify that objects other than a lack property F. On the basis of this asymmetry, I argue that attaching a marker to map coordinates is a different mode of semantic composition than attaching a predicate to a singular term. (shrink)

Frege's theory of indirect contexts and the shift of sense and reference in these contexts has puzzled many. What can the hierarchy of indirect senses, doubly indirect senses, and so on, be? Donald Davidson gave a well-known 'unlearnability' argument against Frege's theory. The present paper argues that the key to Frege's theory lies in the fact that whenever a reference is specified (even though many senses determine a single reference), it is specified in a particular way, so that giving a (...) reference implies giving a sense; and that one must be 'acquainted' with the sense. It is argued that an indirect sense must be 'immediately revelatory' of its reference. General principles for Frege's doctrine of sense and reference are sated, for both direct and indirect quotation, to be understood iteratively. I also discuss Frege's doctrine of tensed and first person statements in the light of my analysis. The views of various other authors are examined. The conclusion is to ascribe to Frege an implicit doctrine of acquaintance similar to that of Russell. (shrink)

One particular topic in the literature on Frege’s conception of sense relates to two apparently contradictory theses held by Frege: the isomorphism of thought and language on one hand and the expressibility of a thought by different sentences on the other. I will divide the paper into five sections. In (1) I introduce the problem of the tension in Frege’s thought. In (2) I discuss the main attempts to resolve the conflict between Frege’s two contradictory claims, showing what is wrong (...) with some of them. In (3), I analyze where, in Frege’s writings and discussions on sense identity, one can find grounds for two different conceptions of sense. In (4) I show how the two contradictory theses held by Frege are connected with different concerns, compelling Frege to a constant oscillation in terminology. In (5) I summarize two further reasons that prevented Frege from making the distinction between two conceptions of sense clear: (i) the antipsychologism problem and (ii) the overlap of traditions in German literature contemporary to Frege about the concept of value. I conclude with a hint for a reconstruction of the Fregean notion of ‘thought’ which resolves the contradiction between his two theses. (shrink)

Logic is usually thought to concern itself only with features that sentences and arguments possess in virtue of their logical structures or forms. The logical form of a sentence or argument is determined by its syntactic or semantic structure and by the placement of certain expressions called “logical constants.”[1] Thus, for example, the sentences Every boy loves some girl. and Some boy loves every girl. are thought to differ in logical form, even though they share a common syntactic and semantic (...) structure, because they differ in the placement of the logical constants “every” and “some”. By contrast, the sentences Every girl loves some boy. and Every boy loves some girl. are thought to have the same logical form, because “girl” and “boy” are not logical constants. Thus, in order to settle questions about logical form, and ultimately about which arguments are logically valid and which sentences logically true, we must distinguish the “logical constants” of a language from its nonlogical expressions. (shrink)

An overview of contemporary part-whole theories, with reference to both their axiomatic developments and their philosophical underpinnings.

According to an old and attractive view, vagueness must be eliminated before semantic notions — truth, implication, and so on — may be applied. This view was accepted by Frege, but is rarely defended nowadays.1 This..

The syntax of Frege's scientific language is commonly taken to be characterized by two oddities: the representation of the intended illocutionary role of sentences by a special sign, the judgement-stroke, and the treatment of sentences as a species of singular terms. In this paper, an alternative view is defended. The main theses are: the syntax of Frege's scientific language aims at an explication of the logical form of judgements; the judgement-stroke is, therefore, a truth-operator, not a pragmatic operator; in Frege's (...) first system, '⊦ Δ' expresses that the circumstance Δ is a fact, and in his second system that the truth-value - Δ is the True; in both systems, the judgement-stroke is construed as a sign sui generis, not as a genuine predicate; its counterpart in natural language is the syntactic "form of assertoric sentences", not the truth-predicate; neither in Frege's first nor in his second system sentences are treated as singular terms. (shrink)

Saul Kripke's thesis that ordinary proper names are rigid designators is supported by widely shared intuitions about the occurrence of names in ordinary modal contexts. By those intuitions names are scopeless with respect to the modal expressions. That is, sentences in a pair like (a) Aristotle might have been fond of dogs, (b) Concerning Aristotle, it is true that he might have been fond of dogs will have the same truth value. The same does not in general hold for definite (...) descriptions. If one, like Kripke, accounts for this difference by means of the intensions of the names and the descriptions, the conclusion is that names do not in general have the same intension as any normal, identifying description. However, this difference can be accounted for alternatively by appeal to the semantics of the modal expressions. On the account we suggest, dubbed 'relational modality', simple singular terms, like proper names, contribute to modal contexts simply by their actual world reference, not by their descriptive content. That account turns out to be fully equivalent with the rigidity account when it comes to truth of modal and non-modal sentence (with respect to the actual world), and hence supports the same basic intuitions. Here we present the relational modality account and compare it with others, in particular Kripke's own. (shrink)

This paper explores a variety of different versions of the thesis that natural language is involved in human thinking. It distinguishes amongst strong and weak forms of this thesis, dismissing some as implausibly strong and others as uninterestingly weak. Strong forms dismissed include the view that language is conceptually necessary for thought (endorsed by many philosophers) and the view that language is _de facto_ the medium of all human conceptual thinking (endorsed by many philosophers and social scientists). Weak forms include (...) the view that language is necessary for the acquisition of many human concepts, and the view that language can serve to scaffold human thought processes. The paper also discusses the thesis that language may be the medium of _conscious_ propositional thinking, but argues that this cannot be its most fundamental cognitive role. The idea is then proposed that natural language is the medium for non-domain-specific thinking, serving to integrate the outputs of a variety of domain-specific conceptual faculties (or central-cognitive ‘quasi-modules’). Recent experimental evidence in support of this idea is reviewed, and the implications of the idea are discussed, especially for our conception of the architecture of human cognition. Finally, some further kinds of evidence which might serve to corroborate or refute the hypothesis are mentioned. The overall goal of the paper is to review a wide variety of accounts of the cognitive function of natural language, integrating a number of different kinds of evidence and theoretical consideration in order to propose and elaborate the most plausible candidate. (shrink)

The article offers an analysis of Peirce's notion of “rhema.” It examines and explains Peirce's definition of the rhema; it identifies and solves two problems that are direct consequences of the definition. The first problem is that proper names, while classified as rhemata, do not satisfy Peirce's definition of the rhema. The second problem is that Peirce also calls “rhemata” the results of propositional analysis that however do not satisfy his own definition of the rhema. Peirce himself solves the first (...) problem by generalizing the notion of rhema into that of “seme.” I argue that we can solve the second problem if, following M. Dummett, we distinguish propositional analysis from propositional decomposition. (shrink)

Commentators regularly attribute to Frege realist, idealist, and quietist responses to metaphysical questions concerning the abstract objects he calls ‘thoughts’. But despite decades of effort, the evidence offered on behalf of these attributions remains unconvincing. I argue that Frege deliberately avoids commitment to any of these positions, as part of a metaphysical separatist policy motivated by the fact that logic is epistemologically autonomous from metaphysics. Frege’s views and arguments prove relevant to current attempts to argue for epistemological autonomy, particularly that (...) of ethics. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine Frege’s view of the context principle in his mature philosophical doctrine. Here, the author argues that the context principle is embodied in the contextual explanation of value-ranges presented in Basic Laws of Arithmetic. The contextual explanation of value-ranges plays essentially the same role as the context principle in The Foundations of Arithmetic. It is supposed to show how a reference to natural numbers is possible. Moreover, the author argues against the view that (...) the context principle should be separated from the recarving thesis. This aspect of Frege’s view leads the author to the rejection of the purely referential view of the context principle, which is fairly widely accepted in the current literature. (shrink)

Consider the Unshareability View, namely, the view that first person thought or self-thought—thought as typically expressed via the first person pronoun—is not shareable from subject to subject. In this article, I show that a significant number of Fregean and non-Fregean commentators of Frege have taken the Unshareability View to be the default Fregean position, rehearse Frege’s chief claims about self-thought and suggest that their combination entails the Unshareability View only on the assumption that there is a one-to-one correspondence between way (...) of thinking and thought-individuating cognitive value, outline an account of self-thought that rejects the assumption and keeps intact all of Frege’s chief claims, and respond to a number of worries to the effect that this proposal yields undesirable results from the point of view of the individuation of self-thought at the level of cognitive value. (shrink)

Peirce seems to maintain two incompatible theses: that a sentence is multiply analyzable into subject and predicate, and that a sentence is uniquely analyzable as a combination of rhemata of first intention and rhemata of second intention. In this paper it is argued that the incompatibility disappears as soon as we distinguish, following Dummett’s work on Frege, two distinct notions of analysis: ‘analysis’ proper, whose purpose is to display the manner in which the sense of a sentence is determined by (...) the senses of its constituent parts, and ‘decomposition’, which is the process of dividing a sentence into a predicate and a subject, and whose purpose is to both to explain how quantified sentences are constructed and to evidence a pattern within a sentence which it shares with other sentences. (shrink)

In this paper, I critically discuss Frege’s philosophy of geometry with special emphasis on his position in The Foundations of Arithmetic of 1884. In Sect. 2, I argue that that what Frege calls faculty of intuition in his dissertation is probably meant to refer to a capacity of visualizing geometrical configurations structurally in a way which is essentially the same for most Western educated human beings. I further suggest that according to his Habilitationsschrift it is through spatial intuition that we (...) come to know the axioms of Euclidean geometry. In Sect. 3, I argue that Frege seems right in claiming in The Foundations, §14 that the synthetic nature of the Euclidean axioms follows from the fact that they are independent of one another and of the primitive laws of logic. If the former were dependent on the latter, they would be analytic in Frege’s sense of analyticity. But then they would not be independent of one another and due to their mutual provability would lose their status as axioms of Euclidean geometry, since according to Frege an axiom of a theory T is per definitionen unprovable in T. I further argue that only by invoking pure spatial intuition can Frege “explain” the epistemological status of the axioms of Euclidean geometry completely: their synthetic a priori nature. Finally, I argue that his view about independence in The Foundations, §14 seems to clash with his conception of independence in his mature period. In Sect. 4, I scrutinize Frege’s somewhat vague, but unduly neglected remarks in The Foundations, §26 on space, spatial intuition and the axioms of Euclidean geometry. I argue that for the sake of coherence Frege should have said unambiguously that space is objective, that it is independedent not only of our spatial intuition, but of our mental life altogether including our judgements about space, instead of encouraging the possible conjecture that in his view it contains an objective and a subjective component. I further argue that for Frege the objectivity of both space and the axioms of Euclidean geometry manifests itself in our universal and compulsory acknowledgement of the Euclidean axioms as true. I conclude Sect. 4 by arguing that there is a conflict between the subjectivity of our spatial intuitions as stressed in The Foundations, §26 and Frege’s thesis in his dissertation that the axioms of Euclidean geometry derive their validity from the nature of our faculty of intuition. To resolve this conflict, I propose that in the light of his avowed realism in The Foundations Frege could have replaced his early thesis by saying that although we come to know the axioms of Euclidean geometry through spatial intuition and are justified in acknowledging them as true on the basis of geometrical intuition, their truth is independent not only of the nature of our faculty of intuition and singular acts of intuition, but of our mental processes and activities in general, including the inner mental act of judging. In Sect. 5, I argue that Frege most likely did not adopt Kant’s method of acquiring geometrical knowledge via the ostensive construction of concepts in spatial intuition. In contrast to Kant, Frege holds that the axioms of three-dimensional Euclidean geometry express state of affairs about space obtaining independently of our spatial intuition. In Sect. 6, I conclude with a summarized assessment of Frege’s philosophy of geometry. (shrink)

Frege's concern in GGI §10 is neither with the epistemological issue of how we come to know about value-ranges, nor with the semantic-metaphysical issue of whether we have said enough about such objects in order to ensure that any kind of reference to them is possible. The problem which occupies Frege in GGI §10 is the general problem according to which we ‘cannot yet decide’, for any arbitrary function, what value ‘’ has if ‘ℵ’ is a canonical value-range name. This (...) is a problem with the ‘reference’ of value-range names, but only in the weak sense that, if we do not exercise care, value-range terms might become ‘bedeutungslos’ for purely formal reasons. Frege addresses the general problem only for the primitive function- and object-names he has already introduced into his concept-script. I argue that this methodology was perfectly intentional: his intention for GG in general, on display in GGI §10, is to check, for each primitive function- and object-name, as it is introduced into concept-script, whether it interacts with the other primitive names which have already been introduced in such a way that these atomic combinations of primitive names do not become bedeutungslos. If there is a risk of producing a bedeutungslos combination, Frege will make an arbitrary stipulation to ensure that logical hygiene is maintained. I argue that this interpretation does not violate some of the other principal commitments of GG. (shrink)

This paper is about first‐person thoughts—thoughts about oneself that are expressible through uses of first‐person pronouns. It is widely held that first‐person thoughts cannot be shared. My aim is to postpone rejection of the more natural view that such thoughts about oneself can be shared. I sketch an account on which such thoughts can be shared and indicate some ways in which deciding the fate of the account will depend upon further work.

Hector‐Neri Castaüeda claimed in several papers that a proposition expressed by an indexical sentence (in a context of utterance) can be re‐expressed by means of an oratio obliqua clause (in a sentential context) that contains a quasi‐indicator. Robert M. Adams and Rogers Albritton have presented a counter‐argument that is accepted by Castaüeda himself. I will argue that the Adams/Albritton argument is not convincing: The argument uses several assumptions which could be disputed. The paper tries to develop a more direct argument (...) against Castaüeda's central claim. If Castaüeda's thesis is false, what then is achieved by quasi‐indexicals in oratio ubliqua? Adams and Castaüeda answer this question with a picture: the quasi‐indexical clause portrays an indexical proposition. I use Perry's idea that quasi‐indicators could be seen as expressions that bind special sense variables to give a less metaphorical account of the functioning of quasi‐indicators. Finally. I explore the consequences of this account for iterated knowledge‐ascriptions with quasi‐indicators and for truth‐conditional theories of meaning. (shrink)

Over the past fifty years the philosophy of language and mind has been dominated by a nondescriptivist approach to content and reference. This book attempts to recast and systematize that approach by offering an indexical model in terms of mental files. According to Recanati, we refer through mental files, the function of which is to store information derived through certain types of contextual relation the subject bears to objects in his or her environment. The reference of a file is determined (...) relationally, not satisfactionally, so a file is not to be equated to the body of (mis-)information it contains. Mental files are the mental equivalent of singular terms, and the reference of linguistic expressions is inherited from that of the files we associate with them. On this approach, mental files, the vehicles of singular thought, do all the work of so-called 'modes of presentation' in Fregean and neo-Russellian theories. (shrink)

This paper examines some aspects of Strawson’s conception of descriptive metaphysics, as it is developed in Individuals. Descriptive metaphysics sets out to describe ”the actual structure of our thought about the world”. Three specific problems for this project are discussed. First, isn’t the description of our actual thought about the world mainly an empirical task? Second, how determinate and consistent is the stuff we find, how determinate and consistent is our conceptual scheme? Third, who are “we” here? Answers to these (...) sets of questions are mainly negative in spirit. But all this will probably not mean that there will be no place for metaphysics, descriptive or revisionary, as a subject. The whole enterprise is perhaps more fraught with difficulties than Strawson thought, however. (shrink)

That there are analytic truths may challenge a principle of the homogeneity of truth. Unlike standard conceptions, in which analyticity is couched in terms of "truth in virtue of meanings", Frege's notions of analytic and a priori concern justification, respecting a principle of the homogeneity of truth. Where there is no justification these notions do not apply, Frege insists. Basic truths and axioms may be analytic (or a priori), though unprovable, which means there is a form of justification which is (...) not (deductive) proof. This is also required for regarding singular factual propositions as a posteriori. A Fregean direction for explicating this wider notion of justification is suggested in terms of his notion of sense (Sinn)—modes in which what the axioms are about are given—and its general epistemological significance is sketched. (shrink)

The article introduces a special issue of the journal _Metaphysica_ on vagueness and ontology. The conventional view has it that all vagueness is semantic or representational. Russell, Dummett, Evans and Lewis, inter alia, have argued that the notion of “ontic” or “metaphysical” vagueness is not even intelligible. In recent years, a growing minority of philosophers have tried to make sense of the notion and have spelled it out in various ways. The article gives an overview and relates the idea of (...) ontic vagueness to the unquestioned phenomenon of fuzzy spatiotemporal boundaries and to the associated “problem of the many”. It briefly discusses the question of whether ontic vagueness can be spelled out in terms of “vague identity”, emphasizes the often neglected role of the difference between sortal and non-sortal ontologies and suggests a deflationary answer to the ill-conceived question of whether the “ultimate source” of vagueness lies either in language or in the world. (shrink)

The form of the sentence, as it is understood in contemporary semantics and linguistics, is functional. This paper interprets the metaphors in which Frege shows what the functional sentence means, arguing that Frege's sentence is neither an adequate translation of natural language nor of use in feminist theorizing.

After a brief review of the notions of necessity and a priority, this paper scrutinizes Kripke's arguments for supposedly contingent a priori propositions and necessary a posteriori propositions involving proper names, and reaches a negative conclusion, i.e. there are no such propositions, or at least the propositions Kripke gives as examples are not such propositions. All of us, including Kripke himself, still have to face the old question raised by Hume, i.e. how can we justify the necessity and universality of (...) general statements on the basis of sensory or empirical evidence? (shrink)

It is a commonplace that Frege thought ordinary language to be seriously defective. Yet his remarks about ordinary language are not always unflattering. Comparing the relation between his formal language and ordinary language to the relation between the microscope and the eye, Frege remarked: ‘[the eye], because of the range of its applicability and because of the ease with which it can adapt itself to the most varied circumstances, has a great superiority over the microscope’. The point, of course, is (...) that, for Frege, the deficiencies of ordinary language arise in connection with the scientific endeavour: ordinary language is not an acceptable medium in which to pursue truth. As he goes on to observe: ‘… viewed as an optical instrument [the eye] reveals many imperfections … as soon as scientific purposes place strong requirements upon sharpness of resolution, the eye proves to be inadequate. On the other hand, the microscope is perfectly suited for just such purposes’. (shrink)

A widely held view about Fregean Sense has it that the determination of a sign's referent by the sign's sense is achieved viasatisfaction: the sense specifies a condition (or set of conditions) and the referent is that entity, if any, which uniquely satisfies that (set of) condition(s). This is usually held in conjunction with the claim that the sense is existentially and qualitatively independent of the referent: if the referent did not exist, or did not uniquely satisfy the sense, the (...) sense would still exist and would still specify the same condition(s) that it actually does (and might determine a different referent than its actual one). Proponents of this view give several reasons for holding it. I describe these reasons and argue that they are not convincing. More generally, I try to show that the notion of satisfaction has no useful application within Frege's system. I then suggest an alternative account of the determination of a referent by a sense that I think is truer to Frege and more illuminating. Compared to the satisfaction view, my account construes determination as a more naturalistic and epistemically real relation between speakers and things in the world. (shrink)

The central premise of Michael Dummett's global argument for anti-realism is the thesis that a speaker's grasp of the meaning of a declarative, indexical-free sentence must be manifested in her uses of that sentence. This enigmatic thesis has been the subject of a great deal of discussion, and something of a consensus has emerged about its content and justification. The received view is that the manifestation thesis expresses a behaviorist and reductive theory of meaning, essentially in agreement with Quine's view (...) of language, and motivated by worries about the epistemology of communication. In the present paper I begin by arguing that this standard interpretation of the manifestation thesis is neither particularly faithful to Dummett's writings nor philosophically compelling. I then continue by reconstructing, from Dummett's texts, an account of the manifestation thesis, and of its justification, that differ sharply from the received view. On my reading, the thesis is motivated not epistemologically, but conceptually. I argue that connections among our conceptions of meaning, assertion, and justification lead to a conclusion about the metaphysics of meaning: we cannot form a clearly coherent conception of how two speakers can attach different meanings to a sentence without at the same time differing in what they count as justifying assertions made with that sentence. I conclude with some suggestions about how Dummett's argument for global anti-realism should be understood, given my account of the manifestation thesis. (shrink)

Names and natural kind terms have long been a major focus of debates about meaning and reference. This article discusses some of the theories and arguments that have appeared in those debates. It is remarkably difficult to say what names are without making controversial theoretical assumptions. This article does not attempt to do so here. It instead relies on paradigm examples that nearly all theorists would agree are proper names, for instance, ‘Aristotle’, ‘Mark Twain’, ‘London’, ‘Venus’, and ‘Pegasus’. All of (...) the proper names that are discussed in the article are singular nouns that have no syntactic structure. Most of them refer to objects, but some, such as ‘Pegasus’, apparently do not. The article begins with proper names and the question ‘What is the meaning of a proper name?’ It turns to natural kind terms later. (shrink)

According to the species of neo-logicism advanced by Hale and Wright, mathematical knowledge is essentially logical knowledge. Their view is found to be best understood as a set of related though independent theses: (1) neo-fregeanism-a general conception of the relation between language and reality; (2) the method of abstraction-a particular method for introducing concepts into language; (3) the scope of logic-second-order logic is logic. The criticisms of Boolos, Dummett, Field and Quine (amongst others) of these theses are explicated and assessed. (...) The issues discussed include reductionism, rejectionism, the Julius Caesar problem, the Bad Company objections, and the charge that second-order logic is set theory in disguise. (shrink)

In his recent book, "The Metaphysicians of Meaning" (2000), Gideon Makin argues that in the so-called "Gray's Elegy" argument (the GEA) in "On Denoting", Russell provides decisive arguments against not only his own theory of denoting concepts but also Frege's theory of sense. I argue that by failing to recognize fundamental differences between the two theories, Makin fails to recognize that the GEA has less force against Frege's theory than against Russell's own earlier theory. While I agree with many aspects (...) of Makin's interpretation of the GEA, I differ with him regarding some significant details and present an interpretation according to which the GEA emerges as simpler, stronger, and more integrated. (shrink)

Vernacularism is the view that logical forms are fundamentally assigned to natural language expressions, and are only derivatively assigned to anything else, e.g., propositions, mental representations, expressions of symbolic logic, etc. In this paper, we argue that Vernacularism is not as plausible as it first appears because of non-sentential speech. More specifically, there are argument-premises, meant by speakers of non-sentences, for which no natural language paraphrase is readily available in the language used by the speaker and the hearer. The speaker (...) can intend this proposition and the hearer can recover it (and its logical form). Since they cannot, by hypothesis, be doing this by using a sentence of their shared language, the proposition-meant has its logical form non-derivatively, which falsifies Vernacularism. We conclude the paper with a brief review of the debate on incomplete definite descriptions in which Vernacularism is assumed as a suppressed premise. (shrink)

The restricted semantic ellipsis hypothesis, we have argued, is committed to an enormous number of multiply ambiguous expressions, the introduction of which gains us no extra explanatory power. We should, therefore, reject it. We should also spurn the original version since: (a) it entails the restricted version and (b) it incorrectly declares that, whenever a speaker makes an assertion by uttering an unembedded word or phrase, the expression uttered has illocutionary force.Once rejected, the semantic ellipsis hypothesis cannot account for the (...) many exceptions to the syntactic ellipsis hypothesis. So, we can safely infer that the Claim is true.(1)The Claim: Speakers can make assertions by uttering ordinary, unembedded, words and phrases.To the degree that the Claim reallyis in tension with the primacy of sentences (i.e., the view that (a) only sentences can be used to make assertions and (b) only sentences are meaningful in isolation) this doctrine must also be rejected. (shrink)

In this essay I will consider two theses that are associated with Frege,and will investigate the extent to which Frege really believed them.Much of what I have to say will come as no surprise to scholars of thehistorical Frege. But Frege is not only a historical figure; he alsooccupies a site on the philosophical landscape that has allowed hisdoctrines to seep into the subconscious water table. And scholars in a widevariety of different scholarly establishments then sip from thesedoctrines. I believe (...) that some Frege-interested philosophers at various ofthese establishments might find my conclusions surprising.Some of these philosophical establishments have arisen from an educationalmilieu in which Frege is associated with some specific doctrine at theexpense of not even being aware of other milieux where other specificdoctrines are given sole prominence. The two theses which I will discussillustrate this point. Each of them is called Frege''s Principle, but byphilosophers from different milieux. By calling them milieux I do not want to convey the idea that they are each located at some specificsocio-politico-geographico-temporal location. Rather, it is a matter oftheir each being located at different places on the intellectuallandscape. For this reason one might (and I sometimes will) call them(interpretative) traditions. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to provide a non‐contradictory interpretation of sentences such as “Smith's murderer might not have murdered Smith”. An anti‐actualist, two‐dimensional framework including partial functions provides the basis for my solution. I argue for two claims. The modal profile of the proposition expressed by “The F might not have been an F” is complex: at any world where there is a unique F the proposition is true; at any world without a unique F the proposition has (...) no truth‐value; hence, at no world is it false. It remains an open semantic and epistemological question which of the first two kinds of world the actual world is. The semantic method should be based on explicit intensionalization in lieu of actualism. Actualism accords a privileged role to the actual world. Explicit intensionalization places all possible worlds, including the actual one, on an equal footing. Syntactically, a lambda‐bound world variable replaces the actual‐world constant or operator, while the other world variable is existentially bound. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Is it possible to effect singular reference to mathematical objects in the abstractionist framework? I will argue that even if mathematical expressions pass the relevant syntactic and inferential tests to qualify as singular terms, that does not mean that their semantic function is to refer to a particular object. I will defend two arguments leading to this claim: the permutation argument for the referential indeterminacy of mathematical terms, and the argument from the semantic idleness of the terms introduced by (...) abstraction principles. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Backwards-looking operators Saarinen, E. [1979. “Backwards-Looking Operators in Tense Logic and in Natural Language.” In Essays on Mathematical and Philosophical Logic, edited by J. Hintikka, I. Niiniluoto, and E. Saarinen, 341–367. Dordrecht: Reidel] that have the material in their scope depend on higher intensional operators, are known to increase the expressivity of some intensional languages and have thus played a central role in debates about approaches to intensionality in terms of implicit parameters vs. variables explicitly quantifying over them. The (...) current contribution takes a look at these operators from a type-logical perspective. It is shown that extending Gallin's translation from intensional type logic to two-sorted type theory so as to include a version of Yanovich's backwards-looking operators, does not increase the expressive power of formulae with exclusively intensional parameters. The result, which makes use of a theorem by Zimmermann : 65–77]), is illustrated by pertinent examples from the literature. The paper closes by indicating alternative strategies of incorporating backwards-looking operators. (shrink)

This paper challenges a standard interpretation according to which Frege’s conception of logic (early and late) is at odds with the contemporary one, because on the latter’s view logic is formal, while on Frege’s view it is not, given that logic’s subject matter is reality’s most general features. I argue that Frege – in Begriffsschrift – retained the idea that logic is formal; Frege sees logic as providing the ‘logical cement’ that ties up together the contentful concepts of specific sciences, (...) not the most general truths. Finally, I discuss how Frege conceives of the application of Begriffsschrift, and of its status as a ‘lingua characteristica’. (shrink)

Examples suggest that one and the same A may be different Bs, and hence that there is some sort of incompleteness in the unqualified statement that x and y are the same which needs to be eliminated by answering the question “the same what?” One way to make this more precise is by appeal to Geach's idea that identity is relative. In this paper I evaluate Geach's relative identity thesis.