Bertrand Russell, in the second of his 1914 Lowell lectures, Our Knowledge of the External World, asserted famously that ‘every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and purification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical’ (Russell 1993, p. 42). He went on to characterize that portion of logic that concerned the study of forms of propositions, or, as he (...) called them, ‘logical forms’. This portion of logic he called ‘philosophical logic’. Russell asserted that ... some kind of knowledge of logical forms, though with most people it is not explicit, is involved in all understanding of discourse. It is the business of philosophical logic to extract this knowledge from its concrete integuments, and to render it explicit and pure. (p. 53) Perhaps no one still endorses quite this grand a view of the role of logic and the investigation of logical form in philosophy. But talk of logical form retains a central role in analytic philosophy. Given its widespread use in philosophy and linguistics, it is rather surprising that the concept of logical form has not received more attention by philosophers than it has. The concern of this paper is to say something about what talk of logical form comes to, in a tradition that stretches back to (and arguably beyond) Russell’s use of that expression. This will not be exactly Russell’s conception. For we do not endorse Russell’s view that propositions are the bearers of logical form, or that appeal to propositions adds anything to our understanding of what talk of logical form comes to. But we will be concerned to provide an account responsive to the interests expressed by Russell in the above quotations, though one clarified of extraneous elements, and expressed precisely. For this purpose, it is important to note that the concern expressed by Russell in the above passages, as the surrounding text makes clear, is a concern not just with logic conceived narrowly as the study of logical terms, but with propositional form more generally, which includes, e.g., such features as those that correspond to the number of argument places in a propositional function, and the categories of objects which propositional.... (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)

Since Sydney Shoemaker published his seminal article ‘Self-Reference and Self-Awareness’ in 1968, the notion of ‘Immunity to Error through Misidentification’ has received much attention. It crops up in discussions of personal identity, indexical thought and introspection, and has been used to interpret remarks made by philosophers from Wittgenstein to William James. The precise significance of IEM is often unspecified in these discussions, however. It is unclear, for example, whether it constitutes an important status of judgments, whether it explains an important (...) characteristic of judgments, or whether it merely marks an important characteristic of judgments. Nevertheless, reference to IEM abounds, making this obscure notion seem all the more significant. (shrink)

Quine (1960, "Word and object". Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, ch. 2) claims that there are a variety of equally good schemes for translating or interpreting ordinary talk. 'Rabbit' might be taken to divide its reference over rabbits, over temporal slices of rabbits, or undetached parts of rabbits, without significantly affecting which sentences get classified as true and which as false. This is the basis of his famous 'argument from below' to the conclusion that there can be no fact of the (...) matter as to how reference is to be divided. Putative counterexamples to Quine's claim have been put forward in the past (see especially Evans (1975, "Journal of Philosophy", LXXII(13), 343-362. Reprinted in McDowell (Ed.), "Gareth Evans: Collected papers." Oxford: Clarendon Press.), Fodor (1993, "The elm and the expert: Mentalese and its semantics." Cambridge, MA: Bradford)), and various patches have been suggested (e. g. Wright (1997, The indeterminacy of translation. In C. Wright & B. Hale (Eds.), "A companion to the philosophy of language" (pp. 397-426). Oxford: Blackwell)). One lacuna in this literature is that one does not find any detailed presentation of what exactly these interpretations are supposed to be. Drawing on contemporary literature on persistence, the present paper sets out detailed semantic treatments for fragments of English, whereby predicates such as 'rabbit' divide their reference over four-dimensional continuants (Quine's rabbits), instantaneous temporal slices of those continuants (Quine's rabbitslices) and the simple elements which compose those slices (undetached rabbit parts) respectively. Once we have the systematic interpretations on the table, we can get to work evaluating them. (shrink)

Many philosophers suppose that sometimes we think we are saying or thinking something meaningful when in fact we’re not saying or thinking anything at all: we are producing nonsense. But what is nonsense? An account of nonsense must, I argue, meet two constraints. The first constraint requires that nonsense can be rationally engaged with, not just mentioned. In particular, we can reason with nonsense and use it within that-clauses. An account which fails to meet this constraint cannot explain why nonsense (...) appears meaningful. The second constraint requires that nonsense does not express thoughts. An account which fails to meet this constraint undercuts the critical force of the concept of nonsense. I offer an account which meets both constraints. The central idea is that to be under the illusion that some nonsense makes sense is to enter a pretence that the nonsense is meaningful. (shrink)

What is the relation of logic to thinking? My dissertation offers a new argument for the claim that logic is constitutive of thinking in the following sense: representational activity counts as thinking only if it manifests sensitivity to logical rules. In short, thinking has to be minimally logical. An account of thinking has to allow for our freedom to question or revise our commitments – even seemingly obvious conceptual connections – without loss of understanding. This freedom, I argue, requires that (...) thinkers have general abilities to respond to support and tension among their thoughts. And these abilities are constituted by following logical rules. So thinkers have to follow logical rules. But there isn’t just one correct logic for thinking. I show that my view is consistent with logical pluralism: there are a range of correct logics, any one of which a thinker might follow. A logic for thinking does, however, have to contain certain minimal principles: Modus Ponens and Non-Contradiction, and perhaps others. We follow logical rules by exercising logical capacities, which display a distinctive first-person/third-person asymmetry: a subject can find the instances of a rule compelling without seeing them as instances of a rule. As a result, there are two limits on illogical thinking. First, thinkers have to tend to find instances of logical rules compelling. Second, thinkers can’t think in obviously illogical ways. So thinking has to be logical – but not perfectly so. When we try to think, but fail, we produce nonsense. But our failures to think are often subjectively indistinguishable from thinking. To explain how this occurs, I offer an account of nonsense. To be under the illusion that some nonsense makes sense is to enter a pretence that the nonsense is meaningful. Our use of nonsense within the pretence relies on the role of logical form in understanding. Finally, while the normativity of logic doesn’t fall directly out of logical constitutivism, it’s possible to build an attractive account of logical normativity which has logical constitutivism as an integral part. I argue that thinking is necessary for human flourishing, and that this is the source of logical normativity. (shrink)

(1) This paper is about how to build an account of the normativity of logic around the claim that logic is constitutive of thinking. I take the claim that logic is constitutive of thinking to mean that representational activity must tend to conform to logic to count as thinking. (2) I develop a natural line of thought about how to develop the constitutive position into an account of logical normativity by drawing on constitutivism in metaethics. (3) I argue that, while (...) this line of thought provides some insights, it is importantly incomplete, as it is unable to explain why we should think. I consider two attempts at rescuing the line of thought. The first, unsuccessful response is that it is self-defeating to ask why we ought to think. The second response is that we need to think. But this response secures normativity only if thinking has some connection to human flourishing. (4) I argue that thinking is necessary for human flourishing. Logic is normative because it is constitutive of this good. (5) I show that the resulting account deals nicely with problems that vex other accounts of logical normativity. (shrink)

Handbook article about Radical interpretation and the principle of charity in Donald Davidson's philosophy.

The many-property problem has traditionally been taken to show that the adverbial theory of perception is untenable. This paper first shows that several widely accepted views concerning the nature of perception---including both representational and non-representational views---likewise face the many-property problem. It then presents a solution to the many-property problem for these views, but goes on to show how this solution can be adapted to provide a novel, fully compositional solution to the many-property problem for adverbialism. Thus, with respect to the (...) many-property problem, adverbialism and several widely accepted views in the philosophy of perception are on a par, and the problem is solved. (shrink)

Esta enciclopédia abrange, de uma forma introdutória mas desejavelmente rigorosa, uma diversidade de conceitos, temas, problemas, argumentos e teorias localizados numa área relativamente recente de estudos, os quais tem sido habitual qualificar como «estudos lógico-filosóficos». De uma forma apropriadamente genérica, e apesar de o território teórico abrangido ser extenso e de contornos por vezes difusos, podemos dizer que na área se investiga um conjunto de questões fundamentais acerca da natureza da linguagem, da mente, da cognição e do raciocínio humanos, bem (...) como questões acerca das conexões destes com a realidade não mental e extralinguística. A razão daquela qualificação é a seguinte: por um lado, a investigação em questão é qualificada como filosófica em virtude do elevado grau de generalidade e abstracção das questões examinadas (entre outras coisas); por outro, a investigação é qualificada como lógica em virtude de ser uma investigação logicamente disciplinada, no sentido de nela se fazer um uso intenso de conceitos, técnicas e métodos provenientes da disciplina de lógica. O agregado de tópicos que constitui a área de estudos lógico-filosóficos é já visível, pelo menos em parte, no Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus de Ludwig Wittgenstein, uma obra publicada em 1921. E uma boa maneira de ter uma ideia sinóptica do território disciplinar abrangido por esta enciclopédia, ou pelo menos de uma porção substancial dele, é extrair do Tractatus uma lista dos tópicos mais salientes aí discutidos; a lista incluirá certamente tópicos do seguinte género, muitos dos quais se podem encontrar ao longo desta enciclopédia: factos e estados de coisas; objectos; representação; crenças e estados mentais; pensamentos; a proposição; nomes próprios; valores de verdade e bivalência; quantificação; funções de verdade; verdade lógica; identidade; tautologia; o raciocínio matemático; a natureza da inferência; o cepticismo e o solipsismo; a indução; as constantes lógicas; a negação; a forma lógica; as leis da ciência; o número. (shrink)

This chapter reviews some of the history of discussions of logical form and offers a truth-theoretic account that traces back to Donald Davidson.

Quine (1960, Word and object. Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, ch. 2) claims that there are a variety of equally good schemes for translating or interpreting ordinary talk. ‘Rabbit’ might be taken to divide its reference over rabbits, over temporal slices of rabbits, or undetached parts of rabbits, without significantly affecting which sentences get classified as true and which as false. This is the basis of his famous ‘argument from below’ to the conclusion that there can be no fact of the matter (...) as to how reference is to be divided. Putative counterexamples to Quine’s claim have been put forward in the past (see especially Evans 1975; 1975, Journal of Philosophy, LXXII(13), 343–362. Reprinted in McDowell (Ed.), Gareth Evans: Collected papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press.), and various patches have been suggested (e.g. Wright (1997, The indeterminacy of translation. In C. Wright & B. Hale (Eds.), A companion to the philosophy of language (pp. 397–426). Oxford: Blackwell)). One lacuna in this literature is that one does not find any detailed presentation of what exactly these interpretations are supposed to be. Drawing on contemporary literature on persistence, the present paper sets out detailed semantic treatments for fragments of English, whereby predicates such as ‘rabbit’ divide their reference over four-dimensional continuants (Quine’s rabbits), instantaneous temporal slices of those continuants (Quine’s rabbit-slices) and the simple elements which compose those slices (undetached rabbit parts) respectively. Once we have the systematic interpretations on the table, we can get to work evaluating them. (shrink)

Since at least the 1938 publication of Hans Reichenbach’s Experience and Predication , there has been widespread agreement that, when discussing the beliefs that people have, it is important to distinguish contexts of discovery and contexts of justification. Traditionally, when one conflates the two contexts, the result is a “genetic fallacy”. This paper examines genealogical critiques and addresses the question of whether such critiques are fallacious and, if so, whether this vitiates their usefulness. The paper concludes that while there may (...) be one or more senses in which genealogical critiques are fallacious, this does not vitiate their value. (shrink)

I propose a way of thinking aboout content, and a related way of thinking about ontological commitment. (This is part of a series of four closely related papers. The other three are ‘On Specifying Truth-Conditions’, ‘An Actualist’s Guide to Quantifying In’ and ‘An Account of Possibility’.).

The present discussion takes up an issue raised in Section 5 of Ross Brady and Penelope Rush’s paper ‘Four Basic Logical Issues’ concerning the (claimed) triviality – in the sense of automatic availability – of soundness and completeness results for a logic in a metalanguage employing at least as much logical vocabulary as the object logic, where the metalogical behaviour of the common logical vocabulary is as in the object logic. We shall see – in Propositions 4.5–4.7 – that this (...) triviality claim faces difficulties in the face of Halldén incompleteness, for essentially the same reasons that Halldén thought this phenomenon raised seman- tic difficulties for the modal logics of C. I. Lewis exhibiting it. To counter any inclination to dismiss the phenomenon as providing at best a marginal range of counterexamples to the triviality claim, a Postscript assembles some reminders of the extent of – and the varied considerations favouring – Halldén incompleteness. (shrink)

A legal fiction is a knowingly false assumption that is given effect in a legal proceeding and that participants are not permitted to disprove. I offer a semantic pretence theory that shows how fiction-involving legal reasoning works.

In the early days of natural language semantics, Donald Davidson issued a challenge to those, like Richard Montague, who would do semantics in a model-theoretic framework that gives a central role to a model-relative notion of truth. Davidson argued that no theory of this kind can claim to be an account of real truth conditions unless it first makes clear how the relativized notion relates to our ordinary non-relativized notion of truth. In the 1990s, Davidson’s challenge was developed by Etchemendy (...) into an argument against the model-theoretic account of logical consequence, one that also threatens the attempt to capture natural language entailment relations in modeltheoretic terms—one of the central desiderata of semantics. Nevertheless, the modeltheoretic framework has flourished within natural language semantics. But it has flourished without any consensus among semanticists as to how to answer Davidson’s challenge. The aim of this essay is to develop an answer. I argue that model-theoretic semantics is best understood as model-based science: a semantics for a natural language is a scientific model of truth conditions. This makes good sense of the way model-theoretic tools are used in natural language semantics. And it allows us to answer Davidson’s challenge by showing how a theory that employs a relativized notion of truth manages to tell us about ordinary truth conditions. Moreover, I argue that it helps us see how semantics can provide genuine explanations for natural language entailment and other truth-conditional phenomena. (shrink)

In two recent papers, Bob Hale has attempted to free second-order logic of the 'staggering existential assumptions' with which Quine famously attempted to saddle it. I argue, first, that the ontological issue is at best secondary: the crucial issue about second-order logic, at least for a neo-logicist, is epistemological. I then argue that neither Crispin Wright's attempt to characterize a `neutralist' conception of quantification that is wholly independent of existential commitment, nor Hale's attempt to characterize the second-order domain in terms (...) of definability, can serve a neo-logicist's purposes. The problem, in both cases, is similar: neither Wright nor Hale is sufficiently sensitive to the demands that impredicativity imposes. Finally, I defend my own earlier attempt to finesse this issue, in "A Logic for Frege's Theorem", from Hale's criticisms. (shrink)

Work on the nature and scope of formal logic has focused unduly on the distinction between logical and extra-logical vocabulary; which argument forms a logical theory countenances depends not only on its stock of logical terms, but also on its range of grammatical categories and modes of composition. Furthermore, there is a sense in which logical terms are unnecessary. Alexandra Zinke has recently pointed out that propositional logic can be done without logical terms. By defining a logical-term-free language with the (...) full expressive power of first-order logic with identity, I show that this is true of logic more generally. Furthermore, having, in a logical theory, non-trivial valid forms that do not involve logical terms is not merely a technical possibility. As the case of adverbs shows, issues about the range of argument forms logic should countenance can quite naturally arise in such a way that they do not turn on whether we countenance certain terms as logical. (shrink)

Is there a principled difference between entailments in natural language that are valid solely in virtue of their form or structure and those that are not? This paper advances an affirmative answer to this question, one that takes as its starting point Gareth Evans’s suggestion that semantic theory aims to carve reality at the joints by uncovering the semantic natural kinds of the language. I sketch an Evans-inspired account of semantic kinds and show how it supports a principled account of (...) structural entailment. I illustrate the account by application to a case study involving the entailment properties of adverbs; this involves developing a novel proposal about the semantics for adverbs like ‘quickly’ and ‘slowly’. In the course of the discussion I explore some implications of the account for the place of model-theoretic tools in natural language semantics. (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)

Gareth Evans proposes that there are semantic natural kinds of words. In his development of this theory,he argues for two constraints on the identification of these kinds. I argue that neither of these constraints are justified. Furthermore,my argument against Evans' second constraint constitutes a direct argument for the existence of semantic natural kinds,something Evans himself never offers. I conclude by sketching some positive details of a more plausible theory of semantic natural kinds.

There is a long tradition of drawing metaphysical conclusions from investigations into language. This paper concerns one contemporary variation on this theme: the alleged ontological significance of cognitivist truth-theoretic accounts of semantic competence. According to such accounts, human speakers’ linguistic behavior is in part empirically explained by their cognizing a truth-theory. Such a theory consists of a finite number of axioms assigning semantic values to lexical items, a finite number of axioms assigning semantic values to complex expressions on the basis (...) of their structure and the semantic values of their constituents, and a finite number of production schemata. The theory enables the derivation of truth-conditions for each sentence of the language: something of roughly the form ‘S is true iff P’.1 The claim that speakers stand in a cognitive relation to such theories is advanced, not as a conceptual analysis of semantic competence or understanding, but rather as an empirical hypothesis about human speakers in particular, one part of a broader empirical account of our linguistic competence and cognition generally. It therefore must mesh with the rest of our theorizing in these areas and whatever relevant data from neighboring inquiries there may be. The precise nature of the cognitive relation a speaker is supposed to bear to a truththeory is a matter of some dispute. I speak of ‘‘cognizing’’ (following. (shrink)

Special issue: "Reflecting on the Legacy of C.I. Lewis: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Modal Logic".

Notice that each of (1)–(4) is an instance of a more general pattern. For example, we could replace ‘black’ in (1) with any of a wide range of other adjectives such as ‘furry’ or ‘hungry’ or ‘three-legged’, without rendering the entailment invalid or any less obvious. Similarly, there are a number of verbs that occur in entailments parallel to (3): ‘Moe boiled the water; so the water boiled’; ‘Bart blew up the school; so the school blew up’; ‘Homer sank the (...) boat; so the boat sank’ and so on. (shrink)

For the sentences of languages that contain operators that express the concepts of definiteness and indefiniteness, there is an unavoidable tension between a truth-theoretic semantics that delivers truth conditions for those sentences that capture their propositional contents and any model-theoretic semantics that has a story to tell about how indetifiniteness in a constituent affects the semantic value of sentences which imbed it. But semantic theories of both kinds play essential roles, so the tension needs to be resolved. I argue that (...) it is the truth theory which correctly characterises the notion of truth, per se. When we take into account the considerations required to bring model theory into harmony with truth theory, those considerations undermine the arguments standardly used to motivate supervaluational model theories designed to validate classical logic. But those considerations also show that celebration would be premature for advocates of the most frequently encountered rival approach - many-valued model theory. (shrink)