This paper is a defense of the view that existence is a property. Since the view is still a minority one, a fair amount of space is allotted to defending it against objections and counter-arguments. Positive arguments aren’t lacking, however, and emerge in the course of the discussion. Not all of the many positive or negative arguments which follow are wholly original—a fact to be expected in this context—but a fair number are, and both sorts of argument are seamlessly interwoven (...) in the warp and woof of what follows. (shrink)

The problem, or cluster of problems, of the unity of the proposition, along with the cluster of problems that tend to go under the name of Bradley’s regress, has recently again become a going concern for philosophers, after having for some time been regarded as primarily of historical interest. In this paper, I distinguish between the different problems that tend to be brought up under the heading of the unity of the proposition, and between different related regress arguments. I present (...) my favored solutions to these problems. (shrink)

In this paper, I address some puzzles about Frege’s conception of how we “grasp” thoughts. I focus on an enigmatic passage that appears near the end of Frege’s great essay “The Thought.” In this passage Frege refers to a “non-sensible something” without which “everyone would remain shut up in his inner world.” I consider and criticize Wolfgang Malzkorn’s interpretation of the passage. According to Malzkorn, Frege’s view is that ideas [Vorstellungen] are the means by which we grasp thoughts. My counter-proposal (...) is that language enables us to grasp thoughts (ideas are merely their baggage or “trappings,” as Frege puts it). One significant consequence of my interpretation is that it helps challenge the standard reading of Frege according to which he is a metaphysical platonist about thoughts. My interpretation thus provides support for the deflationary, anti-ontological reading spelled out by readers like Thomas Ricketts and Wolfgang Carl. As Ricketts puts it, Frege’s distinction between the objective and the subjective, rather than being an ontological doctrine, “lodges in the contrast between asserting something and giving vent to a feeling.”. (shrink)

Aristotle's theory of demonstration, developed in the Posterior Analytics, is not restricted to determining the formal requirements for formulating probative arguments that establish properly the results of scientific investigation. To the probative aspect of demonstration it shall be added its primarily explanatory character, orientated by theses of strong ontological and metaphysical content and involving notions like substance, essence and causation. We shall analyze the relation between those two ranges of Aristotle's philosophy of science and investigate how the formal features of (...) demonstration maintain an affinity with the metaphysical background to which scientific activity is conditioned. (shrink)

This paper uses the resources of higher-order logic to articulate a Fregean conception of predicate reference, and of word-world relations more generally, that is immune to the concept horse problem. The paper then addresses a prominent style of expressibility problem for views of broadly this kind, versions of which are due to Linnebo, Hale, and Wright.

Frege’s rejection of singular reference to concepts is centrally implicated in his notorious paradox of the concept horse. I distinguish a number of claims in which that rejection might consist and detail the dialectical difficulties confronting the defense of several such claims. Arguably the least problematic such claim—that it is simply nonsense to say that a concept can be referred to with a singular term—has recently received a novel defense due to Robert Trueman. I set out Trueman’s argument for this (...) claim, identifying and remedying some omissions and errors of formulation therein. I then develop a response to the argument by showing, pace Trueman, that it is possible—and how it is possible—to express identities between objects and concepts. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell's 1903 masterpiece "The Principles of Mathematics" places great emphasis on the need to separate propositions from psychological items such as thoughts. In 1919 Russell explicitly retracts this view, however, and defines propositions as "psychological occurrences". These psychological occurrences are held by Russell to be mental images. In this paper, I seek to explain this radical change of heart. I argue that Russell's re-psychologising of the proposition in 1919 can only be understood against the background of his struggle with (...) the problem of the unity of the proposition in earlier work. Once this is recognized, and the solution to the problem offered by the 1919 theory is appreciated, new light is also shed on Russell's naturalism. I go on to compare Russell's psychological "picture theory" with the vehemently anti-psychological picture theory of Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" and suggest that, once the background of the dispute is brought into clearer focus, Russell's position can be seen to have many advantages over its more celebrated rival. (shrink)

It is commonplace for philosophers to distinguish mere truths from truths that perspicuously represent the world's structure. According to a popular view, the perspicuous truths are supposed to be metaphysically revelatory and to play an important role in the accounts of law-hood, confirmation, and linguistic interpretation. Yet, there is no consensus about how to characterize this distinction. I examine strategies developed by Lewis and by Sider in his Writing the Book of the World which purport to explain this distinction in (...) terms of vocabulary: the truths that represent the world perspicuously have better, joint-carving vocabulary. I argue that the distinction between a perspicuous and mere truth concerns both the vocabulary of the sentence and its grammar. I then show that the collective motivations for distinguishing perspicuous from mere truths do not allow Lewis and Sider to properly impose constraints on grammar. (shrink)

Jonathan Lowe argues that metaphysics should be restored to a central position in philosophy, as the most fundamental form of rational inquiry, whose findings underpin those of all other disciplines. He portrays metaphysics as charting the possibilities of existence, by idetifying the categories of being and the relations of ontological dependency between entities of different categories. He proceeds to set out a unified and original metaphysical system: he defends a substance ontology, according to which the existence of the world s (...) one world in time depends upon the existence of persisting things which retain their identity over time and through processes of qualitative change. And he contends that even necessary beings, such as the abstract objects of mathematics, depend ultimately for their existence upon there being a concrete world of enduring substances. Within his system of metaphysics Lowe seeks to answer many of the deepest and most challenging questions in philosophy. (shrink)

In this essay I focus on the idea of the univocity of being, championed by Duns Scotus and given prominence more recently by Deleuze. Although I am interested in how this idea can be established, my primary concern is with something more basic: how the idea can even be properly thought. In the course of exploring this issue, which I do partly by borrowing some ideas about logical syntax from Wittgenstein's Tractatus, I try to show how there can be dialogue (...) between analytic philosophers and those of other traditions. (shrink)

According to the contemporary consensus, when reaching in the lexicon grammar looks for items like nouns, verbs, and prepositions while logic sees items like predicates, connectives, and quantifiers. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a single lexical category contemporary grammar and logic both make use of. I hope to show that while a perfect match between the lexical categories of grammar and logic is impossible there can be a substantial overlap. I propose semantic definitions for all the major parts (...) of speech . I argue that the differences among these categories can be captured in terms of distinctions recognized in logic. (shrink)

How do we construct ad hoc concepts, especially those characterised by emergent properties? A reasonable hypothesis, suggested both in psychology and in pragmatics , is that some sort of inferential processing must be involved. I argue that this inferential processing can be accounted for in associative terms. My argument is based on the notion of inference as associative pattern completion based on schemata, with schemata being conceived in turn as patterns of concepts and their relationships. The possible role of conscious (...) attention in inferential processes of this sort is also addressed. (shrink)

In her Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus , Elizabeth Anscombe took it to be a fault of the Tractatus that it excluded the statement “‘Someone’ is not the name of someone”, which she took to be obviously true. It is not a bipolar proposition, and its negation, she said, peters out into nothingness. I examine the question whether she is right that the Tractatus excludes such propositions, and I consider her example in relation to other propositions which, arguably at least, have (...) no intelligible negation. In considering the particular case of Frege’s response to Benno Kerry about the concept ‘horse’, I try to develop an account of the place in Wittgenstein’s philosophy for certain sorts of proposition which do not have an intelligible negation. (shrink)

There are historically three main trends in understanding Wittgenstein's Tractatus. The first is the interpretation offered by the Vienna Circle. They read Wittgenstein as arguing that neither metaphysical nor normative propositions have any cognitive meaning, and thus are to be considered nonsense. This interpretation understands Wittgenstein as setting the limits of sense, and prescribing that nothing of substantive philosophical importance lies beyond that line. The second way of reading the Tractatus, which has became popular since the 1950s, is the interpretation (...) which most currently accept as the early Wittgenstein's view; for this reason I refer to it as the 'standard reading.' According to this interpretation, Wittgenstein did not consider metaphysical and ethical discourse as nonsense. Rather, relying upon the distinction between saying [sagen] and showing [zeigen], he meant that these truths cannot be uttered, but instead are only shown. The standard reading can perhaps be best understood in contrast with the third interpretation, dubbed the "resolute reading." The resolute reading takes seriously Wittgenstein's remark at 6.54 that "[m]y propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as nonsense [unsinnig]." According to the resolute interpretation, Wittgenstein is not advancing a series of philosophical theses in the Tractatus. Rejecting the distinction characteristic of standard readings, between propositions without sense [sinnlos] and just plain nonsense [unsinnig], these interpreters read Wittgenstein as treating ethical and metaphysical inquiry, as well as a bulk of the doctrines in the text, as nonsense. To them, Wittgenstein did not intend to put forth any theses in the the text. Instead his methodology is therapeutic, similar to the later philosophy. It In this essay I explain each interpretation, and evaluate them in terms of textual and philosophical viability. I conclude by arguing that the biases which exist in the tradition of analytic philosophy substantively temper the interpretation of historical texts, which ultimately leads to the fundamental distinction between these three interpretations. (shrink)

Scott Soames has recently argued that traditional accounts of propositions as n-tuples or sets of objects and properties or functions from worlds to extensions cannot adequately explain how these abstract entities come to represent the world. Soames’ new cognitive theory solves this problem by taking propositions to be derived from agents representing the world to be a certain way. Agents represent the world to be a certain way, for example, when they engage in the cognitive act of predicating, or cognizing, (...) an act that takes place during cognitive events, such as perceiving, believing, judging and asserting. On the cognitive theory, propositions just are act types involving the act of predicating and certain other mental operations. This theory, Soames argues, solves not only the problem of how propositions come to represent but also a number of other difficulties for traditional theories, including the problem of de se propositions and the problems of accounting for how agents are capable of grasping propositions and how they come to stand in the relation of expression to sentences. I argue here that Soames’ particular version of the cognitive theory makes two problematic assumptions about cognitive operations and the contents of proper names. I then briefly examine what can count as evidence for the nature of the constituents of the cognitive operation types that produce propositions and argue that the common nature of cognitive operations and what they operate on ought to be determined empirically in cross-disciplinary work. I conclude by offering a semantics for cognitive act types that accommodates one type of empirical evidence. (shrink)

This paper develops a compositional, type-driven constraint semantic theory for a fragment of the language of subjective uncertainty. In the particular application explored here, the interpretation function of constraint semantics yields not propositions but constraints on credal states as the semantic values of declarative sentences. Constraints are richer than propositions in that constraints can straightforwardly represent assessments of the probability that the world is one way rather than another. The richness of constraints helps us model communicative acts in essentially the (...) same way that we model agents’ credences. Moreover, supplementing familiar truth-conditional theories of epistemic modals with constraint semantics helps capture contrasts between strong necessity and possibility modals, on the one hand, and weak necessity modals, on the other. (shrink)

Russell's notion of an incomplete symbol has become a standard against which philosophers compare their views on the relationship between language and the world. But Russell's exact characterization of incomplete symbols and the role they play in his philosophy are still disputed. In this paper, I trace the development of the notion of an incomplete symbol in Russell's philosophy. I suggest – against Kaplan, Evans, and others – that Russell's many characterizations of the notion of an incomplete symbol are compatible. (...) To this end, I examine and reject arguments for the purported incompatibility between declaring an expression to be incomplete and incorporating that symbol into a compositional semantic theory. I then examine how Russell puts the notion of an incomplete symbol to use in metaphysics. (shrink)

I interpret the philosophical views of Werner Heisenberg as a pragmatism and non-metaphysical realism of a Wittgensteinian kind. The “closed theory” is a Wittgensteinian rule/concept.

The paradox of the concept horse has often been taken to be devastating for Frege’s ontological distinction between objects and concepts. I argue that if we consider how the concept-object distinction is supposed to account for the unity of linguistic meaning, it transpires that the paradox is in fact not paradoxical.

In Sein und Zeit Heidegger makes several claims about the nature of ‘assertion’ [Aussage]. These claims are of particular philosophical interest: they illustrate, for example, important points of contact and divergence between Heidegger's work and philosophical movements including Kantianism, the early Analytic tradition and contemporary pragmatism. This article provides a new assessment of one of these claims: that assertion is connected to a ‘present-at-hand’ ontology. I also indicate how my analysis sets the stage for a new reading of Heidegger's further (...) claim that assertion is an explanatorily derivative phenomenon. I begin with a loose overview of Heidegger's position and then develop a sharper formulation of the key premises. I go on to argue that existing treatments of the supposed link between assertion and the ‘present-at-hand’ are unsatisfactory, and advance a new, ‘methodological’, interpretation of that link. Finally, I sketch the implications of my interpretation for the further claim that assertion is explanatorily derivative. (shrink)

The Linda paradox is a key topic in current debates on the rationality of human reasoning and its limitations. We present a novel analysis of this paradox, based on the notion of verisimilitude as studied in the philosophy of science. The comparison with an alternative analysis based on probabilistic confirmation suggests how to overcome some problems of our account by introducing an adequately defined notion of verisimilitudinarian confirmation.

The problem of the ‘Unity of the Proposition’ is the problem of explaining the difference between a content-expressing declarative sentence and a ‘mere list’ of referents. The prevailing view is that such a problem is to be solved metaphysically, either by reducing our ontology to exclude propositions or universals, or by explaining how it is possible for a certain kind of complex entity – the ‘proposition’– to ‘unify’ its constituents. I argue that these metaphysical approaches cannot succeed; instead the only (...) viable approach is linguistic, identifying features of the (type–) sentence itself that enable it to express a content. Thus the problem of the ‘Unity of the Proposition’ (distinguishing sentences from lists) is distinct from the problem of ‘propositional unity’ (explaining how the constituents of propositions form a unified content). I suggest that, while the latter problem is not pressing, the former does not permit of an answer which applies in generality in all languages; we can only fully explain the Unity of the Proposition for single languages or groups of similar languages. (shrink)

I trace changes to Frege's understanding of numbers, arguing in particular that the view of arithmetic based in geometry developed at the end of his life (1924–1925) was not as radical a deviation from his views during the logicist period as some have suggested. Indeed, by looking at his earlier views regarding the connection between numbers and second-level concepts, his understanding of extensions of concepts, and the changes to his views, firstly, in between Grundlagen and Grundgesetze, and, later, after learning (...) of Russell's paradox, this position is a natural position for him to have retreated to, when properly understood. (shrink)

This essay presents a philosophical and computational theory of the representation of de re, de dicto, nested, and quasi-indexical belief reports expressed in natural language. The propositional Semantic Network Processing System (SNePS) is used for representing and reasoning about these reports. In particular, quasi-indicators (indexical expressions occurring in intentional contexts and representing uses of indicators by another speaker) pose problems for natural-language representation and reasoning systems, because--unlike pure indicators--they cannot be replaced by coreferential NPs without changing the meaning of the (...) embedding sentence. Therefore, the referent of the quasi-indicator must be represented in such a way that no invalid coreferential claims are entailed. The importance of quasi-indicators is discussed, and it is shown that all four of the above categories of belief reports can be handled by a single representational technique using belief spaces containing intensional entities. Inference rules and belief-revision techniques for the system are also examined. (shrink)

It is fairly well known that Wittgenstein's criticisms of Russell's multiple‐relation theory of judgement had a devastating effect on the latter's philosophical enterprise. The exact nature of those criticisms however, and the explanation for the severity of their consequences, has been a source of confusion and disagreement amongst both Russell and Wittgenstein scholars. In this paper, I offer an interpretation of those criticisms which shows them to be consonant with Wittgenstein's general critique of Russell's conception of logic and which serves (...) to elucidate some of the notoriously enigmatic passages of the Tractatus. In particular, I seek to show the continuity of Wittgenstein's criticisms of the theory of judgement with his remarks on Russell's paradox and the theory of types. In addition, I place these issues in the context of Russell's own philosophical ambitions in order to reveal the deep divisions between the two over the nature of logical form and the analysis of propositional content. (shrink)

This essay addresses the question of the effect of Russell's paradox on Frege's distinctive brand of arithmetical realism. It is argued that the effect is not just to undermine Frege's specific account of numbers as extensions (courses of value) but more importantly to undermine his general means of explaining the object-directedness of arithmetical discourse. It is argued that contemporary neo-Fregean attempts to revive that explanation do not successfully avoid the central problem brought to light by the paradox. Along the way, (...) it is argued that the need to fend off an eliminative construal of arithmetic can help explain the so-called Caesar problem in the Grundlagen, and that the "syntactic priority thesis" is insufficient to establish the claim that numbers are objects. (shrink)

Influenced by G. E. Moore, Russell broke with Idealism towards the end of 1898; but in later years he characterized his meeting Peano in August 1900 as ?the most important event? in ?the most important year in my intellectual life?. While Russell discovered his paradox during his post-Peano period, the question arises whether he was already committed, during his pre-Peano Moorean period, to assumptions from which his paradox may be derived. Peter Hylton has argued that the pre-Peano Russell was thus (...) vulnerable to (at least one version of) Russell's paradox and hence that the paradox exposes a pre-existing difficulty in Russell's Moorean philosophy. Contrary to Hylton, I argue that the Moorean Russell adhered to views which insulated him against the paradox. Further, I argue that Russell became vulnerable to his paradox as a result of changes in his Moorean position occasioned, first, by his acceptance of Cantor's theory of the transfinite, and, second, by his correspondence with Frege. I conclude with some general comments regarding Russell's acceptance of naïve set theory. (shrink)

In his landmark article, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” W.V.O. Quine pushed analytical philosophy into its post-positivist phase by rejecting two central tenets of logical empiricism. The first dogma was the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements; the second was reductionism, or the belief that to each synthetic sentence there corresponds a set of experiences that will confirm or disconfirm it. But in both “Two Dogmas” and Word and Object, Quine stretches analytical philosophy to its limits. The problem is, ironically, his (...) adherence to two separate dogmas. The first stems from Quine’s empiricism: he insists that there is nothing more to meaning than the empirical method of discovering it. The second has been taken as the defining characteristic of analytical philosophy;2 it is the belief that a philosophical account of thought can only be attained through an account of language – the famed “linguistic turn.” I will argue that a philosophical account of language can only be attained given an account of thought,3 and that the philosophies of Kant and Davidson can help us construct such an account. (shrink)

Wright's _Truth and Objectivity_ seeks to systematise a variety of anti-realist positions. I argue that many objections to the system are avoided by transposing its talk of truth into talk of warrant. However, a problem remains about debates involving 'direction-of-fit'. -/- Dummett introduced 'anti-realism' as a philosophical view informed by mathematical intuitionism. Subsequently, the term has been associated with many debates, ancient and modern. _Truth and Objectivity_ proposes that truth admits of different characteristics; these various debates then concern which characteristics (...) truth has, in a given area. This pluralism of truth is at odds with deflationism. I find fault with Wright's argument against deflationism. However, transmission of warrant across the Disquotational Schema suffices to ground Wright's proposal, which survives as a pluralism of classes of warrant. -/- The two main debates concern whether truths are always knowable (Epistemic Constraint) and whether disagreements in an area must be down to some fault of one of those involved (Cognitive Command). I introduce Assertoric Constraint, relating to Epistemic Constraint, where truths cannot outstrip the availability of warrant for their assertion. I solve a structural problem by a comparison with a constitutive analysis of Moore's Paradox. The relativism of blameless disagreement is problematic. Wright's response invokes a sort of ignorance which he calls `Quandary'. I criticise this before proposing an alternative. -/- I agree with Wright that Dummett's original anti-realism does not belong among the positions which Wright seeks to systematise. However, two candidates show that the proposal suffers a weakness. Wright thinks Expressivism misguided, and implicitly rules out his earlier non-cognitivism about necessity. I argue that Expressivism has promise, and I endorse Wright's Cautious Man argument for non-cognitivism about necessity; both involve play with `direction-of-fit'. I conclude that this sort of anti-realist debate needs to be accommodated by the proposal. (shrink)

Are Fregean thoughts compositionally complex and composed of senses? We argue that, in Begriffsschrift, Frege took 'conceptual contents' to be unstructured, but that he quickly moved away from this position, holding just two years later that conceptual contents divide of themselves into 'function' and 'argument'. This second position is shown to be unstable, however, by Frege's famous substitution puzzle. For Frege, the crucial question the puzzle raises is why "The Morning Star is a planet" and "The Evening Star is a (...) planet" have different contents, but his second position predicts that they should have the same content. Frege's response to this antinomy is of course to distinguish sense from reference, but what has not previously been noticed is that this response also requires thoughts to be compositionally complex, composed of senses. That, however, raises the question just how thoughts are composed from senses. We reconstruct a Fregean answer, one that turns on an insistence that this question must be understood as semantic rather than metaphysical. It is not a question about the intrinsic nature of residents of the third realm but a question about how thoughts are expressed by sentences. (shrink)

Along with offering an historically-oriented interpretive reconstruction of the syntax of PM ( rst ed.), I argue for a certain understanding of its use of propositional function abstracts formed by placing a circum ex on a variable. I argue that this notation is used in PM only when de nitions are stated schematically in the metalanguage, and in argument-position when higher-type variables are involved. My aim throughout is to explain how the usage of function abstracts as “terms” (loosely speaking) is (...) not inconsistent with a philosophy of types that does not think of propositional functions as mind- and language-independent objects, and adopts a nominalist/substitutional semantics instead. I contrast PM’s approach here both to function abstraction found in the typed λ-calculus, and also to Frege’s notation for functions of various levels that forgoes abstracts altogether, between which it is a kind of intermediary. (shrink)

I present the realist conception of logic supported by Oswaldo Chateaubriand which integrates ontological and epistemological aspects, opposing it to mathematical and linguistic conceptions. I give special attention to the peculiarities of his hierarchy of types in which some properties accumulate and others have a multiple degree. I explain such deviations of the traditional conception, showing the underlying purpose in each of these peculiarities. I compare the ideas of Chateaubriand to the similar ideas of Frege, Tarski and Gödel. I suggest (...) a view of the logical properties in terms of the Aristotelian notion of focal meaning and I give a formal expression to the type of the entities in the hierarchy proposed by Chateaubriand. (shrink)

In “Function and Concept” and “On Concept and Object”, Frege argued that certain differences between dependent and independent meanings were inviolable and “founded deep in the nature of things” but, in those articles, he was not explicit about the actual consequences of violating such differences. However, since by creating a law that permitted one to pass from a concept to its extension, he himself mixed dependent and independent meanings, we are in a position to study some of the actual consequences (...) of his having done so. To make certain of Frege’s ideas about the inviolability of logical form more tangible, I describe a string of very interrelated consequences that his attempt to transform dependent meanings into independent meanings actually brought in its wake. (shrink)

What is logical relevance? Anderson and Belnap say that the “modern classical tradition [,] stemming from Frege and Whitehead-Russell, gave no consideration whatsoever to the classical notion of relevance.” But just what is this classical notion? I argue that the relevance tradition is implicitly most deeply concerned with the containment of truth-grounds, less deeply with the containment of classes, and least of all with variable sharing in the Anderson–Belnap manner. Thus modern classical logicians such as Peirce, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and (...) Quine are implicit relevantists on the deepest level. In showing this, I reunite two fields of logic which, strangely from the traditional point of view, have become basically separated from each other: relevance logic and diagram logic. I argue that there are two main concepts of relevance, intensional and extensional. The first is that of the relevantists, who overlook the presence of the second in modern classical logic. The second is the concept of truth-ground containment as following from in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. I show that this second concept belongs to the diagram tradition of showing that the premisses contain the conclusion by the fact that the conclusion is diagrammed in the very act of diagramming the premisses. I argue that the extensional concept is primary, with at least five usable modern classical filters or constraints and indefinitely many secondary intensional filters or constraints. For the extensional concept is the genus of deductive relevance, and the filters define species. Also following the Tractatus, deductive relevance, or full truth-ground containment, is the limit of inductive relevance, or partial truth-ground containment. Purely extensional inductive or partial relevance has its filters or species too. Thus extensional relevance is more properly a universal concept of relevance or summum genus with modern classical deductive logic, relevantist deductive logic, and inductive logic as its three main domains. (shrink)

Certain commentators on Russell's “no class” theory, in which apparent reference to classes or sets is eliminated using higher-order quantification, including W. V. Quine and (recently) Scott Soames, have doubted its success, noting the obscurity of Russell’s understanding of so-called “propositional functions”. These critics allege that realist readings of propositional functions fail to avoid commitment to classes or sets (or something equally problematic), and that nominalist readings fail to meet the demands placed on classes by mathematics. I show that Russell (...) did thoroughly explore these issues, and had good reasons for rejecting accounts of propositional functions as extra-linguistic entities. I argue in favor of a reading taking propositional functions to be nothing over and above open formulas which addresses many such worries, and in particular, does not interpret Russell as reducing classes to language. (shrink)

Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation has puzzled the philosophical community for several decades. It is unquestionably among the best known and most disputed theses in contemporary philosophy. Quine’s classical argument for the indeterminacy thesis, in his seminal work Word and Object, has even been described by Putnam as “what may well be the most fascinating and the most discussed philosophical argument since Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories” (Putnam, 1975a: p. 159).

The distinction between a type and its tokens is a useful metaphysical distinction. In §1 it is explained what it is, and what it is not. Its importance and wide applicability in linguistics, philosophy, science and everyday life are briefly surveyed in §2. Whether types are universals is discussed in §3. §4 discusses some other suggestions for what types are, both generally and specifically. Is a type the sets of its tokens? What exactly is a word, a symphony, a species? (...) §5 asks what a token is. §6 considers the relation between types and their tokens. Do the type and all its tokens share the same properties? Must all the tokens be alike in some or all respects? §7 explains some problems for the view that types exist, and some problems for the view that they don't. §8 elucidates a distinction often confused with the type-token distinction, that between a type (or token) and an occurrence of it. It also discusses some problems that occurrences might be thought to give rise to, and one way to resolve them. (shrink)