What is the relation between metaphysical necessity and essence? This paper defends the view that the relation is one of identity: metaphysical necessity is a special case of essence. My argument consists in showing that the best joint theory of essence and metaphysical necessity is one in which metaphysical necessity is just a special case of essence. The argument is made against the backdrop of a novel, higher-order logic of essence, whose core features are introduced in the first part of (...) the paper. The second part investigates the relation between metaphysical necessity and essence in the context of HLE. Reductive hypotheses are among the most natural hypotheses to be explored in the context of HLE. But they also have to be weighed against their non-reductive rivals. I investigate three different reductive hypotheses and argue that two of them fare better than their non-reductive rivals: they are simpler, more natural, and more systematic. Specifically, I argue that one candidate reduction, according to which metaphysical necessity is truth in virtue of the nature of all propositions, is superior to the others, including one proposed by Kit Fine, according to which metaphysical necessity is truth in virtue of the nature of all objects. The paper concludes by offering some reasons to think that the best joint theory of essence and metaphysical necessity is one in which the logic of metaphysical necessity includes S4, but not S5. (shrink)

I argue that absolutism, the view that absolutely unrestricted quantification is possible, is to blame for both the paradoxes that arise in naive set theory and variants of these paradoxes that arise in plural logic and in semantics. The solution is restrictivism, the view that absolutely unrestricted quantification is not possible. -/- It is generally thought that absolutism is true and that restrictivism is not only false, but inexpressible. As a result, the paradoxes are blamed, not on illicit quantification, but (...) on the logical conception of set which motivates naive set theory. The accepted solution is to replace this with the iterative conception of set. -/- I show that this picture is doubly mistaken. After a close examination of the paradoxes in chapters 2--3, I argue in chapters 4 and 5 that it is possible to rescue naive set theory by restricting quantification over sets and that the resulting restrictivist set theory is expressible. In chapters 6 and 7, I argue that it is the iterative conception of set and the thesis of absolutism that should be rejected. (shrink)

In this paper, I motivate a modal account of propositions on the basis of an iterative conception of propositions. As an application, I suggest that the account provides a satisfying solution to the Russell-Myhill paradox. The account is in the spirit of recently developed modal accounts of sets motivated on the basis of the iterative conception of sets.

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)

In this article, I reconstruct Walter Benjamin's philosophy of language and refine the non-predicational view of meaning often attributed to him. By situating his 1916 essay ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’ within the context of his struggle with Russell's paradox and its implications for phenomenology, I show how Benjamin arrives at his conception of non-conceptual content as an environmentally embedded affordance that is directly apprehended by appropriately situated and capable agents. This affordance-like character of meaning (...) explains Benjamin's account of communication, Adamic naming, and his famous distinction between linguistic and spiritual essences (sprachliche- and geistige Wesen). I conclude by showing why translation is central to his views on expression and communication and how it reinforces his account of language-use. (shrink)

This thesis comprises three main chapters—each comprising one relatively standalone paper. The unifying theme is fragmentalism about truth, which is the view that the predicate “true” either expresses distinct concepts or expresses distinct properties. -/- In Chapter 1, I provide a formal development of alethic pluralism. Pluralism is the view that there are distinct truth properties associated with distinct domains of subject matter, where a truth property satisfies certain truth-characterizing principles. On behalf of pluralists, I propose an account of logic (...) and semantics that shows how they can answer central conceptual and logical challenges for their view. -/- In Chapter 2, I motivate and develop a modal account of propositions on the basis of an iterative conception of propositions, where the modality is logico-mathematical. The modal account of propositions takes the conception to motivate an inherently potential hierarchy of propositions. I show that the account helps provide satisfying solutions to the intensional paradoxes of Russell-Myhill, Kaplan, and Prior. -/- In Chapter 3, I propose that “true” is polysemous. I suggest that “true” is initially polysemous between correspondence truth and disquotational truth, and further polysemous between the meanings corresponding to the subconcepts of the concept truth generated by the indefinite extensibility of that concept. I show that the proposal provides satisfying solutions to the semantic paradoxes. (shrink)