R. K. Meyer once gave precise form to the question of whether relevant implication can be defined in any modal system, and his answer was `no'. In the present paper, we extend S4, first with propositional quantifiers, to the system S4π+; and then with definite propositional descriptions, to the system S4π+ lp . We show that relevant implication can in some sense be defined in the modal system S4π+ lp , although it cannot be defined in S4π+.

This is a commentary on MM McCabe's "First Chop your logos... Socrates and the sophists on language, logic, and development". In her paper MM analyses Plato's Euthydemos, in which Plato tackles the problem of falsity in a way that takes into account the speaker and complements the Sophist's discussion of what is said. The dialogue looks as if it is merely a demonstration of the silly consequences of eristic combat. And so it is. But a main point of MM's paper (...) is that there is serious philosophy in the Euthydemos, too. MM argues that to counter the sophist brothers Euthydemos and Dionysodoros, Socrates points out that that there are different aspects to the verb 'to say' that run in parallel to the different aspects of the very 'to learn'. So just as there is continuity rather than ambiguity between 'to learn' and 'to understand', so there is continuity between the different aspects of saying. Thus Socrates puts forward a teleological account of both learning and meaning. Following up on some of MM's thoughts, I argue that the sophists subscribe, despite appearance, to a theory of meaning that respects serious and widely accepted philosophical theses on meaning. -/- Forthcoming in the Australasian Philosophical Review. The curator of the volume is Fiona Leigh, and the committee also has Hugh Benson and Tim Clarke. You can find MM's paper as well as the commentaries by Nicholas Denyer and Russell E. Jones and Ravi Sharma (and myself) by registering. (shrink)

Aristotle's illustrations of the fallacy of Figure of Speech (or Form of Expression) are none too convincing. They are tied to Aristotle's theory of categories and to peculiarities of Greek grammar that fail to hold appeal for a contemporary readership. Yet, upon closer inspection, Figure of Speech shows many points of contact with views and problems that inhabit 20th-century analytical philosophy. In the paper, some Aristotelian examples will be analyzed to gain a better understanding of this fallacy. The case of (...) the Third Man argument and some modern cases lend plausibility to the claim that Figure of Speech is of more interest as a type of fallacy than has generally been assumed. Finally, a case is made for the view that Figure of Speech, though listed among the fallacies dependent upon language, is not properly classified as a fallacy of ambiguity. More likely, it should be looked upon as a type of non sequitur. This has important consequences for the profile of dialogue associated with this fallacy. (shrink)

The paper offers a historical survey of the emergence of logical formalization in twentieth-century analytically oriented philosophy of religion. This development is taken to have passed through three main ?stages?: a pioneering stage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (led by Frege and Russell), a stage of crisis in the 1920s and early 1930s (occasioned by Wittgenstein, logical positivists such as Carnap, and neo-Thomists such as Maritain), and a stage of rehabilitation in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s (led (...) by the Cracow Circle and Quine). (shrink)

What is the exact relationship between analytic philosophy and philosophy of science? In this paper, I will address this question from the perspective of research traditions, with the help of recent histor- ical studies on analytic philosophy. The two groups are particularly focused: the Polish philosophers and the logical empiricists in Berlin. Neither of them is unknown to us. However, by taking seriously their connection to the development of analytic philosophy and philosophy of science as research traditions, I believe, the (...) understanding of our own tradition may be improved. (shrink)

Abstract Theories of descriptions tend to involve commitments about the ambiguity of descriptions. For example, sentences containing descriptions are widely taken to be ambiguous between de re , de dicto , and intermediate interpretations and are sometimes thought to be ambiguous between the former and directly referential interpretations. I provide arguments to suggest that none of these interpretations are due to ambiguities (or indexicality). On the other hand, I argue that descriptions are ambiguous between the above family of interpretations and (...) what may be called ‘institutional’ as well as generic interpretations. My arguments suggest that an adequate theory of descriptions may require considerable rethinking. Most contemporary theories of descriptions appear to be committed to one or more claims about the ambiguity of descriptions that I reject in this paper. I suggest that my observations provide a reason to renew efforts to develop a theory of descriptions within a representationalist theory of interpretation. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-16 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9759-5 Authors Philipp Koralus, Philosophy Department, Princeton University, 212 1879 Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

This paper aims to shed light on the broader significance of Frege’s logicism against the background of discussing and comparing Wittgenstein’s ‘showing/saying’-distinction with Brandom’s idiom of logic as the enterprise of making the implicit rules of our linguistic practices explicit. The main thesis of this paper is that the problem of Frege’s logicism lies deeper than in its inconsistency : it lies in the basic idea that in arithmetic one can, and should, express everything that is implicitly presupposed so that (...) nothing is left unsaid. This, in fact, is the target of Wittgenstein’s critique. Rather than the Tractatus, with its claim that logicism attempts to say something that can only be shown, it is the Philosophical Investigations, with its argument by regress against the thesis that every rule which one can follow must be of an explicit nature, that is of real significance here. (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)

I offer an analysis of the sentence "the concept horse is a concept". It will be argued that the grammatical subject of this sentence, "the concept horse", indeed refers to a concept, and not to an object, as Frege once held. The argument is based on a criterion of proper-namehood according to which an expression is a proper name if it is so rendered in Frege's ideography. The predicate "is a concept", on the other hand, should not be thought of (...) as referring to a function. It will be argued that the analysis of sentences of the form "C is a concept" requires the introduction of a new form of statement. Such statements are not to be thought of as having function--argument form, but rather the structure subject--copula--predicate. (shrink)

Sequel to Part I. In these articles, I describe Cantor’s power-class theorem, as well as a number of logical and philosophical paradoxes that stem from it, many of which were discovered or considered (implicitly or explicitly) in Bertrand Russell’s work. These include Russell’s paradox of the class of all classes not members of themselves, as well as others involving properties, propositions, descriptive senses, class-intensions and equivalence classes of coextensional properties. Part II addresses Russell’s own various attempts to solve these paradoxes, (...) including strategies that he considered and rejected (limitation of size, the zigzag theory, etc.), as well as his own final views whereupon many purported entities that, if reified, lead to these contradictions, must not be genuine entities, but ‘logical fictions’ or ‘logical constructions’ instead. (shrink)

It would seem that some statements like ‘There are exactly four moons of Jupiter’ and ‘The number of moons of Jupiter is four’ have the same truth-conditions and yet differ in ontological commitment. One strategy to resolve this paradoxical phenomenon is to insist that the statements have not only the same truth-conditions but also the same ontological commitments; the other strategy is to reject the presumption that they have the same truth-conditions. This paper critically examines some popular versions of these (...) two strategies, and defends a new solution according to which the statements have the same ontological commitments and yet differ in truth-conditions. (shrink)

In the 2020 Yale Law Journal article, “Commonsense Consent,” Roseanna Sommers argues that deception is compatible with the layperson’s intuitive sense of consent. That is, unlike the canonical understanding of consent defended by legal scholars and philosophers, the notion of consent defended by the folk is not invalidated by deception. In this study, I find that while respondents do appear to attribute consent to victims of deception, they do so in a limited number of contexts – i.e., they attribute de (...) re consent to victims of de dicto deception and attribute de dicto consent to victims of de re deception. When the two varieties of consent and deception are properly disambiguated and matched type for type however, we see the reverse phenomenon – i.e., participants refrain from attributing de dicto consent to de dicto deception and refrain from attributing de re consent to de re deception. If this is right, rather than saying, as Sommers does, that deception generally fails to invalidate commonsense consent, we should refine our understanding of commonsense consent to include two varieties of consent, each of which is in fact invalidated by its own variety of deception. (shrink)

InThe Language Animal, Charles Taylor’s struggle to provide a theoretical framework for his narration of the self finally becomes obvious. About 30 years after he wrote his great and fascinatingSources of the Self, Taylor closes the gap between the self as a radical being-in-the-world and its analytical premises. Even if the main topic of Taylor’s new book may seem to be only a comparison of what he calls ‘HHH-theory’ and ‘HLC-theory,’ there are two other authors, the combination of whose ideas (...) clarifies not only his approach to language but also to his concept of ‘reality’ as such: Gottlob Frege and Ludwig Wittgenstein.DansThe Language Animal, les efforts que doit déployer Charles Taylor pour fournir un point de vue théorique permettant de fonder son récit du soi deviennent finalement apparents. Quelque trente ans après son grand et fascinantLes sources du moi, il comble l’écart qui subsistait entre le soi en tant qu’être au monde radical et ses prémisses analytiques. Même si le principal sujet du nouveau livre de Taylor semble se résumer à une comparaison entre ce qu’il appelle la théorie HHH et la théorie HLC, on y retrouve deux auteurs dont les idées, combinées, permettent de clarifier son approche du langage et du concept de «réalité» : Gottlob Frege et Ludwig Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Proper names are usually considered devices of singular reference but, when considered as word-types, they also exhibit other kinds of uses. In this paper I intend to show that systematic kinds of uses of proper names considered as word-types can be accounted for by a generalized rule-based conception of systematic polysemy, one which not only postulates a multiplicity of stable senses for an expression, but also a multiplicity of content generating rules, each of which determines potentially different contents in different (...) contexts. In contrast to the currently extant polysemous conceptions of proper names (Leckie in Philos Stud 165:1139–1160, 2013), which only encompass individual and predicative uses, the presented proposal concerns all systematic uses of proper names considered in the literature, i.e., individual, predicative, deferred, descriptive, anaphoric, and bound uses of proper names. The resulting conception accommodates referential intuition about the default individual uses of proper names while also admitting other kinds of uses without generating homonymy. It transpires that proper names are semantically underdetermined and context-sensitive expressions. (shrink)

(2012). Reasoning without believing: on the mechanisation of presuppositions and partiality. Journal of Applied Non-Classical Logics: Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 295-317. doi: 10.1080/11663081.2012.705962.

This paper uses the distribution and interpretation of antonymous adjectives in comparative constructions as an empirical basis to argue that abstract representations of measurement, or ‘degrees’, must be modeled as intervals on a scale, rather than as points, as commonly assumed. I begin by demonstrating that the facts in this domain must be accounted for in terms of the interaction of the semantics of adjectival polarity and the semantics of the comparative, rather than principles governing the (overt) expression of particular (...) types of adjectives in comparatives. I then show that a principled account of the full range of data under consideration can be constructed within a model in which degrees are formalized as intervals on a scale and adjectival polarity is characterized in terms of two structurally distinct and complementary sorts of `positive' and `negative' degrees. (shrink)

The dominant account of propositions holds that they are structured entities that have, as constituents, the semantic values of the constituents of the sentences that express them. Since such theories hold that propositions are structured, in some sense, like the sentences that express them, they must provide an answer to what I will call Soames’ Question: “What level, or levels, of sentence structure does semantic information incorporate?”. As it turns out, answering Soames’ Question is no easy task. I argue in (...) this paper that the two most promising ways of answering it, the Logical Form Account and the LF Account, are both unsatisfactory. This result casts doubt on the very idea that propositions are structured. (shrink)

An "overview article" that (a) clarifies the nature of theological anti-realism and how that thesis should be formulated, and (b) negatively assesses some of the most common arguments for being a theological anti-realist.

This paper attempts to revive a once-lively program in the philosophy of language—that of reducing linguistic phenomena to facts about mental states and actions. I argue that recent skepticism toward this project is generated by features of traditional implementations of the project, rather than the project itself. A picture of language as essentially a mechanism for cooperative information exchange attracted theorists to metasemantic accounts grounding language use in illocutionary action (roughly, using an utterance to elicit a propositional attitude). When this (...) picture is rejected, a metasemantics grounding language in locutionary action (using an utterance to direct attention) emerges as a more viable proposal, dissolving an intractable issue for traditional theories: The metasemantics of subsentential expressions. (shrink)

This paper argues that true singular existentials are rationally indubitable. After the claim is clarified and motivated (Section 1), it is defended against objections inspired by Cartesian skepticism and semantic externalism (Section 2), a Fregean fine‐grained conception of propositional content (Section 3), Kripke's causal theory of reference (Section 4), a Stalnakerian coarse‐grained conception of propositional content (Section 5), as well as Evans's account of descriptive reference fixing (Section 6). The discussion is brought to a close by concluding that either true (...) singular existentials are a priori or apriority is not necessary for rational indubitability (Section 7). (shrink)

This paper studies the uses of proper names within a communication-theoretic setting, looking at both the conditions that govern the use of a name by a speaker and those involved in the correct interpretation of the name by her audience. The setting in which these conditions are investigated is provided by an extension of Discourse Representation Theory, MSDRT, in which mental states are represented as combinations of propositional attitudes and entity representations . The first half of the paper presents the (...) features of this framework that are needed to understand its application to the account of names that follows. N-labelled entity representations, where N is a proper name, play a pivotal part in this account: A speaker must have an N-labelled ER in order to be in a position to use a name N, and the interpreter must either have such a representation, or else construct one as part of his interpretation. The paper distinguishes different types of name uses in terms of what they presuppose about the role of N-labelled ERs on the side of the interpreter. (shrink)

A free logical analysis of singular terms couched in terms of the semantic theory of Keenan and Faltz is shown to avoid problems with both Frege's and Russell's treatments. At its heart is the proposal of Keenan and Faltz to reverse the usual mode-theoretic conception of individuals and properties, taking the latter as primitive and the former as derived therefrom. A simple extension of the notion 'property' is then shown to enable a parallel treatment of definite generics.

Abstract Recent criticisms of intuition from experimental philosophy and elsewhere have helped undermine the authority of traditional conceptual analysis. As the product of more empirically informed philosophical methodology, this result is compelling and philosophically salutary. But the negative critiques rarely suggest a positive alternative. In particular, a normative account of concept determination—how concepts should be characterized—is strikingly absent from such work. Carnap's underappreciated theory of explication provides such a theory. Analyses of complex concepts in empirical sciences illustrates and supports this (...) claim, and counteracts the charge explication is only suitable for highly mathematical, axiomatic contexts. Explication is also defended against the influential criticism it is “philosophically unilluminating”. Content Type Journal Article Category Original paper in Philosophy of Science Pages 1-19 DOI 10.1007/s13194-011-0027-5 Authors James Justus, Philosophy Department, Florida State University and University of Sydney, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA Journal European Journal for Philosophy of Science Online ISSN 1879-4920 Print ISSN 1879-4912. (shrink)

Both Russell and Donnellan proposed direct, non-descriptive cognitive relations between thinkers and objects. They agreed that such relations couldn’t be initiated in evidence cases, but Donnellan, unlike Russell, thought direct cognitive relations could be transmitted from person to person. Kaplan (2012) suggests the issues of initiation and transmission are separable—allowing one to deny that evidence yields direct cognition while believing direct cognition is transmittable. Here, cases involving transmission, evidence, ordinary perception, and perception aided by technology are considered. It is concluded (...) that the same mechanism is at work in each case, and that the initiation issue cannot be separated from the transmission issue since transmission cases are evidence cases. Finally, it is argued that this doesn’t threaten the directness of the cognitive relations involved. (shrink)

Just Words: On Speech and Hidden Harm, by McGowanMary Kate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. xi + 209.

This paper argues that mental models of discourse are key in any theory of the interpretation of definite descriptions. It considers both referential and attributive uses of such descriptions, in the sense introduced by Donnellan.

Philosophers in the tradition of Berkeley say that the first step in gaining knowledge from perception is to report or describe one's perceptual data, or that which one sees ‘immediately'. Further, perceptual data are existing things of some sort, and always are exactly as they appear to be since, as H. H. Price says, “in the sphere of the given … what seems, is”. However, these two claims about perceptual data are sometimes incompatible, as the following case shows. Suppose a (...) man looking at a speckled hen reports that it has many speckles but is not able to report the exact number of speckles it has. If above is correct, the man's perceptual datum, as opposed to the physical hen itself which he sees—according to Berkeleians—in a merely indirect sense, would have to be indeterminate in character. Yet we assume that everything which exists ) is and has to be completely determinate. A person's knowledge is indeterminate if he knows that the planet Mars has either two or three satellites and doesn't know which. But Mars itself at any moment has to have some definite number of satellites. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide a brief overview of the development of analytic philosophy in the Philippines. I first highlight the circumstances that led to its inception in the late 1930s, and some of the notable works by prominent Filipino analytic philosophers that helped shape the tradition. Next, I discuss the socio-political climate in the late 1950s through the 1970s that may have led some Filipino philosophers to move away from analytic philosophy. Finally, I explore some signs of its re-emergence (...) in the late twentieth century and its possible trajectories in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

If “on what matters” captures Parfit’s search for objective moral truths (Parfit 2011), perhaps “on who matters (and why)” might be a working title for Shepherd’s enquiry into the moral status of n...

This response to Evanset alencourages broader consideration of what constitutes disability, extending beyond a protagonist’s capabilities toward society’s fuller chorus. Three avenues are submitted to encourage this. First, Engel’s biopsychosocial paradigm of health can be helpfully applied to the question of identity in general, and disability in particular. Second, the philosophy of language (and of naming) gives useful insight into the pitfalls of trying to define disability via descriptions of capability. Third, Kennedy’s critique ‘Unmasking Medicine’ offers a sociopolitical view that (...) builds on Foucault and Illich allowing us to recognise that it matters who judges who, as disabled, and on what grounds. Alongside this, I suggest alternative views first, on the authors’ liberal use of bell curves in the depiction of disability and second, on their terminology of capacity spaces. (shrink)

I develop a theory of counterfactuals about relative computability, i.e. counterfactuals such as 'If the validity problem were algorithmically decidable, then the halting problem would also be algorithmically decidable,' which is true, and 'If the validity problem were algorithmically decidable, then arithmetical truth would also be algorithmically decidable,' which is false. These counterfactuals are counterpossibles, i.e. they have metaphysically impossible antecedents. They thus pose a challenge to the orthodoxy about counterfactuals, which would treat them as uniformly true. What’s more, I (...) argue that these counterpossibles don’t just appear in the periphery of relative computability theory but instead they play an ineliminable role in the development of the theory. Finally, I present and discuss a model theory for these counterfactuals that is a straightforward extension of the familiar comparative similarity models. (shrink)

In this paper, I try to demonstrate a problem with two medieval European views of existence: The property view and the essence view. Adopting a style of reasoning employed by the Indian Madhyamaka philosopher Nāgārjuna, I argue that both the property view and the essence view understand the relation between an object and its existence in terms of difference: The former understands the difference as the difference between an object and its property of existence, and the latter, as the difference (...) between an object’s essence and existence. Neither understanding is without problems, and both lack explanatory power. We must reject both the views. (shrink)

Stephen Yablo has argued for metaontological antirealism: he believes that the sentences claiming or denying the existence of numbers (or other abstract entities or mereological sums) are inapt for truth valuation, because the reference failure of a numerical singular term (or a singular term for an abstract entity or a mereological sum) would not produce a truth value gap in any sentence containing that term. At the same time, Yablo believes that nothing similar applies to singular terms that aim to (...) refer to an entity whose existence or non-existence is a factual matter, e.g. ‘the king of France’: the failure of the presupposition that there is a unique French king makes some sentences with the term ‘the king of France’, in particular “The king of France is bald”, gappy. In this paper I will show that the sentence “The king of France is bald” must be false, and not gappy, according to Yablo’s own criteria and that, furthermore, the presupposition that the term ‘the king of France’ refers presents a fail-safe mechanism in the same way Yablo thinks abstract presuppositions do—this undermines his argument for metaontological antirealism. (shrink)

Susan Stebbing’s work on incomplete symbols and analysis was instrumental in clarifying, sharpening, and improving the project of logical constructions which was pivotal to early analytic philosophy. She dispelled use-mention confusions by restricting the term ‘incomplete symbol’ to expressions eliminable through analysis, rather than those expressions’ purported referents, and distinguished linguistic analysis from analysis of facts. In this paper I explore Stebbing’s role in analytic philosophy’s development from anti-holism, presupposing that analysis terminates in simples, to the more holist or foundherentist (...) analytic philosophy of the later 20th century. I read Stebbing as a transitional figure who made room for more holist analytic movements, e.g., applications of incomplete symbol theory to Quinean ontological commitment. Stebbing, I argue, is part of a historical narrative which starts with the holism of Bradley, an early influence on her, to which Moore and Russell’s logical analysis was a response. They countered Bradley’s holist reservations about facts with the view that the world is built up out of individually knowable simples. Stebbing, a more subtle and sympathetic reader of the British idealists, defends analysis, but with important refinements and caveats which prepared the way for a return to foundherentism and holism within analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This essay offers a detailed philosophical criticism of Frege’s popular thesis that identity is a relation of names. I consider Frege’s position as articulated both in ‘On Sense and Reference’, and in the Grundgesetze, where he appears to take an objectual view of identity, arguing that in both cases Frege is clearly committed to the proposition that identity is a relation holding between names, on the grounds that two different things can never be identical. A counterexample to Frege’s thesis is (...) considered, and a positive thesis is developed according to which, in contradistinction to the Fregean position, identity is a reflexive, symmetric, and transitive relation holding only between a thing and itself which can be expressed as a relation between names. (shrink)

This article makes a case for wide reflective equilibrium in doing African epistemology. It argues that on the issue of formulating a viable theory of knowledge, such an approach is more promising than the extant dominant approaches, namely the method of ethno-epistemology and the method of particularistic studies. More specifically, wide reflective equilibrium articulates a proper balance between philosophy and culture and endows a theory of knowledge with multiple sources of normativity.

The paper provides a proof theoretic characterization of the Russellian theory of definite descriptions (RDD) as characterized by Kalish, Montague and Mar (KMM). To this effect three sequent calculi are introduced: LKID0, LKID1 and LKID2. LKID0 is an auxiliary system which is easily shown to be equivalent to KMM. The main research is devoted to LKID1 and LKID2. The former is simpler in the sense of having smaller number of rules and, after small change, satisfies cut elimination but fails to (...) satisfy the subformula property. In LKID2 an additional analysis of different kinds of identities leads to proliferation of rules but yields the subformula property. This refined proof theoretic analysis leading to fully analytic calculus with constructive proof of cut elimination is the main contribution of the paper. (shrink)