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Philosophers and linguists alike tend to call a semantic theory ‘Russellian’ just in case it assigns to sentences in which definite descriptions occur the truth-conditions Russell did in ‘On Denoting’. This is unfortunate; not all aspects of those particular truth-conditions do explanatory work in Russell's writings. As far as the semantics of descriptions is concerned, the key insights of ‘On Denoting’ are that definite descriptions are not uniformly referring expressions, and that they are scope-bearing elements. Anyone who accepts these two (...) |
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It is argued that a number of important, and seemingly disparate, types of representation are species of a single relation, here called structural representation, that can be described in detail and studied in a way that is of considerable philosophical interest. A structural representation depends on the existence of a common structure between a representation and that which it represents, and it is important because it allows us to reason directly about the representation in order to draw conclusions about the (...) |
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“The Strong Programme” is put forward as a metaphysical theory of sociology by the Edinburgh School (SSK) to study the social causes of knowledge. Barry Barnes and David Bloor are the proponents of the School. They call their programme “the Relativist View of Knowledge” and argue against rationalism in the philosophy of science. Does their relativist account of knowledge present a serious challenge to rationalism, which has dominated 20th century philosophy of science? I attempt to answer this question by criticizing (...) |
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The paper is concerned with the idea that the world is the totality of facts, not of things – with what is involved in thinking of the world in that way, and why one might do so. It approaches this issue through a comparison between Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the identity theory of truth proposed by Hornsby and McDowell.The paper’s positive conclusion is that there is a genuine affinity between these two. A negative contention is that the modern identity theory is (...) |
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Since the discovery of incommensurability in ancient Greece, arithmeticism and geometricism constantly switched roles. After ninetieth century arithmeticism Frege eventually returned to the view that mathematics is really entirely geometry. Yet Poincaré, Brouwer, Weyl and Bernays are mathematicians opposed to the explication of the continuum purely in terms of the discrete. At the beginning of the twenty-first century ‘continuum theorists’ in France (Longo, Thom and others) believe that the continuum precedes the discrete. In addition the last 50 years witnessed the (...) |
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Starting from the assumption that one can literally perceive someone's anger in their face, I argue that this would not be possible if what is perceived is a static facial signature of their anger. There is a product–process distinction in talk of facial expression, and I argue that one can see anger in someone's facial expression only if this is understood to be a process rather than a product. |
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The paper gives a detailed reconstruction and discussion of Peirce’s doctrine of propositions, so-called Dicisigns, developed in the years around 1900. The special features different from the logical mainstream are highlighted: the functional definition not dependent upon conscious stances nor human language, the semiotic characterization extending propositions and quasi-propositions to cover prelinguistic and prehuman occurrences of signs, the relations of Dicisigns to the conception of facts, of diagrammatical reasoning, of icons and indices, of meanings, of objects, of syntax in Peirce’s (...) |
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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 (...) |
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In this article I present a summary of Bertrand Russell's protracted attempts to solve the problem of the unity of the proposition, and explain the significance of the problem for Russell's philosophy. Unlike many other accounts which take the problem to be confined to Russell's early theories of propositional content, I argue that the problem (or variants of it) is a recurring theme throughout the whole of Russell's career. |
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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 (...) |
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Cartwright attempts to argue from an analysis of the composition of forces, and more generally the composition of laws, to the conclusion that laws must be regarded as false. A response to Cartwright is developed which contends that properly understood composition poses no threat to the truth of laws, even though agreeing with Cartwright that laws do not satisfy the "facticity" requirement. My analysis draws especially on the work of Creary, Bhaskar, Mill, and points towards a general rejection of Cartwright's (...) |
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This paper is about a certain view of intentionality, a problem faced by the view, and two ways in which, it has been proposed, the problem might be solved. The view is that every intentional state has an intentional object. The problem is that the putative intentional objects of some intentional states do not, or even cannot, exist. The two strategies to solve the problem and secure the view are those implemented by Tim Crane in his article “Intentional Objects”. In (...) |
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Semantic indeterminacy is the ether of philosophy of language. It fills the interstices of our intentions and pervades accounts of presupposition, tense, fiction, translation, and especially, vagueness. Yet semantic indeterminacy is as impossible as ectoplasm. Indeed, more so! The demonstration need only borrow a few assumptions used elsewhere in widely accepted impossibility results. Since an impossibility is never a necessary condition for anything actual, semantic indeterminacy must be superfluous. Language is no more explained by semantic indeterminacy than calculus is explained (...) |
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Reply to Beaney: the closing of the historical mindIn his comments, Michael Beaney sets himself up as the arbiter of what is genuine history and what isn’t. While celebrating the outpouring of specialized scholarship on Frege, he has no patience with the enterprise outlined in the Précis, which attempts to construct a large-scale picture of the richness of the analytic tradition. That enterprise is one in which great figures of our recent past are challenged by aspects of contemporary thought, and (...) |
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In this paper, I explore whether elementary classical mechanics adheres to the Principle of Composition of Causes as Mill claimed and as certain contemporary authors still seem to believe. Among other things, I provide a proof that if one reads Mill’s description of the principle literally, it does not hold in any general sense. In addition, I explore a separate notion of Composition of Causes and note that it too does not hold in elementary classical mechanics. Among the major morals (...) |
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Consider the following argument written on the board in room 227: 1 = 1. So, the argument on the board in room 227 is not valid. This argument generates a paradox. The aim of this paper is to present a resolution of this paradox and related paradoxes of validity, including a version of the Curry paradox. The proposal stresses the close connections between these validity paradoxes and paradoxes of truth and paradoxes of denotation. So a more general aim is to (...) |
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Call a quantifier ‘unrestricted’ if it ranges over absolutely all objects. Arguably, unrestricted quantification is often presupposed in philosophical inquiry. However, developing a semantic theory that vindicates unrestricted quantification proves rather difficult, at least as long as we formulate our semantic theory within a classical first-order language. It has been argued that using a type theory as framework for our semantic theory provides a resolution of this problem, at least if a broadly Fregean interpretation of type theory is assumed. However, (...) |
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Many historical and philosophical studies treat infinity as an exclusively quantitative notion, whose proper domain of application is mathematics and physics. The main aim of this paper is to disentangle, by critically examining, three notions of infinity in the early modern period, and to argue that one—but only one—of them is quantitative. One of these non-quantitative notions concerns being or reality, while the other concerns a particular iterative property of an aggregate. These three notions will emerge through examination of three (...) |
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Moritz Pasch (1843ber neuere Geometrie (1882), in which he also clearly formulated the view that deductions must be independent from the meanings of the nonlogical terms involved. Pasch also presented in these lectures the main tenets of his philosophy of mathematics, which he continued to elaborate on throughout the rest of his life. This philosophy is quite unique in combining a deductivist methodology with a radically empiricist epistemology for mathematics. By taking into consideration publications from the entire span of Paschs (...) |
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In this paper, I shall discuss several topics related to Frege’s paradigms of second-order abstraction principles and his logicism. The discussion includes a critical examination of some controversial views put forward mainly by Robin Jeshion, Tyler Burge, Crispin Wright, Richard Heck and John MacFarlane. In the introductory section, I try to shed light on the connection between logical abstraction and logical objects. The second section contains a critical appraisal of Frege’s notion of evidence and its interpretation by Jeshion, the introduction (...) |
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In this paper, I shall discuss several topics related to Frege's paradigms of second-order abstraction principles and his logicism. The discussion includes a critical examination of some controversial views put forward mainly by Robin Jeshion, Tyler Burge, Crispin Wright, Richard Heck and John MacFarlane. In the introductory section, I try to shed light on the connection between logical abstraction and logical objects. The second section contains a critical appraisal of Frege's notion of evidence and its interpretation by Jeshion, the introduction (...) |
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(2012). Gingerbread Nuts and Pebbles: Frege and the Neo-Kantians – Two Recently Discovered Documents. British Journal for the History of Philosophy. ???aop.label???. doi: 10.1080/09608788.2012.692665. |
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Neo-logicism is, not least in the light of Frege’s logicist programme, an important topic in the current philosophy of mathematics. In this essay, I critically discuss a number of issues that I consider to be relevant for both Frege’s logicism and neo-logicism. I begin with a brief introduction into Wright’s neo-Fregean project and mention the main objections that he faces. In Sect. 2, I discuss the Julius Caesar problem and its possible Fregean and neo-Fregean solution. In Sect. 3, I raise (...) |
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The concept of quantity (Größe) plays a key role in Frege's theory of real numbers. Typically enough, he refers to this theory as ?theory of quantity? (?Größenlehre?) in the second volume of his opus magnum Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Frege 1903). In this essay, I deal, in a critical way, with Frege's treatment of the concept of quantity and his approach to analysis from the beginning of his academic career until Frege 1903. I begin with a few introductory remarks. In Section (...) |
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The relational approach to tense holds that the now, passage, and becoming are to be understood in terms of relations between events. The debate over the adequacy of this framework is illustrated by a comparative study of the sense in which physical theories, (in)deterministic and (non)relativistic, can lend expression to the metaphysics at issue. The objective is not to settle the matter, but to clarify the nature of this metaphysics and to establish that the same issues are at stake in (...) |
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A detailed interpretation is provided of the ‘Gray's Elegy’ passage in Russell's ‘On Denoting’. The passage is suffciently obscure that its principal lessons have been independently rediscovered. Russell attempts to demonstrate that the thesis that definite descriptions are singular terms is untenable. The thesis demands a distinction be drawn between content and designation, but the attempt to form a proposition directly about the content (as by using an appropriate form of quotation) inevitably results in a proposition about the thing designated (...) |
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In Russell's Problems of Philosophy (PP), acquaintance is the basis of thought and also the basis of empirical knowledge. Thought is based on acquaintance, in that a thinker has to be acquainted with the basic constituents of his thoughts. Empirical knowledge is based on acquaintance, in that acquaintance is involved in perception, and perception is the ultimate source of all empirical knowledge. |
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In early major works, Cassirer and Schlick differently recast traditional doctrines of the concept and of the relation of concept to intuitive content along the lines of recent epistemological discussions within the exact sciences. In this, they attempted to refashion epistemology by incorporating as its basic principle the notion of functional coordination, the theoretical sciences' own methodological tool for dispensing with the imprecise and unreliable guide of intuitive evidence. Examining their respective reconstructions of the theory of knowledge provides an axis (...) |
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The standard version of the story of Russell's theory of types gives legitimately precedence to the vicious circle principle, but it fails to appreciate the significance of the doctrine of incomplete symbols and of the ultimate universalist perspective of Russell's logic. It is what the Author tries to do. This enables him to resolve the apparent contradiction which exists in "Principles" between the ontological commitment of the theory itself with respect to individuals, propositions, and functions, and the inventory of the (...) |
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In this article I argue that Russell's multiple-relation theory of judgment is a continuation of the campaign against Frege and Meinong begun in “On Denoting” with the theory of descriptions. More precisely, I hold that the problem of false belief, to which the multiple-relation theory is presented as a solution, emerges quite naturally out of the problem context of “On Denoting” and threatens to give new life to the theories Russell purports to have laid to rest there, and that Russell's (...) |
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In the course of developing a semantics with epistemological intent, Brandom claims that his inferentialism is Hegelian. This paper argues that, even on a charitable reading, Brandom is an anti-Hegelian. |
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In this paper I argue for a view of groups, things like teams, committees, clubs and courts. I begin by examining features all groups seem to share. I formulate a list of six features of groups that serve as criteria any adequate theory of groups must capture. Next, I examine four of the most prominent views of groups currently on offer—that groups are non-singular pluralities, fusions, aggregates and sets. I argue that each fails to capture one or more of the (...) |
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A number of papers have argued in favour of the material account of indicative conditionals, but typically they either concentrate on defending the account from the charge that it has counterintuitive consequences, or else focus on some particular positive argument in favour of the theory. In this paper, I survey the various positive arguments that can be given, presenting simple versions where possible and showing the connections between them. I conclude with some methodological considerations. |
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Between 1903 and 1918 Russell made a number of attempts to understand the unity of the proposition, but his attempts all foundered on his failure clearly to distinguish between different senses in which the relation R might be said to relate a and b in the proposition aRb: he failed to distinguish between the relation as truth-maker and the relation as unifier, and consequently committed himself again and again to the unacceptable consequence that only true propositions are genuinely unified. There (...) |
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83. It should now be apparent that the familiar problems of reference and modality can be satisfactorily resolved without either abandoning substitutivity of identity in modal contexts or invoking an intensional ontology. It might be argued, however, that the suggested resolution avoids invoking an intensional ontology only because the modal predicates, e.g. Nec and Believes, are left unanalysed. This may well be true but it should be appreciated that the analysis of modal predicates is an issue which is independent of (...) |
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In this essay, I discuss some observations by Peirce which suggest he had some idea of the substantive metalogical differences between logics which permit both quantifiers and relations, and those which do not. Peirce thus seems to have had arguments?which even De Morgan and Frege lacked?that show the superior expressiveness of relational logics. |
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The work of Hugh MacColl (1837–1909) suffered the same fate after his death as before it:despite being vaguely alluded to and in part even commended, on the whole it has remained an unknown quantity. Even worse, those of his ideas which have played a decisive role in the history of logic have been credited to his successors; this is especially the case with the definition of strict implication and the first formal development of formal modal logic. This paper takes an (...) |
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La constatación de que nuestro universo está constituido de unos y los mismos elementos materiales en cualquier lugar en que podamos observarlo nos lleva directamente a la postulación de un único principio y causa del único proceso universal al que se debe cuanto existe. Y en ese trance parece inevitable preguntar: ¿cómo ha surgido Todo? Todo, aquí, significa cuanto hay; sin excepción alguna. Esta visión puramente física del Universo puede denominarse naturalismo universal, entendiendo el término naturalismo como traducción del término (...) |
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David Chalmers’ two-dimensionalism is an ambitious philosophical program that aims to “ground” or “construct” Fregean meanings and restore “the golden triangle” of apriority, necessity, and meaning that Kripke seemingly broke. This paper aims to examine critically what Chalmers’ theory can in reality achieve. It is argued that the theory faces severe challenges. There are some gaps in the overall arguments, and the reasoning is in some places somewhat circular. Chalmers’ theory is effectively founded on certain strong philosophical assumptions. It is (...) |
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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 (...) |
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Pure type systems arise as a generalisation of simply typed lambda calculus. The contemporary development of mathematics has renewed the interest in type theories, as they are not just the object of mere historical research, but have an active role in the development of computational science and core mathematics. It is worth exploring some of them in depth, particularly predicative Martin-Löf’s intuitionistic type theory and impredicative Coquand’s calculus of constructions. The logical and philosophical differences and similarities between them will be (...) |
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