The book is addressed to all readers interested in cognitive science, and especially in research combining a logical analysis with psychological, linguistic and neurobiological approaches. The publication is the result of a collaboration between the Department of Cognitive Science at University of Lodz and the Department of Cognitive Science at Lund University. It is intended to provide a comprehensive presentation of the key research issues undertaken in both Departments, including considerations on meaning, natural language and reasoning, linguistic as well as (...) numerical competence, the theory of decision making, modelling of conceptual representations, cognitive and game theoretic approach to social interactions. (shrink)

PLEASE NOTE: This is the corrected 2nd eBook edition, 2021. ●●●●● _Critique of Impure Reason_ has now also been published in a printed edition. To reduce the otherwise high price of this scholarly, technical book of nearly 900 pages and make it more widely available beyond university libraries to individual readers, the non-profit publisher and the author have agreed to issue the printed edition at cost. ●●●●● The printed edition was released on September 1, 2021 and is now available through (...) all booksellers, including Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and brick-and-mortar bookstores under ISBN 978-0-578-88646-6. ●●●●● In light of the length of this book, readers who would like to have a more detailed description of the book's objectives and method may find it helpful to read the detailed and clearly written Wikipedia entry about this work: From the Wikipedia search page, use the search phrase "Critique of Impure Reason". At least at the time of this writing (11/29/2021), the Wikipedia entry is well-researched and accurate. ●●●●● In addition, a "Primer on Bartlett's CRITIQUE OF IMPURE REASON" has been made available by the author. It is available under its title through PhilPapers and other philosophy online archives. ●●●●● COMMENDATIONS OF THIS WORK, from the back cover of the published edition: ●●●●● “I admire its range of philosophical vision.” – Nicholas Rescher, Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, author of more than 100 books. ●●●●● “Bartlett’s _Critique of Impure Reason_ is an impressive, bold, and ambitious work. Careful scholarship is balanced by original analyses that lead the reader to recognize the limits of meaning, knowledge, and conceptual possibility. The work addresses a host of traditional philosophical problems, among them the nature of space, time, causality, consciousness, the self, other minds, ontology, free will and determinism, and others. The book culminates in a fascinating and profound new understanding of relativity physics and quantum theory.” – Gerhard Preyer, Professor of Philosophy, Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, author of many books including _Concepts of Meaning_, _Beyond Semantics and Pragmatics_, _Intention and Practical Thought_, and _Contextualism in Philosophy_. ●●●●● “[This work’s] goal is of a unique and difficult species: Dr. Bartlett seeks to develop a formal logical calculus on the basis of transcendental philosophical arguments; in fact, he hopes that this calculus will be the formal expression of the transcendental foundation of knowledge.... I consider Dr. Bartlett’s work soundly conceived and executed with great skill.” – C. F. von Weizsäcker, philosopher and physicist, former Director, Max-Planck-Institute, Starnberg, Germany. ●●●●● “Bartlett has written an American “Prolegomena to All Future Metaphysics.” He aims rigorously to eliminate meaningless assertions, reach bedrock, and place philosophy on a firm foundation that will enable it, like science and mathematics, to produce lasting results that generations to come can build on. This is a great book, the fruit of a lifetime of research and reflection, and it deserves serious attention.” — Martin X. Moleski, former Professor, Canisius College, Buffalo, NY, studies of scientific method, the presuppositions of thought, and the self-referential nature of epistemology. ●●●●● “Bartlett has written a book on what might be called the underpinnings of philosophy. It has fascinating depth and breadth, and is all the more striking due to its unifying perspective based on the concepts of reference and self-reference.” – Don Perlis, Professor of Computer Science, University of Maryland, author of numerous publications on self-adjusting autonomous systems and philosophical issues concerning self-reference, mind, and consciousness. ●●●●● ●●●●● The _Critique of Impure Reason: Horizons of Possibility and Meaning_ comprises a major and important contribution to philosophy. Thanks to the generosity of its publisher, this massive 885-page volume has been published as a free open access eBook (3.75MB) as well as an open access printed edition. It inaugurates a revolutionary paradigm shift in philosophical thought by providing compelling and long-sought-for solutions to a wide range of philosophical problems. In the process, the work fundamentally transforms the way in which the concepts of reference, meaning, and possibility are understood. The book includes a Foreword by the celebrated German philosopher and physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. ●●●●● In Kant’s _Critique of Pure Reason_ we find an analysis of the preconditions of experience and of knowledge. In contrast, but yet in parallel, the new _Critique_ focuses upon the ways—unfortunately very widespread and often unselfconsciously habitual—in which many of the concepts that we employ _conflict_ with the very preconditions of meaning and of knowledge. ●●●●● This is a book about the boundaries of frameworks and about the unrecognized conceptual confusions in which we become entangled when we attempt to transgress beyond the limits of the possible and meaningful. We tend either not to recognize or not to accept that we all-too-often attempt to trespass beyond the boundaries of the frameworks that make knowledge possible and the world meaningful. ●●●●● The _Critique of Impure Reason_ proposes a bold, ground-breaking, and startling thesis: that a great many of the major philosophical problems of the past can be solved through the recognition of a viciously deceptive form of thinking to which philosophers as well as non-philosophers commonly fall victim. For the first time, the book advances and justifies the criticism that a substantial number of the questions that have occupied philosophers fall into the category of “impure reason,” violating the very conditions of their possible meaningfulness. ●●●●● The purpose of the study is twofold: first, to enable us to recognize the boundaries of what is referentially forbidden—the limits beyond which reference becomes meaningless—and second, to avoid falling victims to a certain broad class of conceptual confusions that lie at the heart of many major philosophical problems. As a consequence, the boundaries of _possible meaning_ are determined. ●●●●● Bartlett, the author or editor of more than 20 books, is responsible for identifying this widespread and delusion-inducing variety of error, _metalogical projection_. It is a previously unrecognized and insidious form of erroneous thinking that undermines its own possibility of meaning. It comes about as a result of the pervasive human compulsion to seek to transcend the limits of possible reference and meaning. ●●●●● Based on original research and rigorous analysis combined with extensive scholarship, the _Critique of Impure Reason_ develops a self-validating method that makes it possible to recognize, correct, and eliminate this major and pervasive form of fallacious thinking. In so doing, the book provides at last provable and constructive solutions to a wide range of major philosophical problems. ●●●●● CONTENTS AT A GLANCE ▪▪▪▪▪ Preface ▪▪▪▪▪ Foreword by Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker ▪▪▪▪▪ Acknowledgments ▪▪▪▪▪ Avant-propos: A philosopher’s rallying call ▪▪▪▪▪ Introduction ▪▪▪▪▪ A note to the reader ▪▪▪▪▪ A note on conventions ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ PART I ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ WHY PHILOSOPHY HAS MADE NO PROGRESS AND HOW IT CAN ▪▪▪▪▪ 1 Philosophical-psychological prelude ▪▪▪▪▪ 2 Putting belief in its place: Its psychology and a needed polemic ▪▪▪▪▪ 3 Turning away from the linguistic turn: From theory of reference to metalogic of reference ▪▪▪▪▪ 4 The stepladder to maximum theoretical generality ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ PART II ▪▪▪▪▪ THE METALOGIC OF REFERENCE ▪▪▪▪▪ A New Approach to Deductive, Transcendental Philosophy ▪▪▪▪▪ 5 Reference, identity, and identification ▪▪▪▪▪ 6 Self-referential argument and the metalogic of reference ▪▪▪▪▪ 7 Possibility theory ▪▪▪▪▪ 8 Presupposition logic, reference, and identification ▪▪▪▪▪ 9 Transcendental argumentation and the metalogic of reference ▪▪▪▪▪ 10 Framework relativity ▪▪▪▪▪ 11 The metalogic of meaning ▪▪▪▪▪ 12 The problem of putative meaning and the logic of meaninglessness ▪▪▪▪▪ 13 Projection ▪▪▪▪▪ 14 Horizons ▪▪▪▪▪ 15 De-projection ▪▪▪▪▪ 16 Self-validation ▪▪▪▪▪ 17 Rationality: Rules of admissibility ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ PART III ▪▪▪▪▪ PHILOSOPHICAL APPLICATIONS OF THE METALOGIC OF REFERENCE ▪▪▪▪▪ Major Problems and Questions of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Science ▪▪▪▪▪ 18 Ontology and the metalogic of reference ▪▪▪▪▪ 19 Discovery or invention in general problem-solving, mathematics, and physics ▪▪▪▪▪ 20 The conceptually unreachable: “The far side” ▪▪▪▪▪ 21 The projections of the external world, things-in-themselves, other minds, realism, and idealism ▪▪▪▪▪ 22 The projections of time, space, and space-time ▪▪▪▪▪ 23 The projections of causality, determinism, and free will ▪▪▪▪▪ 24 Projections of the self and of solipsism ▪▪▪▪▪ 25 Non-relational, agentless reference and referential fields ▪▪▪▪▪ 26 Relativity physics as seen through the lens of the metalogic of reference ▪▪▪▪▪ 27 Quantum theory as seen through the lens of the metalogic of reference ▪▪▪▪▪ 28 Epistemological lessons learned from and applicable to relativity physics and quantum theory ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ PART IV ▪▪▪▪▪ HORIZONS ▪▪▪▪▪ 29 Beyond belief ▪▪▪▪▪ 30 _Critique of Impure Reason_: Its results in retrospect ▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪ SUPPLEMENT ▪▪▪▪▪ The Formal Structure of the Metalogic of Reference ▪▪▪▪▪ APPENDIX I ▪▪▪▪▪ The Concept of Horizon in the Work of Other Philosophers ▪▪▪▪▪ APPENDIX II ▪▪▪▪▪ Epistemological Intelligence ▪▪▪▪▪ References ▪▪▪▪▪ Index ▪▪▪▪▪ About the author. 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In §2-4, I survey three extant ways of making sense of indeterminate truth and find each of them wanting. All the later sections of the paper are concerned with showing that the most promising way of making sense of indeterminate truth is via either a theory of truthmaker gaps or via a theory of truthmaking gaps. The first intimations of a truthmaker–truthmaking gap theory of indeterminacy are to be found in Quine (1981). In §5, we see how Quine proposes to (...) solve Unger’s problem of the many via positing the possibility of groundless truth. In §6, I elaborate the truthmaker gap model of indeterminacy first sketched by Sorensen (2001, ch.11) and use it to give a reductive analysis of indeterminate truth. In §7, I briefly assess what kind of formal framework can best express the possibility of truthmaker gaps. In §8, I contrast what I dub ‘the ordinary conception of worldly indeterminacy’ with Williamson’s conception of worldly indeterminacy. In §9, I show how one can distinguish linguistic from worldly indeterminacy on a truthmaker gap conception. In §10, I briefly sketch the relationship between truthmaker gaps and ignorance. In §11, I assess whether a truthmaker gap conception of vagueness is really just a form of epistemicism. In §12, I propose that truthmaker gaps can yield a plausible model of (semantic) presupposition failure. In §13, in response to the worry that a truthmaker gap conception of indeterminacy is both parochial and controversial—since it commits us to an implausibly strong theory of truthmaking—I set forth a truthmaking gap conception of indeterminacy. In §14, I answer the worry that groundless truths, of whatever species, are just unacceptably queer. A key part of this answer is that a truthmaker–truthmaking gap model of indeterminacy turns out to be considerably less queer than any model of indeterminacy which gives up on Tarski’s T-schema for truth (and cognate schemas). (shrink)

In this paper we explain our pretense account of truth-talk and apply it in a diagnosis and treatment of the Liar Paradox. We begin by assuming that some form of deflationism is the correct approach to the topic of truth. We then briefly motivate the idea that all T-deflationists should endorse a fictionalist view of truth-talk, and, after distinguishing pretense-involving fictionalism (PIF) from error- theoretic fictionalism (ETF), explain the merits of the former over the latter. After presenting the basic framework (...) of our PIF account of truth-talk, we demonstrate a few advantages it offers over T-deflationist accounts that do not explicitly acknowledge pretense at work in the discourse. In turning to the Liar Paradox, we explain how the quasi-anaphoric functioning that our account attributes to truth-talk provides a diagnosis of the Liar Paradox (and other instances of semantic pathology) as having no content—in the sense of not specifying any of what we call M-conditions. At the same time, however, we vindicate the intuition that we can understand liar sentences, thereby avoiding one standard objection to “meaningless strategy” responses to the Liar Paradox. With this diagnosis in place, we then, by way of treatment, introduce a new predicate, ‘semantically defective’, and show how the explanation we give for its application allows for a consistent, yet revenge-immune, (dis)solution of the Liar Paradox, and semantic pathology generally. (shrink)

This book, provides a critical approach to all major logical paradoxes: from ancient to contemporary ones. There are four key aims of the book: 1. Providing systematic and historical survey of different approaches – solutions of the most prominent paradoxes discussed in the logical and philosophical literature. 2. Introducing original solutions of major paradoxes like: Liar paradox, Protagoras paradox, an unexpected examination paradox, stone paradox, crocodile, Newcomb paradox. 3. Explaining the far-reaching significance of paradoxes of vagueness and change for philosophy (...) and ontology. 4. Proposing a novel, well justified and, as it seems, natural classification of paradoxes. (shrink)

This anthology of the very latest research on truth features the work of recognized luminaries in the field, put together following a rigorous refereeing process. Along with an introduction outlining the central issues in the field, it provides a unique and unrivaled view of contemporary work on the nature of truth, with papers selected from key conferences in 2011 such as Truth Be Told, Truth at Work, Paradoxes of Truth and Denotation and Axiomatic Theories of Truth. Studying the nature of (...) the concept of ‘truth’ has always been a core role of philosophy, but recent years have been a boom time in the topic. With a wealth of recent conferences examining the subject from various angles, this collection of essays recognizes the pressing need for a volume that brings scholars up to date on the arguments. Offering academics and graduate students alike a much-needed repository of today’s cutting-edge work in this vital topic of philosophy, the volume is required reading for anyone needing to keep abreast of developments, and is certain to act as a catalyst for further innovation and research. (shrink)

Indirect speech reports can be true even if they attribute to the speaker the saying of something weaker than what she in fact expressed, yet not all weakenings of what the speaker expressed yield true reports. For example, if Anna utters ‘Bob and Carla passed the exam’, we can accurately report her as having said that Carla passed the exam, but we can not accurately report her as having said that either it rains or it does not, or that either (...) Carla passed the exam or pandas are cute. This paper offers an analysis of speech reports that distinguishes weakenings of what the speaker expressed that yield true reports from weakenings that do not. According to this analysis, speech reports are not only sensitive to the informational content of what the speaker expressed, but also to the possibilities a speaker raises in making an utterance. As I argue, this analysis has significant advantages over its most promising competitors, including views based on work by Barwise and Perry : 668–691, 1981), views appealing to recent work on the notion of content parthood by Fine :199–226, 2016) and Yablo, and Richard’s : 605–616, 1998) proposal appealing to structured propositions. (shrink)

This paper investigates how naive theories of truth fare with respect to a set of extremely plausible principles of restricted quantification. It is first shown that both nonsubstructural theories as well as certain substructural theories cannot validate all those principles. Then, pursuing further an approach to the semantic paradoxes that the author has defended elsewhere, the theory of restricted quantification available in a specific naive theory that rejects the structural property of contraction is explored. It is shown that the theory (...) validates all the principles in question, and it is argued that other prima facie plausible principles that the theory fails to validate are objectionable on independent grounds. (shrink)

Many topics have not been covered, in most cases because I don't know quite what to say about them. Would it be possible to add a decidability predicate to the language? What about stronger connectives, like exclusion negation or Lukasiewicz implication? Would an expanded language do better at expressing its own semantics? Would it contain new and more terrible paradoxes? Can the account be supplemented with a workable notion of inherent truth (see note 36)? In what sense does stage semantics (...) lie “between” fixed point and stability semantics? In what sense, exactly, are our semantical rules inconsistent? In what sense, if any, does their inconsistency resolve the problem of the paradoxes?The ideals of strength, grounding, and closure together define an intuitively appealing conception of truth. Nothing would be gained by insisting that it was the intuitive conception of truth, and in fact recent developments make me wonder whether such a thing exists. However that may be, until the alternatives are better understood it would be foolish to attempt to decide between them. Truth gives up her secrets slowly and grudgingly, and loves to confound our presumptions. (shrink)

I argue that ‘Moore’s paradox for God’. I do not believe this proposition shows that nobody can be both omniscient and rational in all her beliefs. I then anticipate and rebut three objections to my argument.

Philosophical issues often turn into logic. That is certainly true of Moore’s Paradox, which tends to appear and reappear in many philosophical contexts. There is no doubt that its study belongs to pragmatics rather than semantics or syntax. But it is also true that issues in pragmatics can often be studied fruitfully by attending to their projection, so to speak, onto the levels of semantics or syntax — just in the way that problems in spherical geometry are often illuminated by (...) the study of projections onto a plane. To begin I will describe a potentially vast landscape of logics of a certain form, with some illustrations of how they appear naturally in response to some problems in philosophical logic. Then I will turn Moore’s Paradox into logic, within that landscape, and show how far it can be illuminated therein. (shrink)

The liar paradox is a famous and ancient paradox related to logic and philosophy. It shows it is perfectly possible to construct sentences that are correct grammatically and semantically but that cannot be true or false in the traditional sense. In this paper the authors show four approaches to interpreting paradoxes that illustrate the influence of: the levels of language, their belonging to indeterminate compatible propositions or indeterminate propositions, being based on universal antinomy and the theory of dialetheism.

Propositions are central to at least most theorizing about the connection between our mental lives and the world: we use them in our theories of an array of attitudes including belief, desire, hope, fear, knowledge, and understanding. Unfortunately, when we press on these theories, we encounter a relatively neglected family of paradoxes first studied by Arthur Prior. I argue that these paradoxes present a fatal problem for most familiar resolutions of paradoxes. In particular, I argue that truth-value gap, contextualist, situation (...) theoretic, revision theoretic, ramified, and dialetheist approaches to the paradoxes must deny us the conceptual resources that they themselves make use of, on pain of contradiction. I then detail the costs of the extant strategies that avoid this issue: Hartry Field’s paracomplete approach; Andrew Bacon’s classical treatment of indeterminacy; a generalization of ideas from Prior, Nicholas J.J. Smith, and Hartley Slater; and free logics as recently explored by Bacon, John Hawthorne, and Gabriel Uzquiano. I argue that none of these is perfect, and that each restricts the theories we can endorse in a variety of areas of philosophy. I spell these restrictions out, showing, I hope, that the further investigation of these paradoxes must be a part of future research on propositional attitudes. (shrink)

Kripke’s theory of truth is arguably the most influential approach to self-referential truth and the semantic paradoxes. The use of a partial evaluation scheme is crucial to the theory and the most prominent schemes that are adopted are the strong Kleene and the supervaluation scheme. The strong Kleene scheme is attractive because it ensures the compositionality of the notion of truth. But under the strong Kleene scheme classical tautologies do not, in general, turn out to be true and, as a (...) consequence, classical reasoning is no longer admissible once the notion of truth is involved. The supervaluation scheme adheres to classical reasoning but violates compositionality. Moreover, it turns Kripke’s theory into a rather complicated affair: to check whether a sentence is true we have to look at all admissible precisification of the interpretation of the truth predicate we are presented with. One consequence of this complicated evaluation condition is that under the supervaluation scheme a more proof-theoretic characterization of Kripke’s theory becomes inherently difficult, if not impossible. In this paper we explore the middle ground between the strong Kleene and the supervaluation scheme and provide an evaluation scheme that adheres to classical reasoning but retains many of the attractive features of the strong Kleene scheme. We supplement our semantic investigation with a novel axiomatic theory of truth that matches the semantic theory we have put forth. (shrink)

Mights plug gaps. If p lacks a truth-value, then ‘It might be that p’ should also lack truth-value. Yet epistemic hedges often turn an unassertible statement into an assertible one. The phenomenon is illustrated in detail for two kinds of statements that are frequently alleged to be counterexamples to the principle of bivalence: future contingents and statements that apply predicates to borderline cases. The paper concludes by exploring the prospects for generalizing this gap-plugging strategy.

I argue that (a) the phenomenon characteristic of pragmatic presupposition, is distinct from (b) the phenomenon characteristic of semantic presupposition, and that there are sentences exhibiting (a) alone. I apply this to Stalnaker's defense of van Fraassen's theory of semantic presupposition against Karttunen. I show that, since Stalmaker fails to distinguish (a) from (b), this defense amounts to an unsuccessful attempt to explain pragmatically the supposed instances of (b) in Karttunen's counter-examples. I observe that, given the distinction between (a) and (...) (b), we can salvage from Stalnaker the strategy of discounting certain of Karttunen's counter-examples which exhibit not (b) but merely (a). (shrink)

In diesem Aufsatz wird ein neues Paradoxon vorgestellt, der Super-Lügner. Er ist stärker als alle bekannten Lügner-Sätze, nicht mehr eindeutig selbstreferentiell und läßt sich darüber hinaus in eindeutig in die Tarski-Hierarchie einordnen. Eine unendlich große Familie von Super-Lügnern auf Metaebenen ist konstruierbar. Schließlich widersetzt sich der Super-Lügner der Auflösung durch die neue vielversprechende Reflexionslogik LR von U. Blau.

In diesem Aufsatz wird ein neues Paradoxon vorgestellt, der Super-Lügner. Er ist stärker als alle bekannten Lügner-Sätze, nicht mehr eindeutig selbstreferentiell und läßt sich darüber hinaus in eindeutig in die Tarski-Hierarchie einordnen. Eine unendlich große Familie von Super-Lügnern auf Metaebenen ist konstruierbar. Schließlich widersetzt sich der Super-Lügner der Auflösung durch die neue vielversprechende Reflexionslogik LR von U. Blau.

It’s not clear what supervaluationists should say about propositional content. Does a vague sentence, e.g., ‘Harry is bald’, express one proposition, or a barrage of propositions, or none at all? Or is the matter indeterminate? The supervaluationist canon is not decisive on the issue; authoritative passages can be cited in favor of each of the proposals just mentioned. Furthermore, some detractors have argued that supervaluationism is incapable of providing any coherent account of propositional content. This paper considers each of the (...) proposals for how many propositions are expressed by a vague sentence: none, some, all, or it’s indeterminate. Most of these proposals turn out to be unworkable in the metalanguage. I conclude that orthodox supervaluationists—those who identify truth with supertruth—must either relax the standard requirement that propositions be bivalent, or else alter the standard relation between sentences and propositions in which a sentence inherits its truth-conditions from the proposition it expresses. The best option going forward for the orthodox supervaluationist is perhaps the most surprising—amend the requirement that propositions be bivalent. I argue that propositions having supervaluational truth-conditions are best suited to fill the propositional roles in the semantic theory of a vague language. These propositions admit of truth-value gaps, and gappy propositions are controversial, but I argue that they earn their keep. (shrink)

A view often expressed is that to classify the liar sentence as neither true nor false is satisfactory for the simple liar but not for the strengthened liar. I argue that in fact it is equally unsatisfactory for both liars. I go on to discuss whether, nevertheless, Kripke''s theory of truth represents an advance on that of Tarski.

I examine Quine’s and Davidson’s arguments to the effect that classical logic is the one and only correct logic. This conclusion is drawn from their views on radical translation and interpretation, respectively. I focus on the latter, but I first address, independently, Quine’s argument to the effect that the ‘deviant’ logician, who departs from classical logic, is merely changing the subject. Regarding logical pluralism, the question is whether there is more than one correct logic. I argue that bivalence may be (...) subject matter dependent, but that distribution and the law of excluded middle can probably not be dropped whilst maintaining the standard meanings of the connectives. In discussing the ramifications of the indeterminacy of interpretation, I ask whether it forces Davidsonian interpreters to adopt Dummett’s epistemic conception of truth vis-à-vis their interpretations. And, if so, does this cohere with their attributing a nonepistemic notion of truth to their interpretees? This would be a form of logical pluralism. In addition, I discuss Davidson’s arguments against conceptual schemes. Schemes incommensurable with our own could be construed as wholesale deviant logics, or so I argue. And, if so, their possibility would yield, in turn, the possibility of a radical logical pluralism. I also address Davidson’s application of Tarski’s definition of truth. (shrink)

Strawson’s work seems to contain both pragmatic and semantic concepts of presupposition. The former concept has largely been studied by many philosophers and linguists, while the latter has not been properly investigated. The present author explicates the semantic concept of existential presupposition in relation to deriving existential statements and distinguishing their de dicto/de re variants.

This paper argues for tlie claims that a) a natural language such as English is semanticaly closed b) semantic closure implies inconsistency. A corollary of these is that the semantics of English must be paraconsistent. The first part of the paper formulates a definition of semantic closure which applies to natural languages and shows that this implies inconsistency. The second section argues that English is semeantically closed. The preceding discussion is predicated on the assumption that there are no truth value (...) gaps. The next section of the paper considers whether the possibility of these makes any difference to the substantive conclusions of the previous sections, and argues that it does not. The crux of the preceding arguments is that none of the consistent semantical accounts that have been offered for solving the semantical paradoxes is a semantic ofEnglish. The final section of the paper produces a general argument as to why this must always be the case. (shrink)

ABSTRACTI offer a simple‐minded analysis of presupposition in which if a sentence has a presupposition, then both that sentence and its negation logically entail the presupposition; and in which sentence with failed presuppositions are neither true nor false. This account naturally generates an analysis of what it takes to disagree and what it takes to be at fault in a disagreement. A simple generalization gives rise to the possibility of disagreements in which no party is at fault, as is required (...) by leading theories on predicates of taste. (shrink)

Over the past several decades, in the field of temporal logic there have been created a great number of semantical theories that provide different truth conditions for tensed propositions. In this article we deal with five non-bivalent semantical interpretations of the temporal logic systems CL and Kb : 1) Ł3 by J. Łukasiewicz; 2) K3 by S. C. Kleene; 3) Ockhamism by A. Prior; 4) supervaluationism by R. Thomason; 5) relativism by J. MacFarlane. The aim of this article is to (...) present a detailed typology of the five semantical theories based on these criteria: a) the ability to deal with the problem of retrospective evaluation of future contingent propositions; b) the ability to deal with the problem of divine omniscience and free will; c) their relation to the law of excluded middle; d) their relation to other formulas that are intuitively acceptable in an intederministic context. It is argued that the only theory that satisfies all four criteria is the relativism of J. MacFarlane; however, it faces some serious challenges when dealing with the problem of retrospective evaluation of future contingent propositions in the theological context. (shrink)

The partial structures approach has two major components: a broad notion of structure (partial structure) and a weak notion of truth (quasi-truth). In this paper, we discuss the relationship between this approach and free logic. We also compare the model-theoretic analysis supplied by partial structures with the method of supervaluations, which was initially introduced as a technique to provide a semantic analysis of free logic. We then combine the three formal frameworks (partial structures, free logic and supervaluations), and apply the (...) resulting approach to accommodate semantic paradoxes. (shrink)

My purpose in this paper is to argue that the classical notion of entailment is not suitable for non-bivalent logics, to propose an appropriate alternative and to suggest a generalized entailment notion suitable to bivalent and non-bivalent logics alike. In classical two valued logic, one can not infer a false statement from one that is not false, any more than one can infer from a true statement a statement that is not true. In classical logic in fact preserving truth and (...) preserving non-falsity are one and the same thing. They are not the same in non-bivalent logics however and I will argue that the classical notion of entailment that preserves only truth is not strong enough for such a logic. I will show that if we retain the classical notion of entailment in a logic that has three values, true, false and a third value in between, an inconsistency can be derived that can be resolved only by measures that seriously disable the logic. I will show this for a logic designed to allow for semantic presuppositions, then I will show that we get the same result in any three valued logic with the same value ordering. I will finally suggest how the notion of entailment should be generalized so that this problem may be avoided. The strengthened notion of entailment I am proposing is a conservative extension of the classical notion that preserves not only truth but the order of all values in a logic, so that the value of an entailed statement must alway be at least as great as the value of the sequence of statements entailing it. A notion of entailment this strong or stronger will, I believe, be found to be applicable to non-classical logics generally. In the opinion of Dana Scott, no really workable three valued logic has yet been developed. It is hard to disagree with this. A workable three valued logic however could perhaps be developed however, if we had a notion of entailment suitable to non-bivalent logics. (shrink)

We often say one thing and mean another. This kind of indirection (concerning the content conveyed) is both ubiquitous and widely recognized. Other forms of indirection, however, are less common and less discussed. For example, we can sometimes address one person with the primary intention of being overheard by someone else. And, sometimes speakers say something simply in order to make it possible for someone else to say that they said it. Politicians generating sounds bites for the media are an (...) example of this kind of indirection. In this paper, I will explore—via a series of fictionalized examples—these less discussed forms of indirection and consider how such forms of indirection can be duplicitous and misleading. (shrink)

We began by distinguishing Tarskian and Fitchean notions of universality in such a way that the claim that no language is universal in the sense of Tarski is compatible with accepting Fitchean universality. Then we examined a proposal involving two truth concepts — one that fit the Fitchean notion and another that followed Tarski's views on truth — finding little advantage in such generosity. We attempted a reformulation of Herzberger's argument for the negative view — the view that no language (...) is universal in Tarski's sense — but found it unsuccessful when the language of the argument's formulation was brought under consideration. A more persuasive argument for EI was found, free of the defect of the previous one. EI was then shown to have unsettling consequences, prompting us to inquire about avoiding it. We found this possible, noting that EI is itself a solution to the semantic paradoxes, to which there are alternatives that avoid the unwelcome aspects of EI. However, whether any such alternative is ultimately preferable to EI remains to be seen. (shrink)

The essay outlines the character of free logic, and motivation for its construction and development. It details some technical achievements of high philosophical interest, but urges that the role of existence assumptions in logic is still not fully understood, that unresolved old problems, both technical and philosophical, abound, and presents some new problems of considerable philosophical import in free logic.

In this paper, we define some consequence relations based on supervaluation semantics for partial models, and we investigate their properties. For our main consequence relation, we show that natural versions of the following fail: upwards and downwards Lowenheim-Skolem, axiomatizability, and compactness. We also consider an alternate version for supervaluation semantics, and show both axiomatizability and compactness for the resulting consequence relation.

This piece gives an overview of the supervaluationist theory of vagueness. According to that theory, a sentence is true if and only if it is true on all ways of making it precise. This yields borderline case predications that are neither true nor false, but yet classical logic is preserved almost entirely. The article presents the view and some of its merits and briefly compares it with other theories of vagueness. It raises issues about higher-order vagueness and the definitely operator (...) and about the supervaluationist's accounts of truth and validity. (shrink)

We give a survey on truth theories for applicative theories. It comprises Frege structures, universes for Frege structures, and a theory of supervaluation. We present the proof-theoretic results for these theories and show their syntactical expressive power. In particular, we present as a novelty a syntactical interpretation of ID1 in a applicative truth theory based on supervaluation.

For a very long time truth-value gaps were under a cloud of suspicion because they were considered logically unmanageable. So Frege declared that:“as regards concepts we have a requirement of sharp delimitation; if this were not satisfied it would be impossible to set forth logical laws about them”.Three-valued logic promised to dispel the cloud but in the eyes of many it had promised more than it could deliver. So in response to Reichenbach's plea for a three-valued quantum logic Russell replied:“This (...) is one of a number of questions as to which I am prevented from accepting a certain view by difficulties in carrying it out, but am prepared to alter my opinion if technical skill supplies an answer to my difficulties”.‘By now technical skill has supplied many alternative systems of three-valued logic, but few answers and numerous additional difficulties.’. (shrink)