This group of sentences is used by Quine in a well-known attack on quantified modal logic and the possibility of meaningful modalized predication. Modalized predication would involve specifying some object, and asserting of it that necessarily or possibly it has some given property φ. If this can be done sensibly, then the modal context ‘necessarily φx’ can be quantified into, and conversely. So modalized predication and quantifying into modal contexts are bound up together. Quine thinks that neither is very sensible, (...) and says of sentence. (shrink)

By a `denoting phrase' I mean a phrase such as any one of the following: a man, some man, any man, every man, all men, the present King of England, the present King of France, the center of mass of the solar system at the first instant of the twentieth century, the revolution of the earth round the sun, the revolution of the sun round the earth. Thus a phrase is denoting solely in virtue of its form. We may distinguish (...) three cases: (1) A phrase may be denoting, and yet not denote anything; e.g., `the present King of France'. (2) A phrase may denote one definite object; e.g., `the present King of England' denotes a certain man. (3) A phrase may denote ambiguously; e.g. `a man' denotes not many men, but an ambiguous man. The interpretation of such phrases is a matter of considerably difficulty; indeed, it is very hard to frame any theory not susceptible of formal refutation. All the difficulties with which I am acquainted are met, so far as I can discover, by the theory which I am about to explain. (shrink)

What is the nature of, and what is the relationship between, external objects and our visual perceptual experience of them? In this book, Frank Jackson defends the answers provided by the traditional Representative theory of perception. He argues, among other things that we are never immediately aware of external objects, that they are the causes of our perceptual experiences and that they have only the primary qualities. In the course of the argument, sense data and the distinction between mediate and (...) immediate perception receive detailed defences and the author criticises attempts to reduce perceiving the believing and to show that the Representative theory makes the external world unknowable. Jackson recognises that his views are unfashionable but argues in detail that they are to be preferred to their currently favoured competitors. It will become an obvious point of reference for all future work on the philosophy of perception. (shrink)

The papers collected in this volume were written over a period of some eight or nine years, with some still earlier material incorporated in one of them. Publishing them under the same cover does not make a con tinuous book of them. The papers are thematically connected with each other, however, in a way which has led me to think that they can naturally be grouped together. In any list of philosophically important concepts, those falling within the range of application (...) of modal logic will rank high in interest. They include necessity, possibility, obligation, permission, knowledge, belief, perception, memory, hoping, and striving, to mention just a few of the more obvious ones. When a satisfactory semantics (in the sense of Tarski and Carnap) was first developed for modal logic, a fascinating new set of methods and ideas was thus made available for philosophical studies. The pioneers of this model theory of modality include prominently Stig Kanger and Saul Kripke. Several others were working in the same area independently and more or less concurrently. Some of the older papers in this collection, especially 'Quantification and Modality' and 'Modes of Modality', serve to clarify some of the main possibilities in the semantics of modal logics in general. (shrink)

The thoughts of three philosophers on three topics: meaning, causality, and objectivity, are the focus of this study.

Formalized physical theories are not, as a rule, stated in intensional languages. Yet in talking about them we often treat them as if they were. We say for instance: 'Consider what would happen if instead of p's being true q were. In such a case r would be likely.' If we say this sort of thing, p, q and r appear to stand for the meanings of sentences of the theory, but meanings in some intensional sense. Now it is very (...) easy to extend the syntax of the formal theory by adding all sorts of intensional operators, e.g. a modal operator; and it is possible to extend the semantics by adding a set of possible worlds and evaluating the modal formulae in the usual way. But this procedure is open to the criticism that we are extending the theory by adding something which is not already there. In particular the criticism will be that the possible worlds required by the semantics seem to have no connection with the intended interpretations of the original physical theory. The aim of this paper is to shew how a set of possible worlds is already implicit in the intended interpretations of a formally presented physical theory and that these interpretations induce, in a comparatively direct way, an intensional semantics which corresponds to the original one. (shrink)