In the first part of the article the author discusses the use of the word 'fact'. In the second he uses his conclusions to "throw light on some of the discussions of the logical atomists." he discusses austin, Russell, And strawson. The author concludes that it a mistake to identify questions of ontology with questions of language, Which arises because of a confusion with the term 'fact'. (staff).

This volume consists of the first of the John Dewey Lectures delivered under the auspices of Columbia University's Philosophy Department as well as other essays by the author. Intended to clarify the meaning of the philosophical doctrines propounded by Professor Quine in 'Word and Objects', the essays included herein both support and expand those doctrines.

The relationship between formal logic and general philosophy is discussed under headings such as A Re-examination of Our Tense-Logical Postulates, Modal Logic in the Style of Frege, and Intentional Logic and Indeterminism.

Such a thesis is counter to prevailing trends among contemporary philosophers. All that is about to be maintained is that facts may be regarded as entities, i.e. that it is legitimate and tenable so to regard them; this is much less than saying that they must be so regarded, and that anyone who declined to make use of the category of facts would be mistaken. Yet even so weak a thesis will be viewed askance by many; those who concede its (...) meaningfulness and logical possibility will still, a large proportion of them, dismiss it on other grounds-particularly on the ground of superfluity. And precisely one of the reasons why we have selected this particular thesis for defense, is as an occasion to examine the weight and force of Ockham's Razor. (shrink)

This paper is part of a general programme of developing and investigating particular first- order modal theories. In the paper, a modal theory of propositions is constructed under the assumption that there are genuinely singular propositions, ie. ones that contain individuals as constituents. Various results on decidability, axiomatizability and definability are established.