This two-volume work, first published in 1843, was John Stuart Mill's first major book. It reinvented the modern study of logic and laid the foundations for his later work in the areas of political economy, women's rights and representative government. In clear, systematic prose, Mill disentangles syllogistic logic from its origins in Aristotle and scholasticism and grounds it instead in processes of inductive reasoning. An important attempt at integrating empiricism within a more general theory of human knowledge, the work constitutes (...) essential reading for anyone seeking a full understanding of Mill's thought. Continuing the discussion of induction, Volume 2 concludes with Book VI, 'On the Logic of the Moral Sciences', in which Mill applies empirical reasoning to human behaviour. A crucial early formulation of his thinking regarding free will and necessity, this book establishes the centrality of 'the social science' to Mill's philosophy. (shrink)

"This book is valuable as expounding in full a theory of meaning that has its roots in the work of Frege and has been of the widest influence.

In arithmetic, if only because many of its methods and concepts originated in India, it has been the tradition to reason less strictly than in geometry, ...

In this investigation into Frege's philosophical views as a whole, the central focus is on his notion of sense, the conception that has proved most influential in the development of analytical philosophy, and around which the main problems of interpretation revolve.

Michael Dummett, following an established line of reasoning, has interpreted Frege as a realist. But his claim that Frege was arguing against a dominant idealism is untenable. While there are passages in Frege's writings that seem to support a realistic interpretation, others are irreconcilable with it. The issue can be resolved only by examining the historical context. Frege's thought is, in fact, related to the philosophy of Hermann Lotze. Frege is best regarded as a transcendental idealist in the Lotze-Kant tradition. (...) His contextual principle is a linguistic version of Kant's principle of the transcendental unity of judgment. By ignoring the historical context Dummett has been led to misinterpret the precise role of the contextual principle in Frege's thought. (shrink)

The Principle of Semantic Compositionality (sometimes called Frege''s Principle) is the principle that the meaning of a (syntactically complex) whole is a function only of the meanings of its (syntactic) parts together with the manner in which these parts were combined. This principle has been extremely influential throughout the history of formal semantics; it has had a tremendous impact upon modern linguistics ever since Montague Grammars became known; and it has more recently shown up as a guiding principle for a (...) certain direction in cognitive science.Despite the fact that The Principle is vague or underspecified at a number of points — such as what meaning is, what counts as a part, what counts as a syntactic complex, what counts as combination — this has not stopped some people from viewing The Principle as obviously true, true almost by definition. And it has not stopped other people from viewing The Principle as false, almost pernicious in its effect. And some of these latter theorists think that it is an empirically false principle while others think of it as a methodologically wrong-headed way to proceed. (shrink)

In this essay I will consider two theses that are associated with Frege,and will investigate the extent to which Frege really believed them.Much of what I have to say will come as no surprise to scholars of thehistorical Frege. But Frege is not only a historical figure; he alsooccupies a site on the philosophical landscape that has allowed hisdoctrines to seep into the subconscious water table. And scholars in a widevariety of different scholarly establishments then sip from thesedoctrines. I believe (...) that some Frege-interested philosophers at various ofthese establishments might find my conclusions surprising.Some of these philosophical establishments have arisen from an educationalmilieu in which Frege is associated with some specific doctrine at theexpense of not even being aware of other milieux where other specificdoctrines are given sole prominence. The two theses which I will discussillustrate this point. Each of them is called Frege''s Principle, but byphilosophers from different milieux. By calling them milieux I do not want to convey the idea that they are each located at some specificsocio-politico-geographico-temporal location. Rather, it is a matter oftheir each being located at different places on the intellectuallandscape. For this reason one might (and I sometimes will) call them(interpretative) traditions. (shrink)

Michael Dummett argued that Frege was a realist while Hans Sluga countered that he was an objective idealist in the rationalist tradition of Kant and Lotze. Sluga ties Frege's idealism to the context principle which he argues Frege never gave up. It is argued that Sluga has correctly interpreted the pre?1891 Frege while Dummett is correct concerning the later period. It is also claimed that the context principle was dropped prior to 1891 to be replaced by the doctrine of unsaturated (...) entities. (shrink)

The basic ideas of game-theoretical semantics are implicit in logicians' and mathematicians' folklore but used only sporadically (e.g., game quantifiers, back-and-forth methods, partly ordered quantifiers). the general suggestions of this approach for natural languages are emphasized: the univocity of "is," the failure of compositionality, a reconstruction of aristotelian categories, limitations of generative grammars, unity of sentence and discourse semantics, a new treatment of tenses and other temporal notions, etc.

We consider two formalisations of the notion of a compositionalsemantics for a language, and find some equivalent statements in termsof substitutions. We prove a theorem stating necessary and sufficientconditions for the existence of a canonical compositional semanticsextending a given partial semantics, after discussing what features onewould want such an extension to have. The theorem involves someassumptions about semantical categories in the spirit of Husserl andTarski.

The paper analyses what is said and what is presupposed by thePrinciple of Compositionality for semantics, as it is commonly stated. ThePrinciple of Compositionality is an axiom which some semantics satisfy andsome don’t. It says essentially that if two expressions have the same meaning then they make the same contribution to the meanings of expressionscontaining them. This is a sensible axiom only if one combines it with aconverse, that if two expressions make the same contribution to the meanings of sentences (...) containing them, then they have the same meaning;and some assumption that two expressions which can’t meaningfully besubstituted for each other have different meanings. as a full abstraction principle, and as ‘Husserl’s principle’.) Moreoverthe Principle of Compositionality speaks only about when two expressionshave the same meaning; it adds nothing whatever about what that meaningmight be . Some recent discussions by writers in linguistics and logic are assessed. The paper finishes by reviewing thehistory of the notion of compositionality. (shrink)

This paper presents an analysis of wh-complements in Montague Grammar. We will be concerned primarily with semantics, though some remarks on syntax are made in Section 4. Questions and wh-comple ments in Montague Grammar have been studied in Hamblin (1976), Bennett (1979), Karttunen (1977) and Hauser (1978) among others. These proposals will not be discussed explicitly, but some differences with Karttunen's analysis will be pointed out along the way.

§ i. After deserting for a time the old Euclidean standards of rigour, mathematics is now returning to them, and even making efforts to go beyond them. ...

Die Grundlagen gehören zu den klassischen Texten der Sprachphilosophie, Logik und Mathematik. Frege stützt sein Programm einer Begründung von Arithmetik und Analysis auf reine Logik, indem er die natürlichen Zahlen als bestimmte Begriffsumfänge definiert. Die philosophische Fundierung des Fregeschen Ansatzes bilden erkenntnistheoretische und sprachphilosophische Analysen und Begriffserklärungen. Studienausgabe aufgrund der textkritisch herausgegebenen Jubiläumsausgabe (Centenarausgabe). Mit Einleitung, Anmerkungen, Literaturverzeichnis und Namenregister.