It is advisable to treat some sorts of discourse about fiction with the aid of an intensional operator "in such-And-Such fiction...." the operator may appear either explicitly or tacitly. It may be analyzed in terms of similarity of worlds, As follows: "in the fiction f, A" means that a is true in those of the worlds where f is told as known fact rather than fiction that differ least from our world, Or from the belief worlds of the community in (...) which the fiction originated. (shrink)

Michael Dummett has attempted to give an account of the semantics of abstract singular terms which steers a middle course between reductionism and full-blown Platonism concerning their references: according to this middle position, reference, in the case of abstract singular terms, becomes "a matter wholly internal to the language." My main aim in this paper is to show that Dummett's arguments are in some considerable tension with more general features of his interpretation of Frege's philosophical semantics, so that given a (...) reiteration of his arguments against the reductionist, the Platonist position seems to be the only available alternative. (shrink)

In this work Dummett discusses, section by section, Frege's masterpiece The Foundations of Arithmetic and Frege's treatment of real numbers in the second volume ...

This highly acclaimed book is a major contribution to the philosophy of language as well as a systematic interpretation of Frege, indisputably the father of ...