It is a commonplace that in the development of modern logic towards its actual shape at least two directions or traditions have to be distinguished. These traditions may be called, following the mo...

The so-called New Theory of Reference (Marcus, Kripke etc.) is inspired by the insight that in modal and intensional contexts quantifiers presuppose nondescriptive unanalyzable identity criteria which do not reduce to any descriptive conditions. From this valid insight the New Theorists fallaciously move to the idea that free singular terms can exhibit a built-in direct reference and that there is even a special class of singular terms (proper names) necessarily exhibiting direct reference. This fallacious move has been encouraged by a (...) mistaken belief in the substitutional interpretation of quantifiers, by the myth of thede re reference, and a mistaken assimilation of direct reference to ostensive (perspectival) identification. Thede dicto vs.de re contrast does not involve direct reference, being merely a matter of rule-ordering (scope).The New Theorists' thesis of the necessity of identities of directly referred-to individuals is a consequence of an unmotivated and arbitrary restriction they tacitly impose on the identification of individuals. (shrink)

The syntax of Frege's scientific language is commonly taken to be characterized by two oddities: the representation of the intended illocutionary role of sentences by a special sign, the judgement-stroke, and the treatment of sentences as a species of singular terms. In this paper, an alternative view is defended. The main theses are: the syntax of Frege's scientific language aims at an explication of the logical form of judgements; the judgement-stroke is, therefore, a truth-operator, not a pragmatic operator; in Frege's (...) first system, '⊦ Δ' expresses that the circumstance Δ is a fact, and in his second system that the truth-value - Δ is the True; in both systems, the judgement-stroke is construed as a sign sui generis, not as a genuine predicate; its counterpart in natural language is the syntactic "form of assertoric sentences", not the truth-predicate; neither in Frege's first nor in his second system sentences are treated as singular terms. (shrink)