P. T. Geach, notoriously, holds the Relative Identity Thesis, according to which a meaningful judgment of identity is always, implicitly or explicitly, relative to some general term. ‘The same’ is a fragmentary expression, and has no significance unless we say or mean ‘the same X’, where ‘X’ represents a general term (what Frege calls a Begriffswort or Begriffsausdruck). (P. T. Geach, Mental Acts (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), p. 69. I maintain that it makes no sense to judge whether (...) things are ‘the same’, or remain ‘the same’, unless we add or understand some general term - ‘the same F’. (P. T. Geach, Reference and Generality, third Edition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 63f. I am arguing for the thesis that identity is relative. When one says ‘x is identical with y’, this, I hold, is an incomplete expression; it is short for ‘x is the same A as y’, where ‘A’ represents some count noun understood from the context of utterance - or else, it is just a vague expression of a half-formed thought. (P. T. Geach, ‘Identity,’ Review of Metaphysics 21 (1967-8), p. 3.) One of the ways Geach seeks to support this is by tying it to the well nigh universally admired Fregean thesis about cardinality. (shrink)

Contemporary expressivists typically deny that all true judgments must represent reality. Many instead adopt truth minimalism, according to which there is no substantive property of judgments in virtue of which they are true. In this article, I suggest that expressivists would be better suited to adopt truth pluralism, or the view that there is more than one substantive property of judgments in virtue of which judgments are true. My point is not that an expressivism that takes this form is true, (...) but that it more readily accommodates the motivations that typically lead expressivists to their view in the first place. (shrink)

This collection of essays is the definitive version of a widely discussed debate over the origins of the New Theory of Reference. In new articles, written especially for this volume, Quentin Smith and Scott Soames, the original participants in the debate, elaborate their positions on who was responsible for the ideas that Saul Kripke presented in his Naming and Necessity. They are joined by John Burgess, who weighs in on the side of Soames, while Smith adds a further dimension in (...) discussing the contributions of philosophers such as Follesdal, Geach, Hintikka, and Plantinga. Also included are lengthy excerpts from Follesdal's 1961 Harvard dissertation and a careful examination by Sten Lindstrom of the respective contributions of Kripke and Stig Kanger to the development of modal semantics. The collection will be essential reading for anyone acquainted with these influential ideas. (shrink)

The emphasis in this collection is clearly on logic, and this is one reason why it lacks the overall diversity and richness of the 1960 Stanford volume. However, the eight sections do contain much interesting material; in the mathematical logic section Kochen and Specker continue their study of logics appropriate for quantum theory, Vaught presents several new results about the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem, and Büchi studies second-order ordinal theory from the viewpoint of automata theory; the section on foundations of mathematical theories (...) contains papers on higher-order logic by Kaplan and Montague, model theory and ultra-products by Keisler, definability in set theory by Lévy. The topic of the justification of formal theories was the essential topic of the philosophy of logic section: an especially interesting paper is that of A. Robinson in which the present state of Hilbertean Formalism is analyzed, and in which the notion of potential truth is formalized. The section on the philosophy of science contains a single paper, by Hesse, on metaphor and explanation; Braithwaite, Hintikka, Jeffrey, and Kyburg contribute to a lively section on probability and induction; the section on methodology in physical science takes as topics the theory of relativity, causality, and irreversibility. The last two sections, on the philosophy of the life sciences, and on history of logic and philosophy of science, contain, respectively, papers by Davidson and Suppes on meaning and concept formation, and essays by Church and Geach on existential import historically considered and intentionality among the medievals. The collection would have been better if more of the contributed papers had been included.—P. J. M. (shrink)

G. FREGE, Collected papers on mathematics, logic, and philosophy. Edited by B. McGuinness. Translated by M. Black, V. H. Dudman, P. Geach, H. Kaal, E.-H. W. Kluge, B. McGuinness and R. H. Stoothoff. Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1984. viii + 412pp. £28.50.

REASON AND ARGUMENT by P. T. Geach. Blackwell, 1977. xi + 99 pp. £4 cloth, £ 1.75 paper.