Signification, closure and indirect speech reports
Abstract
Bradwardine’s solution to the the logical paradoxes depends on the idea that every sentence signifies many things, and its truth depends on things’ being wholly as it signifies. This idea is underpinned by his claim that a sentence signifies everything that follows from what it signifies. But the idea that signification is closed under entailment appears too strong, just as logical omniscience is unacceptable in the logic of knowledge. What is needed is a more restricted closure principle. A clue can be found in speech act pluralism, whereby indirect speech reports are closed under intersubstitutivity of co-referential terms. The conclusion is that solving the semantic paradoxes does not require revision of logic, thus saving logic from paradox.
Citation
Read , S 2015 , ' Signification, closure and indirect speech reports ' , Logica Universalis , vol. 9 , no. 2 , pp. 237-251 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s11787-014-0115-3
Publication
Logica Universalis
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1661-8297Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright 2015 Springer Basel. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11787-014-0115-3
Description
Date of Acceptance: 30/09/2014Collections
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