Online research in philosophy

In the Begriffschrift Frege drew no distinction—or anyway signalled no importance to the distinction—between quantifying into positions occupied by what he called eigennamen—singular terms—in a sentence and quantification into predicate position or, more generally, quantification into open sentences—into what remains of a sentence when one or more occurrences of singular terms are removed. He seems to have conceived of both alike as perfectly legitimate forms of generalisation, each properly belonging to logic. More accurately: he seems to have conceived of quantification as such as an operation of pure logic, and in effect to have drawn no distinction between first-order, second-order and higherorder quantification in general.

This paper addresses the issue of operationalizing, or quantifying, sustainable development as a practical guideline for day-to-day environmental policy-making. It criticizes attempts at quantifying some environmental utilization space and argues that the uncertainty of scientific knowledge about the unintended environmental repercussions of consumptive choices casts serious doubt about attempts to justify government intervention in non-sustainable lifestyles.

We consider a family U of finite universes. The second order existential quantifier QR. means for each U ϵ U quantifying over a set of n(R)-place relations isomorphic to a given relation. We define a natural partial order on such quantifiers called interpretability. We show that for every QR. either QR is interpretable by quantifying over subsets of U and one to one functions on U both of bounded order, or the logic L(QR) (first order logic plus the quantifier QR) is undecidable.

In Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes, Quine held (a) that the rule of exportation is always admissible, and (b) that there is a significant distinction between a believes-true (Ex)Fx and (Ex) a believes-true F of x. An argument of Hintikka's, also urged by Sleigh, persuaded him that these two intuitions are incompatible; and he consequently repudiated the rule of exportation. Hintikka and Kaplan propose to restrict exportation and quantifying in to favoured contexts — Hintikka to contexts where the believer knows who or what the person or thing in question is; Kaplan to contexts where the believer possesses a vivid name of the person or thing in question. The bulk of this paper is taken up with criticisms of these proposals. Its ultimate purpose, however, is to motivate an alternative approach, which imposes no restrictions on exportation or quantifying in, but repudiates Quine's other intuition: this is the approach taken in my A Logical Form for the Propositional Attitudes.

There are enormous differences between quantifying name-variables only, quantifying verb-variables only, and quantifying both. These differences are found only in the logic of polyadic predication; and this presumably is why Richard Gaskin thinks that they distinguish names from transitive verbs only, and not from verbs generally. But that thought is mistaken: these differences also distinguish names from intransitive verbs. They thus vindicate the common idea that on the difference between names and verbs we may base grandiose metaphysical distinctions, and undermine Gaskin's idea that both names and verbs may be said to designate objects.