We offer a defense of one aspect of Paul Horwich’s response to the Liar paradox—more specifically, of his move to preserve classical logic. Horwich’s response requires that the full intersubstitutivity of ‘ ‘A’ is true’ and A be abandoned. It is thus open to the objection, due to Hartry Field, that it undermines the generalization function of truth. We defend Horwich’s move by isolating the grade of intersubstitutivity required by the generalization function and by providing a new reading of the (...) biconditionals of the form “ ‘A’ is true iff A.”. (shrink)

Atomists explain properties of wholes as compositions of properties of their parts; in particular properties of complex expressions as composed of properties of their parts. Especially, semantic atomists explain meanings of complex expressions as composed of meanings of their parts. Holists deny themselves this way: they insist that at least in some cases properties of wholes are more basic than, or not reducible to, properties of their parts; in particular, semantic holists claim that meanings of (at least some) wholes are (...) more basic than meanings of parts. Now as atomists have composition as the way of getting themselves from the meanings of parts to the meanings of wholes, holists need something to get them from the meanings of wholes to those of their parts. What is usually invoked in this context is the concept of intersubstitutivity, which is, however, not always wholly clear. (shrink)

The classification of grammars that became known as the Chomsky hierarchy was an exploration of what kinds of regularities could arise from grammars that had various conditions imposed on their structure. Intersubstitutability is closely related to the way different levels on the Chomsky hierarchy correspond to different kinds of memory. This chapter deals with the general concept of a string‐rewriting grammar, which provides the setting in which the Chomsky hierarchy can be formulated. An unrestricted rewriting grammar works with a (...) specified set of nonterminal symbols, and specified set of terminal symbols. From the very outset there were doubts about about whether context‐free grammars (CFGs) could form the basis of a theory of natural language syntax. The grammar's rewrite rules correspond to the automaton's transitions. Chomsky argued that even if the generative capacity of CFGs turned out to be sufficient for English, the resulting grammars would be unreasonably complex. (shrink)

El principio de sustituibilidad de los idénticos salva veritate constituye una pieza de importancia central para la teoría leibniziana de la demostración, para no hablar de sus implicancias ontológicas. Sin embargo, ha recibido la crítica de que encierra una confusión entre uso y mención. No obstante, el presente trabajo defiende la tesis de que el principio no está afectado por esa supuesta confusión, utilizando para ello la distinción leibniziana entre “la consideración del modo de concebir” y la “consideración de la (...) cosa misma”. No obstante, la introducción de dicha distinción viene aparejada con la necesidad establecer restricciones en la aplicación del mencionado principio. (shrink)

This paper presents and defends a way to add a transparent truth predicate to classical logic, such that and A are everywhere intersubstitutable, where all T-biconditionals hold, and where truth can be made compositional. A key feature of our framework, called STTT (for Strict-Tolerant Transparent Truth), is that it supports a non-transitive relation of consequence. At the same time, it can be seen that the only failures of transitivity STTT allows for arise in paradoxical cases.

The standard view of "believes" and other propositional attitude verbs is that such verbs express relations between agents and propositions. A sentence of the form “S believes that p” is true just in case S stands in the belief-relation to the proposition that p; this proposition is the referent of the complement clause "that p." On this view, we would expect the clausal complements of propositional attitude verbs to be freely intersubstitutable with their corresponding proposition descriptions—e.g., "the proposition that p"—as (...) they are in the case of "believes." In many cases, however, intersubstitution of that-clauses and proposition descriptions fails to preserve truth value or even grammaticality. These substitution failures lead some philosophers to reject the standard view of propositional attitude reports. Others conclude that propositional attitude verbs are systematically ambiguous. I reject both these views. On my view, the that-clause complements of propositional attitude verbs denote propositions, but proposition descriptions do not. (shrink)

Some contemporary Russellians, defenders of the view that the semantic content of a proper name, demonstrative or indexical is simply its referent, are prepared to accept that view’s most infamous apparent consequence: that coreferential names, demonstratives, indexicals, etc. are intersubstitutable salva veritate, even in intentional contexts. Nathan Salmon and Scott Soames argue that our recalcitrant intuitions with respect to the famous apparent counterexamples are not semantic intuitions, but rather pragmatic intuitions. Strictly and literally speaking, Lois Lane believes, and even knows (...) that Clark Kent is identical to Superman, since she believes and knows that Superman is identical to Superman. Salmon and Soames attempt to soften our reaction to this shocker by allowing that it is typically misleading to utter the sentence ‘Lois Lane knows that Clark Kent is identical to Superman’, since it pragmatically implicates, without semantically entailing, that Lois Lane would accept the sentence ‘Clark Kent is identical to Superman’. Our compulsive tendency to claim that ‘Lois Lane knows that Clark Kent is Superman’ is false, rather than merely misleading, is due to a confusion between semantics and pragmatics, between truth conditions and conditions of appropriateness of utterance.1 It is probably fair to say that the common reaction to this move in defense of Russellianism is negative. Mark Richard says the following. (shrink)

The paper offers a solution to the semantic paradoxes, one in which (1) we keep the unrestricted truth schema “True(A)↔A”, and (2) the object language can include its own metalanguage. Because of the first feature, classical logic must be restricted, but full classical reasoning applies in “ordinary” contexts, including standard set theory. The more general logic that replaces classical logic includes a principle of substitutivity of equivalents, which with the truth schema leads to the general intersubstitutivity of True(A) with A (...) within the language.The logic is also shown to have the resources required to represent the way in which sentences (like the Liar sentence and the Curry sentence) that lead to paradox in classical logic are “defective”. We can in fact define a hierarchy of “defectiveness” predicates within the language. Contrary to claims that any solution to the paradoxes just breeds further paradoxes (“revenge problems”) involving defectiveness predicates, there is a general consistency/conservativeness proof that shows that talk of truth and the various “levels of defectiveness” can all be made coherent together within a single object language. (shrink)

A lengthy debate in the philosophy of the cognitive sciences has turned on whether the phenomenon known as ‘systematicity’ of language and thought shows that connectionist explanatory aspirations are misguided. We investigate the issue of just which phenomenon ‘systematicity’ is supposed to be. The much-rehearsed examples always suggest that being systematic has something to do with ways in which some parts of expressions in natural languages (and, more conjecturally, some parts of thoughts) can be substituted for others without altering well-formedness. (...) We show that under one construal this yields a grossly weak claim that is not just compatible with a narrow version of associationist psychology but essentially coincides with a formalization of its descriptive power. Under another construal we get a claim (apparently unintended) that requires natural languages to fall within the context-free class, a claim that most linguists regard as too strong. Looking more closely at this proposed reconstruction of systematicity leads us to endorse, with further illustrations, the suggestion of Johnson (2004) that systematicity as a matter of substitutability of co-categorial constituents for one another does not appearto hold of natural languages at all. The appeal of the ill-delineated notion of systematicity may lie in the fact that within certain subclasses of lexical items mutual intersubstitutability does seem to hold, and theexplanation for that lies in a limitation on human memory: we simply cannot learn separate privileges of syntactic distribution for all of the huge number of words and phrases that we know. (shrink)

A new kind of defense of the Millian theory of names is given, which explains intuitive counter-examples as depending on pragmatic effects of the relevant sentences, by direct application of Grice’s and Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory and uncontroversial assumptions. I begin by arguing that synonyms are always intersubstitutable, despite Mates’ considerations, and then apply the method to names. Then, a fairly large sample of cases concerning names are dealt with in related ways. It is argued that the method, as (...) applied to the various cases, satisfies the criterion of success: that for every sentence in context, it is a counter-example to Millianism to the extent that it has pragmatic effects (matching speakers’ intuitions). (shrink)

I here develop a specific version of the deflationary theory of truth. I adopt a terminology on which deflationism holds that an exhaustive account of truth is given by the equivalence between truth-ascriptions and de-nominalised (or disquoted) sentences. An adequate truth-theory, it is argued, must be finite, non-circular, and give a unified account of all occurrences of “true”. I also argue that it must descriptively capture the ordinary meaning of “true”, which is plausibly taken to be unambiguous. Ch. 2 is (...) a critical historical survey of deflationary theories, where notably disquotationalism is found untenable as a descriptive theory of “true”. In Ch. 3, I aim to show that deflationism cannot be finitely and non-circularly formulated by using “true”, and so must only mention it. Hence, it must be a theory specifically about the word “true” (and its foreign counterparts). To capture the ordinary notion, the theory must thus be an empirical, use-theoretic, semantic account of “true”. The task of explaining facts about truth now becomes that of showing that various sentences containing “true” are (unconditionally) assertible. In Ch. 4, I defend the claim (D) that every sentence of the form “That p is true” and the corresponding “p” are intersubstitutable (in a use-theoretic sense), and show how this claim provides a unified and simple account of a wide variety of occurrences of “true”. Disquotationalism then only has the advantage of avoiding propositions. But in Ch. 5, I note that (D) is not committed to propositions. Use-theoretic semantics is then argued to serve nominalism better than truth-theoretic ditto. In particular, it can avoid propositions while sustaining a natural syntactic treatment of “that”-clauses as singular terms and of “Everything he says is true”, as any other quantification. Finally, Horwich’s problem of deriving universal truth-claims is given a solution by recourse to an assertibilist semantics of the universal quantifier. (shrink)

The main purpose of this paper is to propose and defend anew definition of synonymy. Roughly (and slightly misleadingly), theidea is that two expressions are synonymous iff intersubstitutions insentences preserve the degree of doxastic revisability. In Section 1 Iargue that Quine''s attacks on analyticity leave room for such adefinition. The definition is presented in Section 2, and Section 3elaborates on the concept of revisability. The definition is defendedin Sections 4 and 5. It is, inter alia, shown that the definition hasdesired (...) formal properties. In Sections 6 and 7 I briefly comment on,first, the relation of the definition to Quine''s later ideas about (stimulus)synonymy, and, second, its relation to a general, interlinguistic, conceptof meaning. (shrink)

The Reference Principle states that co-referring expressions are everywhere intersubstitutable salva congruitate. On first glance, looks like a truism, but a truism with some bite: transforms difficult philosophical questions about co-reference into easy grammatical questions about substitutability. This has led a number of philosophers to think that we can use to make short work of certain longstanding metaphysical debates. For example, it has been suggested that all we need to do to show that the predicate ‘ is a horse’ does (...) not refer to a property is point out that ‘ is a horse’ and ‘the property of being a horse’ are not everywhere intersubstitutable salva congruitate. However, when we understand ‘substitution’ in the simplest and most straightforward way, is no truism; in fact, natural languages are full of counterexamples to the principle. In this paper, I introduce a new notion of substitution, and then develop and argue for a version of that is immune to these counterexamples. Along the way I touch on the following topics: the relation between argument forms and their natural language instances; the reification of sense; the difference between terms and predicates; and the relation between reference and disquotation. I end by arguing that my new version of cannot be used to settle metaphysical debates quite as easily as some philosophers would like. (shrink)

The semantic puzzles posed by propositional attitude contexts have, since Frege, been understood primarily in terms of certain substitution puzzles. We will take as paradigmatic of such substitution puzzles cases in which two coreferential proper names cannot be intersubstituted salva veritate in the context of an attitude verb. Thus, for example, the following sentences differ in truth value: (1) Lois Lane believes Superman can fly. (2) Lois Lane believes Clark Kent can fly. despite the fact that "Superman" and "Clark Kent" (...) pick out the same individual.1 Equivalently, the following sentence may be true: (3) Lois Lane believes that Superman can fly, but that Clark Kent cannot fly. despite the coreferentiality of the names. (It will at times be convenient to appeal to this conjunctive attitude report in order to fix a single context of utterance.) Substitution failures such as these create a puzzle when conjoined with the assumptions (a) that attitude reports report a binary relation between an individual and some object of that individual's attitude and (b) that that object of the attitude is determined by the content of the complement sentence in the attitude report. If all of the terms in two complement sentences (e.g., "Superman can fly" and "Clark Kent can fly") have the same semantic content, then, prima facie, they ought to generate the same object of believe and, a fortiori, materially equivalent attitude reports. Frege, famously, attempts to defuse the puzzle by positing a semantic value of sense in addition to that of reference, and thereby distinguishing the semantic contents of the two complement sentences. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive primer for the study of intensionality. It explores and assesses those key theories of intensionality which have been developed in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Each of the examined theories is tested as to whether it can account for the problems associated with the intersubstitution salva veritate of co-extensional expressions, and existential generalisation. All of these theories are subsequently compared so as to determine which of them comes closest to successfully solving these problems. The (...) book examines four kinds of intensionalist approaches: the Fregean approach ; the possible-worlds approaches of Carnap, Montague and Cresswell; the theory of properties relations and propositions devised by Bealer; and the Meinongian approaches put forward by Zalta and Priest. The book also proposes an alternative to intensionalism: sententialism. Sententialists argue that the problems of intensionality could be solved by appealing to linguistic items rather than intensional entities. Drawing on the works of Quine, Davidson, Scheffler and R. M. Martin, it explores the viability and value of sententialism as an alternative to intensionalism. (shrink)

The Substitution Anomaly is the failure of intuitively coreferential expressions of the corresponding forms “that S” and “the proposition that S” to be intersubstitutable salva veritate under certain ‘selective’ attitudinal verbs that grammatically accept both sorts of terms as complements. The Substitution Anomaly poses a direct threat to the basic assumptions of Millianism, which predict the interchangeability of “that S” and “the proposition that S”. Jeffrey King has argued persuasively that the most plausible Millian solution is to treat the selective (...) attitudinal verbs as lexically ambiguous , having distinct meanings associated with the different sorts of complement terms. In opposition this approach, I argue that there are independent reasons for maintaining the univocality of these verbs and that this can be done while accommodating the Substitution Anomaly and without sacrificing the transparency of the relevant attitude ascriptions. In particular, I show how, by employing an extended version of Edward Zalta’s system of intensional logic for abstract objects, one can construct for a regimented fragment ℜ of English containing the relevant vocabulary a semantical theory ℑ which (a) treats ℜ’s selective attitudinal verbs as univocal, (b) regards genuine terms as occurring transparently under such verbs in sentences of ℜ, and yet (c) predicts the occurrence of the Substitution Anomaly in ℜ. (shrink)

The paper shows how we can add a truth predicate to arithmetic (or formalized syntactic theory), and keep the usual truth schema Tr( ) ↔ A (understood as the conjunction of Tr( ) → A and A → Tr( )). We also keep the full intersubstitutivity of Tr(>A>)) with A in all contexts, even inside of an →. Keeping these things requires a weakening of classical logic; I suggest a logic based on the strong Kleene truth tables, but with → (...) as an additional connective, and where the effect of classical logic is preserved in the arithmetic or formal syntax itself. Section 1 is an introduction to the problem and some of the difficulties that must be faced, in particular as to the logic of the →; Section 2 gives a construction of an arithmetically standard model of a truth theory; Section 3 investigates the logical laws that result from this; and Section 4 provides some philosophical commentary. (shrink)

This paper provides a new solution to the concept horse paradox. Frege argued no name co-refers with a predicate because no name can be inter-substituted with a predicate. This led Frege to embrace the paradox of the concept horse. But Frege got it wrong because predicates are impurely referring expressions and we shouldn’t expect impurely referring expressions to be intersubstitutable even if they co-refer, because the contexts in which they occur are sensitive to the extra information they carry about their (...) referents. (shrink)

On the basis of arguments put forth by (Kripke, 1977a) and (Kripke, 1980), it is widely held that one can sometimes rationally accept propositions of the form "P and not-P" and also that there are necessary a posteriori truths. We will find that Kripke's arguments for these views appear probative only so long as one fails to distinguish between semantics and presemantics—between the literal meanings of sentences, on the one hand, and the information on the basis of which one identifies (...) those literal meanings, on the other. This same failure, it will be argued, underlies the popular thesis that intersubstituting co-referring terms sometimes turns true sentences into false ones and vice versa. Though seemingly plausible, this thesis has a number of counterintuitive consequences, among them that the occurrence of “snow” in “it is true that snow is white” doesn’t refer to snow. An understanding of the distinction between semantics and presemantics suggests a way to develop a semantic system that doesn’t have these consequences and that, moreover, reconciles our intuitions concerning cognitive content with some powerfully argued theses of contemporary philosophy of language. Some of this paper's main contentions are anticipated by Andrzej Boguslawski in his 1994 paper “Sentential Complementation and Truth.”. (shrink)

Frege held that singular terms can refer only to objects, not to concepts. I argue that the counter-intuitive consequences of this claim ('the concept paradox') arise from Frege's mirroring principle that an incomplete expression can only express an incomplete sense and stand for an incomplete reference. This is not, as is sometimes thought, merely because predicates and singular terms cannot be intersubstituted salva veritate ( congruitate ). The concept paradox, properly understood, poses therefore a different, harder, challenge. An investigation of (...) the foundations of the mirroring principle also sheds light on the role which language plays in Frege's epistemology of logic. (shrink)

Many debates in philosophy of language are driven by examples in which two expressions have the same meaning, in some sense, yet fail of intersubstitutability in some of their occurrences. The usual move in response is to postulate a kind of meaning different from that which is shared by those two expressions. I argue that that the resulting semantic theories nevertheless typically cannot explain such failures: the explaining is not done entirely by the postulation and individuation of the new (...) meanings. It is done partly by accompanying metaphysical and epistemological claims about them. Making this clear requires distinguishing between intersubstitutability salva veritate and intersubstitutability on grounds of logical form, and getting straight on what kinds of facts secure the obtaining of each. (shrink)

An intensional sentential context is one where such intersubstitutivity fails: It is informative that A It is known that A It is necessary that A The fact that A caused it to be that B Some authors characterise intensional contexts by the failure of the intersubstitution of co-referring terms. Such a characterisation is problematic.

It is a remarkable fact about the early history of the analytic tradition that its three most important protagonists all held, at least during significant intervals of their respective careers, that there are entities that cannot be named. This shared commitment on the part of Frege, Russell and the early Wittgenstein is the topic of this thesis. I first clarify the particular form this commitment takes in the work of these three authors. I also illustrate a distinctive cluster of philosophical (...) difficulties attending the view that there are unnameable entities, and explore the relationship between unnameability and inexpressibility. I then investigate what grounds there are for countenancing the unnameable, focussing in particular on the thesis that concepts cannot be named. I give a detailed hearing to four arguments for the unnameability of concepts discernible in, or suggested by, early analytic writings. The first and second arguments (chapters 3 and 4) are distinguishable in the locus classicus, Frege's 'On Concept and Object'. The first concerns the relationship between co-reference and intersubstitutability; the second concerns the unity of thought. The third argument (chapter 4) appeals to the alleged impossibility of expressing identities between objects and concepts, while the fourth (chapter 5) draws on considerations pertaining to diagonalization and Russell's paradox. I make the case that all four arguments fail to provide grounds for accepting the unnameable, contending that each argument can and should be resisted in defence of singular reference to concepts. In doing so I develop a novel defence of the view that absolutely any entity can be referred to with a singular term. (shrink)

In 'A Puzzle about Belief' Saul Kripke appeals to a principle of disquotation that allows us to infer a person's beliefs from the sentences to which she assents (in certain conditions). Kripke relies on this principle in constructing some famous puzzle cases, which he uses to defend the Millian view that the sole semantic function of a proper name is to refer to its bearer. The examples are meant to undermine the anti-Millian objection, grounded in traditional Frege-cases, that truth-value is (...) not always maintained when co-referential names are intersubstituted in belief reports. I argue here that our disquotational practice is sensitive to certain shifts in conversational context, and it is only if we overlook these shifts - if we 'misdisquote' - that we can draw the conclusions Kripke wants to draw from his examples. In the wake of this conclusion, I provide a 'contextualist' treatment of Kripke's puzzle cases. I show how this treatment is motivated by certain norms of rationality, and I defend these norms against an intriguing 'anti-Cartesian' theory of mind. Throughout the paper, I develop the larger implications that my treatment of Kripke's argument has for the semantic theory of names and belief reports, and, more generally, for our picture of the relation between linguistic behaviour and our states of mind. (shrink)

It is commonly held that the ascription of truth to a sentence is intersubstitutable with that very sentence. However, the simplest subclassical logics available to proponents of this view, namely K3 and LP, are hopelessly weak for many purposes. In this article, I argue that this is much more of a problem for proponents of LP than for proponents of K3. The strategies for recapturing classicality offered by proponents of LP are far less promising than those available to proponents of (...) K3. This undermines the ability of proponents LP to engage in public reasoning in classical domains. (shrink)

Although the word 'sustainability' is used broadly, scientific approaches to sustainability fall into one of two competing paradigms. Following the influential Brundtland report of 1987. some theorists identify sustainability with some form of resource availability, and develop indicators for sustainability that stress capital depletion. This approach has spawned debates about the intersubstitutivity of capitals, with many environmental theorists arguing that at some point, depletion of natural capital cannot be offset by increases in human or social capital. The alternative approach is (...) grounded in stock and flow systems systems modeling, and defines sustainability through indicators that determine whether the system structure is robust (e.g. resists perturbation), resilient (recovers after disruption) and adaptive (capable of change in response to external conditions). Both paradigms have applications in economics and ecology. (shrink)

This paper argues that "that"-clauses do not reference propositions because they are not intersubstitutible with other expressions that do reference propositions. In particular, "that"-clauses are shown to not be intersubstitutible with propositional anaphors like "so." The substitution failures are further argued to support a semantics on which "that"-clauses are predicates.

According to a Millian theory of names, co-referring names are intersubstitutable salva veritate in all contexts, including the that-clauses of belief reports. This leads the Millian to famously argue, among other things, that if Lois Lane believes that Superman can fly then she also believes that Clark Kent can fly. Although the Millian provides an ingenious account that explains our strong anti-substitution intuitions in such cases, this paper argues that the Millian account leads to a new problem of enlightenment in (...) identity reports. Specifically, a believer A may come to discover that two names refer to the same individual S, but whether A is enlightened about the identity of S will depend on the number of guises through which A holds contradictory beliefs about S. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

There are two major semantic theories of proper names: Semantic Descriptivism and Direct Reference. According to Semantic Descriptivism, the semantic content of a proper name N for a speaker S is identical to the semantic content of a definite description “the F” that the speaker associates with the name. According to Direct Reference, the semantic content of a proper name is identical to its referent. As is well known, Semantic Descriptivism suffers from a number of drawbacks first pointed out by (...) Donnellan (1970) and Kripke (1972).1 The first difficulty is semantic: in many cases, the definite description that S associates with N (if it denotes) denotes an entity other than the referent of N. The second difficulty is epistemic: in many cases, contrary to what Semantic Descriptivism predicts, an utterance of “N=the F” does not semantically express a proposition that is knowable a priori. And the third difficulty is modal: although Semantic Descriptivism entails that the proposition semantically expressed by an utterance of “N=the F” is metaphysically necessary, in many cases the relevant proposition is actually metaphysically contingent. Direct Reference faces three main difficulties of its own. First, there is the problem of cognitive significance (or, as it has come to be known, Frege’s Puzzle): if the content of a proper name is its referent, then different proper names have the same content, and hence utterances of “N=M” and “N=N” semantically express the same proposition; yet these two utterances differ in cognitive significance, and it would seem 1 that utterances semantically expressing the same proposition should not differ in cognitive significance. Second, there is the problem of substitution: if the content of a proper name is its referent, then co-referential proper names should be intersubstitutable in propositional attitude contexts salva veritate; yet linguistic intuitions suggest that substitution of co-referential proper names in such contexts often fails to preserve truthvalue.. (shrink)

Two readings of the much-discussed περιτροπή argument of "Theaetetus" 170c-171c have dominated the literature. One I call "the relativity reading". On this reading, the argument fails by ignoratio elenchi because it "carelessly" omits "the qualifications 'true for so-and-so' which [Protagoras'] theory insists on" (Bostock 1988: 90). The other reading I call "the many-worlds interpretation". On this view, Plato's argument succeeds in showing that "Protagoras' position becomes utterly self-contradictory" because "he claims that everyone lives in his own relativistic world, yet at (...) the same time he is forced by that very claim to admit that no one does" (Burnyeat 1976b: 48). I discuss and criticise both readings, and present a third, according to which the point of the argument is, very roughly, that Protagoras is committed to equating truth and truth-for, and so, further, to their intersubstitutability. This further commitment proves fatal to his argument. (shrink)

Referentialism is the view that all there is to the meaning of a singular term is its referent. Referentialism entails Substitutivity, i.e., that co-referring terms are intersubstitutable salva veritate . Frege's Paradox shows that Referentialism is inconsistent given two principles: Disquotation says that if S assents to 'P', then S believes that P, and Consistency says that if S believes that P and that not-P, then S is not fully rational. Kripke's strategy was to save Substitutivity by showing that those (...) intuitively plausible principles already led to paradox. I argue that this generalising strategy fails. The Descriptivist, who thinks that a singular term has descriptive meaning, will reject Substitutivity in Frege's Paradox, and deny that Consistency finds application in Kripke's Paradox. The Referentialist, however, may reject Consistency: if the logical properties of the contents of S's beliefs are not reflectively accessible, then S can hold contradictory beliefs without being irrational. Even if successful against Frege's and Kripke's Paradox, this response is ineffective against a strengthened version of the former which rests on Disquotation and Substitutivity, and a strengthened version of the latter which rests only on Disquotation. (shrink)

1. What's in a Name?Can philosophy of language do without the concept of intentionality? To approach this important question it may be useful to begin with the minimal explanatory requirements for a theory of reference that tries to explain the naming of objects as the simplest linguistic act. The limitations of trying to understand meaning without intentionality are therefore best illustrated by considering what is generally acknowledged to be the most thorough-going attempt to dispense altogether with intentional concepts in Frege's (...) reputedly purely extensionalist semantics of proper names. I shall argue that despite his avowed anti-psychologism, Frege paradoxically needs to include psychological elements alongside his famous distinction between sense and reference in order to preserve the universal intersubstitutability of singular referring expressions salva veritate as an adequate extensional criterion of coreferentiality. In so doing, a revisionary Fregean semantics introduces the first instalment of intentionality at the foundations of naming, by which intentionality pervades the philosophy of language. (shrink)

In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus the identity signal is excluded from any meaningful language use, because expressions such as “a = a” and “a = b” cannot be elementary and necessary propositions at the same time. Hence, the identity is used as a operation. That use does not intended to be be meaningful, but only to indicate the intersubstitutable nature of the signs involved.

There are obvious differences between (1) Mary is talking to the Dean and (2) Mary is looking for the Dean. In (1) we can replace "the Dean" by any other coextensional term and preserve truth value; also, from (1) we can infer that there is someone Mary is talking to. Such behavior breaks down in (2): neither intersubstitution of coextensional terms nor existential generalization guarantee preservation of truth value in a sentence like (2). (1) is purely extensional; (2) is intensional.

In mathematical languages and in predicate logic coreferential terms can be interchanged in any sentence without altering the truth value of that sentence. Replacing 3 + 5 by 12 − 4 in any formula of arithmetic will never lead from truth to falsity or from falsity to truth. But natural languages are different in this respect. While in some contexts it is always allowed to interchange coreferential terms, other contexts do not admit this. An example of the first sort of (...) context is likes bananas: for any two coreferential noun phrases A and B the sentence A likes bananas is true if and only if B likes bananas is. A context that does not allow intersubstitution of coreferents is The Ancients knew that appears at dawn. If we fill the hole with the noun phrase the Morning Star we get the true (1a), while if we plug in the Evening Star we get the false (1b). Yet the Morning Star and the Evening Star both refer to the planet Venus and are thus coreferential. (shrink)

Intentionality occurs in connectionist nets among those traits of the nets that scientists call flaws. This label has obscured for philosophers the fact that the naturalistic basis of intentionality has been discovered. I show this while staying on our profession's common ground of discourse about ancient philosophy. In the "Theaetetus", Plato invokes a homunculus to explain perceptual misrecognition, and in "On Memory and Recollection", Aristotle invokes a mental operation of disregarding in order to overcome the extraneous determinateness of mental images. (...) I develop a connectionist alternative to images that does not invoke a homunculus or spurious mental operations. I describe in detail an ultra-simple Hopfield net that provides an inus (indispensable part of a sufficient) condition for misrecognition. In addition, it exhibits properties that make it an inus condition for two marks of the intentionality of singular terms, namely, failures of existential generalization and of intersubstitutability of names. I also define the sense of a singular term. (shrink)

The paper analyses Frege's approach to the identity conditions for the entity labelled by him as Sinn. It starts with a brief characterization of the main principles of Frege's semantics and lists his remarks on the identity conditions for Sinn. They are subject to a detailed scrutiny, and it is shown that, with the exception of the criterion of intersubstitutability in oratio obliqua, all other criteria have to be discarded. Finally, by comparing Frege's views on Sinn with Carnap's method (...) of extension and intension and the method of intensional isomorphism, it is proved that these methods do not provide a criterion for the identity of Frege's Sinn, even for extensional contexts, that the concept of intension does not coincide, as stated by Carnap, in these contexts, with Frege's concept of Sinn, and that Carnap's claim that in oratio obliqua Frege's semantics leads to an infinite hierarchy of Sinn entities can be questioned at least hypothetically in the light of certain new historical facts. (shrink)

If α and α’ are distinct variables and ϕ and ϕ’ are open sentences of some language, where ϕ’ is the result of replacing one or more free occurrences of a in α with free occurrences of α’ in ϕ’, then a universal closure of ⌜)⌝, is an indiscernibility principle of that language. For instance, is an indiscernibility principle.The existence of opaque constructions falsifies the familiar unrestricted principle of substitution which affirms that co-referential expressions are intersubstitutable in all contexts without (...) change of truth-value. But indiscernibility principles are another matter. Not every counter-example to the unrestricted principle of substitution is a counter-example to some indiscernibility principle. Indeed, it is likely to be thought that there is no counter-example to any indiscernibility principle, and that the semantics of variables and objectual quantification ensures that all indiscernibility principles are true. (shrink)

This dissertation examines critically the assumptions of extensionalism and the traditional doctrine of substitutivity, according to which codesignativeness or coextensionality of terms should be a sufficient condition to guarantee intersubstitution of expression salva veritate. First, the discussion focuses on the traditional justifications of the extensionalist principles of substitutivity. The following alleged sources of support for extensionalism are examined: the claim that the extensionalist approach to substitutivity relies on fundamental principles outside the domain of semantics, like the Law of Indiscernibility of (...) Identicals and Leibniz's Law of Substitutivity; the assumption that all sentences that exhibit failures of substitutivity have in common a certain structure, that they include explicit or implicit intensional operators, which cause failures of substitutivity; the presumption that the extensionalist principles of substitutivity follow from a thesis of compositionality of meaning,according to which the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its components and the mode of composition. Second, the intuitive foundations of a theory about the contributions of terms to the assertions expressed by uses of sentences are explored. I claim that this theory provides strong reasons to reject the extensionalist approach to substitutivity. (shrink)

One of the many intriguing features of the axiomatic systems of probability investigated in Popper (1959), appendices _iv, _v, is the different status of the two arguments of the probability functor with regard to the laws of replacement and commutation. The laws for the first argument, (rep1) and (comm1), follow from much simpler axioms, whilst (rep2) and (comm2) are independent of them, and have to be incorporated only when most of the important deductions have been accomplished. It is plain that, (...) in the presence of (comm1), the principle (sub), which says that terms that are intersubstitutable in the first argument are intersubstitutable also in the second argument, implies (comm2), and in Popper’s systems the converse implication obtains. It is naturally asked what is needed in an axiomatic theory of probability in order to enforce this equivalence. Leblanc (1981) offered a rather weak set of axioms, containing (comm1) and (comm2), that suffice for the derivation of (sub). In this paper Leblanc’s result is improved in a number of different ways. Three weaker systems, one of which is incomparable with the other two, are shown to admit the same implication. DOI:10.5007/1808-1711.2011v15n2p271. (shrink)

One of the many intriguing features of the axiomatic systems of probability investigated in Popper (1959), appendices _iv, _v, is the different status of the two arguments of the probability functor with regard to the laws of replacement and commutation. The laws for the first argument, (rep1) and (comm1), follow from much simpler axioms, whilst (rep2) and (comm2) are independent of them, and have to be incorporated only when most of the important deductions have been accomplished. It is plain that, (...) in the presence of (comm1), the principle (sub), which says that terms that are intersubstitutable in the first argument are intersubstitutable also in the second argument, implies (comm2), and in Popper’s systems the converse implication obtains. It is naturally asked what is needed in an axiomatic theory of probability in order to enforce this equivalence. Leblanc (1981) offered a rather weak set of axioms, containing (comm1) and (comm2), that suffice for the derivation of (sub). In this paper Leblanc’s result is improved in a number of different ways. Three weaker systems, one of which is incomparable with the other two, are shown to admit the same implication. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aristotle and the AppearancesPaul Nieuwenburg1.G. E. L. owen’s influential article Tithenai ta phainomena1 has had a very special efficacy in converting long-standing suspicions into the certainty of what one might call, without exaggeration, an orthodoxy. One of Owen’s arguments is widely thought to remove, in a quite definite way, all doubt surrounding the interpretation of the ambiguous term ta phainomena, usually rendered ‘the appearances,’ as it figures in one (...) of Aristotle’s reflections on ‘the methods of ethics.’2 And indeed, as the pun on Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics suggests,3 the argument paves the way for extracting from Aristotle’s instructions [End Page 551] a telos not unlike that of a certain modern conception of ethics—a coherent body of propositions wrought from our common-sense intuitions about moral matters.Point of departure is a quotation of the methodological reflection from the Nicomachean Ethics (EN 1145b2–7), the subject of the argument in question. The reflection sketches the procedure to be followed in the treatment of akrasia, or the phenomenon of, to put it in a rather slipshod manner, doing what one knows to be wrong. It will be helpful to comply with standard practice and to give Owen’s own translation of the bulk of this passage (b2–6), supplementing it with the missing final clause (b6–7).Here as in other cases we must set down [tithentas] the phainomena and begin by considering the difficulties [diaporêsantas], and so go on to vindicate if possible all the common conceptions [ta endoxa] about these states of mind [peri tauta ta pathê], or at any rate most of them and the most important; {for when both the difficulties are solved and the endoxa are left [kataleipêtaı], it would have been proven sufficiently [dedeigmenon hikanôs].} (EN 1145b2–7)Owen argues that W. D. Ross’ ‘empiricist’ construal of the term phainomena (‘observed facts’) cannot be consistently maintained in a dialectical examination of beliefs on moral matters—and we shall presently see why this should be so. Indeed, the term must be systematically ambiguous, referring to ‘hard’ empirical data in one context (notably APr 46a20) and to endoxa (or legomena [EN 1145b20]), i.e., ‘common conceptions’ in the other.As a consequence, the method outlined in this passage would look like this. First, you have to assemble and present a collection of beliefs (tithenai ta phainomena) on the relevant subject-matter. Since it is most likely that tensions will disfigure the set of endoxa you have garnered, you must, second, by way of preliminary exercise ‘go through the perplexities’ (diaporein) they raise, in order to pinpoint the inconsistencies and infelicities barring the way to endoxic coherence. The removal of these frictions will result in a ‘maximal consistent subset’ of endoxa on the matter, namely, when the perplexities (aporiai), or difficulties (duskherê), are solved. Sufficient proof has been given when all, most, or the most important (kuriôtata) endoxa reappear in this final set. “And then? And then nothing: your philosophical task is over. “4The intersubstitutability of ‘appearances’ (phainomena) and ‘reputable beliefs’ [End Page 552] (as I prefer to render endoxa)5 is buttressed by a fairly general consensus in contemporary Aristotelian scholarship. Many authors assume that in the text under consideration and, in its wake, in certain other ethical contexts, both terms have the same reference, without, however, being synonymous.6 Henceforth, I shall label this assumption (I) (for ‘intersubstitutability assumption’), covering both Owen’s conclusion and the argument leading up to it, on the obvious supposition that espousing the conclusion entails a commitment to the validity of the argument. Against all appearances, however, (I) is not as foolproof as its widespread acclaim suggests. Although extensions of (I) to other methodological contexts in Aristotle’s ethical writings (in particular EE 1214b28–1215a) prejudice a due understanding of Aristotelian ethics, the point is, I believe, worth arguing in its own right.In what follows, I shall first lay bare a ‘perplexity’ latent in (I). It will emerge that its premises do not as firmly support the conclusion as it has seemed to many writers. Therefore, I shall not side with those... (shrink)

Some twenty years ago, semanticists of natural language came to be overwhelmed by the problem of semantic analysis of belief sentences (and sentences reporting other kinds of propositional attitudes): the trouble was that sentences of the shapes X believes that A and X believes that B appeared to be able to have different truth values even in cases when A and B shared the same intension, i.e. were, from the viewpoint of intensional semantics, synonymous 1 . Thus, taking intensional semantics (...) for granted, belief sentences appeared to violate the principle of intersubstitutivity of synonyms. The verdict of the gurus of intensional semantics was that hence intensional semantics is inadequate, or at least insufficient for the purposes of analysis of propositional attitudes; and that we need a kind of a ‘hyperintensional semantics’. (shrink)

Two readings of the much-discussed περιτροπή argument of "Theaetetus" 170c-171c have dominated the literature. One I call "the relativity reading". On this reading, the argument fails by ignoratio elenchi because it "carelessly" omits "the qualifications 'true for so-and-so' which [Protagoras'] theory insists on" (Bostock 1988: 90). The other reading I call "the many-worlds interpretation". On this view, Plato's argument succeeds in showing that "Protagoras' position becomes utterly self-contradictory" because "he claims that everyone lives in his own relativistic world, yet at (...) the same time he is forced by that very claim to admit that no one does" (Burnyeat 1976b: 48). I discuss and criticise both readings, and present a third, according to which the point of the argument is, very roughly, that Protagoras is committed to equating truth and truth-for, and so, further, to their intersubstitutability. This further commitment proves fatal to his argument. (shrink)

Richard Levins’ distinction between aggregate, composed and evolved systems acquires new significance as we recognize the importance of mechanistic explanation. Criteria for aggregativity provide limiting cases for absence of organization, so through their failure, can provide rich detectors for organizational properties. I explore the use of failures of aggregativity for the analysis of mechanistic systems in diverse contexts. Aggregativity appears theoretically desireable, but we are easily fooled. It may be exaggerated through approximation, conditions of derivation, and extrapolating from some conditions (...) of decomposition illegtimately to others. Evolved systems particularly may require analyses under alternative complementary decompositions. Exploring these conditions helps us to better understand the strengths and limits of reductionistic methods. (shrink)

Problems of Compositionality is a revised version of Zolt´an Szab´o’s 1995 doctoral dissertation. Of its five chapters, three have appeared (in heavily modified form) in print independently1, so I will concentrate most of my remarks on the second and third chapters, which remain unpublished outside the book. As it happens, I find these two chapters to be the most philosophically rewarding of the book. The principle of compositionality is a general constraint on the shape of a theory of meaning. Szab´o (...) gives the following initial formulation of the principle: The meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its constituents and by its structure. (3) Recent discussion of compositionality branches in a number of different directions, including (at least) disputes over the precise formulation of the principle, investigations of the mathematical features of various such formulations, exploration of a plethora of apparent counterexamples to the compositionality of natural languages, scholarly work on the history of the principle (especially its role in Frege), and employment of the principle as a tool in other philosophical disputes. Szab´o’s path through this thicket begins, in the first chapter, with a defense of an idiosyncratic version of the compositionality principle against some more traditional alternatives, proceeds in the second and third chapters to the oft-neglected and philosophically crucial task of asking why the principle of compositionality ought to be one we seek to impose, and concludes in the fourth and fifth chapters by considering and rejecting two putative counterexamples (manifesting in the semantics of adjectives and of definite descriptions) to the principle. The principle of compositionality is most commonly given a functional implementation – a language L is compositional iff the meaning of a complex expression α of L is a function of the meanings of the parts of α and the syntactic structure of α. Equivalently, L is compositional iff synonyms can be intersubstituted salva significa- tio in complex expressions of L.2 Szab´o, however, rejects the functional/substitutional.... (shrink)

Philosophers of language in the late twentieth century may rightly say of Frege what Dostoevsky reportedly said of Gogol: We have all come out from under his overcoat. The Fregean "overcoat"--the Fregean framework in the philosophy of language--covers not only the devastating critique of psychologism and the famous doctrine of sense and reference, but also, and perhaps more importantly, a stock of standard semantic puzzles. This stock includes the puzzle about informative identity statements, the puzzle about nonreferring singular terms, and (...) the puzzle about "opacity": the failure of the Leibnizian law of intersubstitution in psychological reports and other contexts. Closely related to the standard puzzles are what might be called the Essential Fregean Mysteries: the existence of meanings in a third realm ; the intuitive mental act of "grasping" meanings; the peculiarly "unsaturated" character of the designata of predicates; and truth-values as the designata of sentences. By now, as a result of many attacks by ordinary-language philosophers, by possible-worlds semanticists, by psychosemanticists, and by direct reference theorists, the Fregean framework is being dismantled piece by piece. But the shape of the successor framework is not yet fully apparent. (shrink)