Online research in philosophy

I argue for a cognitive architecture in which folk psychology is supported by an interface of a ToM module and the language faculty, the latter providing the former with interpreted LF structures which form the content representations of ToM states. I show that LF structures satisfy a range of key features asked of contents. I confront this account of ToM with eliminativism and diagnose and combat the thought that "success" and innateness are inconsistent with the falsity of folk psychology. (...) I show that, while my ensemble account of ToM and language refutes the culturalist presuppositions that tend to underlie eliminativist arguments, the falsity of folk psychology is consistent with the account. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell, in the second of his 1914 Lowell lectures, Our Knowledge of the External World, asserted famously that ‘every philosophical problem, when it is subjected to the necessary analysis and purification, is found either to be not really philosophical at all, or else to be, in the sense in which we are using the word, logical’ (Russell 1993, p. 42). He went on to characterize that portion of logic that concerned the study of forms of propositions, or, as (...) he called them, ‘logical forms’. This portion of logic he called ‘philosophical logic’. Russell asserted that ... some kind of knowledge of logical forms, though with most people it is not explicit, is involved in all understanding of discourse. It is the business of philosophical logic to extract this knowledge from its concrete integuments, and to render it explicit and pure. (p. 53) Perhaps no one still endorses quite this grand a view of the role of logic and the investigation of logical form in philosophy. But talk of logical form retains a central role in analytic philosophy. Given its widespread use in philosophy and linguistics, it is rather surprising that the concept of logical form has not received more attention by philosophers than it has. The concern of this paper is to say something about what talk of logical form comes to, in a tradition that stretches back to (and arguably beyond) Russell’s use of that expression. This will not be exactly Russell’s conception. For we do not endorse Russell’s view that propositions are the bearers of logical form, or that appeal to propositions adds anything to our understanding of what talk of logical form comes to. But we will be concerned to provide an account responsive to the interests expressed by Russell in the above quotations, though one clarified of extraneous elements, and expressed precisely. For this purpose, it is important to note that the concern expressed by Russell in the above passages, as the surrounding text makes clear, is a concern not just with logic conceived narrowly as the study of logical terms, but with propositional form more generally, which includes, e.g., such features as those that correspond to the number of argument places in a propositional function, and the categories of objects which propositional.... (shrink)

An attractive semantic theory presented by Richard K. Larson and Peter Ludlow takes a report of propositional attitudes, e.g 'Tom believes Judy Garland sang', to report a believing relation between Tom and an interpreted logical form constructed from 'Judy Garland sang'. We briefly outline the semantic theory and indicate its attractions. However, the definition of interpreted logical forms given by Larson and Ludlow is shown to be faulty, and an alternative definition is offered which matches their intentions. (...) This definition is then shown to imply that Tom does not know his own mind, a result without intuitive support. A third definition is offered to deal with this problem. (shrink)

In Kant’s logical texts the reference of the form of the judgment to an “unknown = x” is well known, but its understanding remains far from consensual. Due to the universality of all concepts, the subject as much as the predicate, in the form S is P, is regarded as predicate of the x, which, in turn, is regarded as the subject of the judgment. In the CPR, particularly in the text on the “logical use of (...) the understanding”, this Kantian interpretation of the subject-predicate relation leads to the question about the relations that must hold between intuition and concept in the judgment. In contrast to intuition, if no concept, due to its universal character, refers immediately to an object, how should we understand the relations of subject and predicate to one another, as well as their relations to intuition, which corresponds to the very special individuality of that object in general = x? In the Kant-Literatur, the relations between intuition and concept in the judgment have been considered in diverse theoretical backgrounds, mainly in Fregean logic and in the logic of Port-Royal. Although so markedly different, these two solutions to the problem above seem to share a common thesis, in so far as they claim, though in different ways, a predicative character to those relations. If the analytic tradition recognizes in the relation between x and the concept S the marks of a propositional function Sx, in turn, the interpretation elaborated from the background of Port-Royal recognizes in this relation the minor premise x is S implicit in the judgment every S is P. This being the case, if it were possible to prove, on the contrary, that the relations between intuition and concept in the judgment could only be of a non-predicative character, then a third solution would be open to us, a solution that could enable us to track down the sense of the conceptions of judgment and logical form in the CPR. In applying this argumentative strategy, it is of the utmost importance to insist on the specificity of Kant’s notion of extension, in order to prove its irreducibility to the Port-Royal notion of extension as well as to the modern one. (shrink)

Introduction 1.1 GOALS This book is devoted to an in-depth investigation of some of the properties of Logical Form (LF). In particular, the primary aim of ...

Consider the following argument: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. Intuitively, what makes this a valid argument has nothing to do with Socrates, men, or mortality. Rather, each sentence in the argument exhibits a certain logical form, which, together with the forms of the other two, constitute a pattern that, of itself, guarantees the truth of the conclusion given the truth of the premises. More generally, then, the logical form of (...) a sentence of natural language is what determines both its logical properties and its logical relations to other sentences. The logical form of a sentence of natural language is typically represented in a theory of logical form by a well-formed formula in a ‘logically pure’ language whose only meaningful symbols are expressions with fixed, distinctly logical meanings (e.g., quantifiers). Thus, the logical forms of the sentences in the above argument would be represented in a theory based on pure predicate logic by the formulas ‘∀x(Fx ⊃ Gx)’, ‘Fy’, and ‘Gy’, respectively, where ‘F’, ‘G’, and ‘y’ are all free variables. The argument’s intuitive validity is then explained in virtue of the fact that the logical forms of the premises formally entail the logical form of the conclusion. The primary goal of a theory of logical form is to explain as broad a range of such intuitive logical phenomena as possible in terms of the logical forms that it assigns to sentences of natural language. (shrink)

On this conception, the semantic types of its primitive terms and their mode of combination determine the logical form of a sentence as it relates to determining under what conditions it is true. We develop this idea in the framework of truth-theoretic semantics. We argue that the semantic form of a declarative sentence in a language L is revealed by a (canonical) proof of its T-sentence in an interpretive truth theory for L. We give a precise characterization (...) of sameness of logical form between any two declarative sentences in any two languages in terms of the notion of corresponding proofs in interpretive truth theories for the languages. We illustrate the utility of this approach with a number of examples. We then extend the characterization to non-declaratives in a generalization of truth-theoretic semantics that appeals to fulfillment conditions, of which truth conditions are one variety. On this approach, logical forms are not reified, and the notion of sameness of logical form is treated as conceptually basic. We discuss the relation of this conception of logical form to the project of identifying logical constants, reviewing two approaches, one of which takes topic neutrality as central, the other recursion. We argue that the project of identifying logical constants for the purposes of classifying together valid arguments is largely independent of that of identifying logical form of sentences, and urge an ecumenical approach to extending talk of logical constants beyond where it is currently well grounded. (shrink)

The term ‘logical form’ has been called on to serve a wide range of purposes in philosophy, and it would be too ambitious to try to survey all of them in a single essay. Instead, I will focus on just one conception of logical form that has occupied a central place in the philosophy of language, and in particular in the philosophical study of linguistic meaning. This is what I will call the classical conception of (...) class='Hi'>logical form. The classical conception, as I will present it in section 1, has (either explicitly or implicitly) shaped a great deal of important philosophical work in semantic theory. But it has come under fire in recent decades, and in sections 2 and 3 I will discuss two of the recent challenges that I take to be most interesting and significant. (shrink)

The LOGICAL FORM of a sentence (or utterance) is a formal representation of its logical structure; that is, of the structure which is relevant to specifying its logical role and properties. There are a number of (interrelated) reasons for giving a rendering of a sentence's logical form. Among them is to obtain proper inferences (which otherwise would not follow; cf. Russell's theory of descriptions), to give the proper form for the determination of truth-conditions (...) (e.g. Tarski's method of truth and satisfaction as applied to quantification), to show those aspects of a sentence's meaning which follow from the logical role of certain terms (and not from the lexical meaning of words; cf. the truth-functional account of conjunction), and to formalize or regiment the language in order to show that it is has certain metalogical properties (e.g. that it is free of paradox, or that there is a sound proof procedure). (shrink)

Many commentators have attempted to say, more clearly than Wittgenstein did in his Tractatus logico-philosophicus, what sort of things the ‘simple objects’ spoken of in that book are. A minority approach, but in my view the correct one, is to reject all such attempts as misplaced. The Tractarian notion of an object is categorially indeterminate: in contrast with both Frege's and Russell's practice, it is not the logician's task to give a specific categorial account of the internal structure of elementary (...) propositions or atomic facts, nor, correlatively, to give an account of the forms of simple objects. The few commentators who have hitherto maintained this view have mainly devoted themselves to establishing that this was Wittgenstein's intention, and do not much address the question whyWittgenstein held that it is not the logician's business to say what the objects are. The present paper means to fill this lacuna by placing this view in the context of the Tractatus's treatment of logic generally, and in particular by connecting it with Wittgenstein's treatment of generality and with his reaction to Russell's approach to logical form. (shrink)

First order logic does not distinguish between different forms of universal generalization; in this paper I argue that lawlike and accidental generalizations (broadly construed) have a different logical form, and that this distinction is syntactically marked in English. I then consider the relevance of this broader conception of lawlikeness to the philosophy of science.

Over the years, I’ve been asked many times what “logical form” is, as applied to natural language. This is a natural enough question to address to me; after all, I’ve written a book titled Logical Form, and I’ve been asked to write any number of papers on the topic. This question, it seems to me, is certainly a “big” question, and big questions deserve big answers. I must admit, however, to being somewhat baffled as to how (...) to do this satisfactorily, since big answers to big questions unfortunately tend to the trivial. With a nod to Wittgenstein, logical form has always seemed to me to be something that you know it when you see it; it is clear enough when it pops up, but one is hard pressed to say just what it is, to define it. This is so even though the meanings of the words “logical” and “form” seem straightforward enough; what I find puzzling is how the first word is supposed to modify the second. What is it that makes a form logical, as opposed to something else that is not logical? This, it seems to me, is a very hard question to answer indeed, for if we cannot contrast logical form with some other type of form, then every form (or no form) is a logical form, and we have arrived at the triviality previously mentioned. (shrink)

Book Information Logical Form and Language. Edited by G. Preyer and G. Peter. Clarendon Press. Oxford. 2002. Pp. x + 512. Hardback, £55. Paperback, £19.99.

The title is meant to emphasize the immense loss of status I take logic to have undergone in recent decades, and to suggest something about its causes. The loss is most obvious in the context of higher education, where almost no post-secondary institutions now have effectual general requirements in standard formal logic, as that was easily understood thirty or more years ago. Courses in so-called 'critical thinking' are, with rare and noble exceptions, only a further illustration of the point, for (...) many of them, if not most, say nothing at all about logical form and formal logic, and proceed as if <span class='Hi'>thought</span> and discourse could be critically understood and appraised in total ignorance of their formal aspects. (shrink)

A Logical Form (LF) is a syntactic structure that is interpreted by the semantic component. For a particular structure to be a possible LF it has to be possible for syntax to generate it and for semantics to interpret it. The study of LF must therefore take into account both assumptions about syntax and about semantics, and since there is much disagreement in both areas, disagreements on LF have been plentiful. This makes the task of writing a survey (...) article in the field fairly difficult, a difficulty that is amplified by the amount of material that needs to be covered if the result is going to be in any way representative. My response to this difficulty is to limit my objectives. As a start, I will confine myself to issues relating to the syntactic positions of Quantificational Noun Phrases (QNPs) at LF and to various interpretive consequences. But even within these relatively narrow confines, I will not attempt anything close to a comprehensive survey. Instead my goal will be restricted to the presentation of one leading idea and to the discussion of some evidence that might bear on it.1 Much research on the nature of LF has consisted in attempts to account for the meaning of sentences containing QNPs. (shrink)

The syntax of Frege's scientific language iscommonly taken to be characterized by two oddities:the representation of the intended illocutionary roleof sentences by a special sign, the judgement-stroke,and the treatment of sentences as a species ofsingular terms. In this paper, an alternative view isdefended. The main theses are: (i) the syntax ofFrege's scientific language aims at an explication ofthe logical form of judgements; (ii) thejudgement-stroke is, therefore, a truth-operator, nota pragmatic operator; (iii) in Frege's first system,` ' expresses that (...) the circumstance is a fact, and in his second system that thetruth-value - is the True; (iv) in bothsystems, the judgement-stroke is construed as a signsui generis, not as a genuine predicate; (v) itscounterpart in natural language is the syntactic ``formof assertoric sentences'', not the (redundant)truth-predicate; (vi) neither in Frege's first nor inhis second system sentences are treated as singular terms. (shrink)

Vernacularism is the view that logical forms are fundamentally assigned to natural language expressions, and are only derivatively assigned to anything else, e.g., propositions, mental representations, expressions of symbolic logic, etc. In this paper, we argue that Vernacularism is not as plausible as it first appears because of nonsentential speech. More specifically, there are argument-premises, meant by speakers of non-sentences, for which no natural language paraphrase is readily available in the language used by the speaker and the hearer. The (...) speaker can intend this proposition and the hearer can recover it (and its logical form). Since they cannot, by hypothesis, be doing this by using a sentence of their shared language, the proposition-meant has its logical form non-derivatively, which falsifies Vernacularism. We conclude the paper with a brief review of the debate on incomplete definite descriptions in which Vernacularism is assumed as a suppressed premise. (shrink)

Despite some talk of ‘erotetic logic’ and ‘the logic of interrogatives’, logicians have hitherto completely overlooked the peculiar logical form of questions, also shared by interrogative clauses generally. Of relevance to an understanding of time are those interrogative clauses that are janus-like: sometimes raising a question, sometimes answering it—which can then no longer arise. Since a closed question can no longer arise, it might seem that simply the passing of time turns an open into a closed question. Instead, (...) the passing of time itself can be understood as the closing or resolution of open questions, of the determination of what is not fixed but as yet in question. (shrink)

This paper argues that, notwithstanding the remarkable popularity of Woodward's (2003) interventionist analysis of causation, the exact definitional details of that theory are surprisingly little understood. There exists a discrepancy in the literature between the clarity about the logical details of interventionism, on the one hand, and the enormous work interventionism is expected to do, on the other. The first part of the paper distinguishes three significantly different readings of the logical form of Woodward's (2003) interventionist theory (...) and identifies the reading that best captures the basic intuitions behind interventionism. In the second part, I show that this preferable reading is far from doing all the work that friends of interventionism would like it to do. (shrink)

Vernacularism is the view that logical forms are fundamentally assigned to natural language expressions, and are only derivatively assigned to anything else, e.g., propositions, mental representations, expressions of symbolic logic, etc. In this paper, we argue that Vernacularism is not as plausible as it first appears because of non-sentential speech. More specifically, there are argument-premises, meant by speakers of non-sentences, for which no natural language paraphrase is readily available in the language used by the speaker and the hearer. The (...) speaker can intend this proposition and the hearer can recover it (and its logical form). Since they cannot, by hypothesis, be doing this by using a sentence of their shared language, the proposition-meant has its logical form non-derivatively, which falsifies Vernacularism. We conclude the paper with a brief review of the debate on incomplete definite descriptions in which Vernacularism is assumed as a suppressed premise. (shrink)

Recent proposals by Taylor, Bennett, Wright and Cohen to identify teleological systems as systems governed by teleological laws and teleological laws as laws of a certain logical form are discussed. Suggested logical forms are treated with both extensional and simple non-extensional models of nomic necessity and shown to generate problematic entailments not derivable from the causal form alone.

The nature of quantum mechanical probability has often seemed mysterious. To shed some light on this topic, the present paper analyzes the logical form of probability assignment in quantum mechanics. To begin the paper, I set out and criticize several attempts to analyze the form. I go on to propose a new form which utilizes a novel, probabilistic conditional and argue that this proposal is, overall, the best rendering of the quantum mechanical probability assignments. Finally, quantum (...) mechanics aside, the discussion here has consequences for counterfactual logic, conditional probability, and epistemic probability. (shrink)

This paper pursues the suggestion of St. Anselm that action expressions can be parsed by saying that the agent makes a certain proposition true. Using the model syntax of Pörn and the relatedness logic of Epstein, it is shown how St. Anselm's approach can reveal the logical form of some common action locutions.

Jerónimo Pardo's analysis of the problems raised by some popular trinitarian paralogisms is studied in this paper. The purpose is to show how the notions employed by the theologians in order to solve theological problems were introduced into a textbook on logic to deal with some genuinely logical problems. First, the problem, common to all logical approaches, of achieving a fine-grained analysis of the logical form of syllogistical inferences. Second, the problem, typical of the terminist approach (...) to logic, of guaranteeing that Latin is an adequate vehicle for logical analysis. (shrink)

In the works of Kant and his followers, the notion of form plays an important role in explaining the apriority, necessity and certainty of logic. Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848), an important early critic of Kant, found the Kantians' definitions of form imprecise and their explanations of the special status of logic deeply unsatisfying. Proposing his own conception of form, Bolzano developed radically different views on logic, truth in virtue of form, and other matters. This essay presents Bolzano's (...) views in the light of his criticisms of the Kantian logicians. (shrink)

If logical truth is necessitated by sheer syntax, mathematics is categorially unlike logic even if all mathematics derives from definitions and logical principles. This contrast gets obscured by the plausibility of the Synonym Substitution Principle implicit in conceptions of analyticity: synonym substitution cannot alter sentence sense. The Principle obviously fails with intercepting: nonuniform term substitution in logical sentences. 'Televisions are televisions' and 'TVs are televisions' neither sound alike nor are used interchangeably. Interception synonymy gets assumed because (...) class='Hi'>logical sentences and their synomic interceptions have identical factual content, which seems to exhaust semantic content. However, intercepting alters syntax by eliminating term recurrence, the sole strictly syntactic means of ensuring necessary term coextension, and thereby syntactically securing necessary truth. Interceptional necessity is lexical, a notational artifact. The denial of interception nonsynonymy and the disregard of term recurrence in logic link with many misconceptions about propositions, logical form, conventions, and metalanguages. Mathematics is distinct from logic: its truth is not syntactic; it is transmitted by synonym substitution; term recurrence has no essential role. The '=' of mathematics is an objectual relation between numbers; the '=' of logic marks a syntactic relation of coreferring terms. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the logical form of valuing. I argue that valuing a concept or property is a universal statement qua logical form, that valuing an object is an existential statement qua logical form, and, furthermore, that a correct analysis of the logical form of valuing contains doxastic operators. I show that these ingredients give rise to an interesting interplay between uniform and ununiform quantification, on the one hand, and de dicto and (...) de re beliefs, on the other. I apply this analysis to the value of political freedom. The received view is that the value of freedom lies in the value of the specific things one is free to do. But Ian Carter has recently shown that freedom has irreducible, "non-specific" value, too. I show that underlying the debate between the proponents of the received view and their critics is a disagreement about logical form: ununiform de dicto beliefs about freedom as a concept, for the received view, and uniform half-de dicto-half-de re beliefs about freedom as an object, for its critics. (shrink)

The need to distinguish between logical and extra-logical varieties of inference, entailment, validity, and consistency has played a prominent role in meta-ethical debates between expressivists and descriptivists. But, to date, the importance that matters of logical form play in these distinctions has been overlooked. That’s a mistake given the foundational place that logical form plays in our understanding of the difference between the logical and the extra-logical. This essay argues that descriptivists are (...) better positioned than their expressivist rivals to provide the needed account of logical form, and so better able to capture the needed distinctions. This finding is significant for several reasons: First, it provides a new argument against expressivism. Second, it reveals that descriptivists can make use of this new argument only if they are willing to take a controversial—but plausible—stand on claims about the nature and foundations of logic. (shrink)

Though, at first sight, logical formalization of natural language sentences and arguments might look like an unproblematic enterprise, the criteria of its success are far from clear and, surprisingly, there have only been a few attempts at making them explicit. This paper provides a picture of the enterprise of logical formalization that does not conceive of it as a kind of translation from one language (a natural one) into another language (a logical one), but rather as a (...) construction of a 'map' of (a piece of) the 'inferential landscape' of the natural language. The criteria that appear to govern the enterprise are labeled as those of reliability, ambitiousness, transparency and parsimony. These criteria, it is argued, do not provide for an excavation of a ready-made logical structure, but rather help us achieve a "reflective equilibrium" between the normative authority of logic and the answerability of logic to a natural language. (shrink)

This work contains Peter Long's important essay, Logic, Form and Grammar , which resolves many difficulties for the logical form of an argument where the reasoning is hypothetical. Also included are two essays on classical problems in philosophical logic, relating to logical form and formal relations.

In this paper, I defend the thesis that alleffects of extra-linguistic context on thetruth-conditions of an assertion are traceable toelements in the actual syntactic structure of thesentence uttered. In the first section, I develop thethesis in detail, and discuss its implications for therelation between semantics and pragmatics. The nexttwo sections are devoted to apparent counterexamples.In the second section, I argue that there are noconvincing examples of true non-sentential assertions.In the third section, I argue that there are noconvincing examples of what (...) John Perry has called`unarticulated constituents''. I conclude by drawingsome consequences of my arguments for appeals tocontext-dependence in the resolution of problems inepistemology and philosophical logic. (shrink)

Yah boo sucks to the grammer wot we lernt in skool! Grammar (and the bad old traditional logic) says that quantifier phrases such as 'nobody', 'everyone', 'all women', 'some men' and 'a man' are in the same category as names such as 'Milly', 'Molly' and 'Mandy'. So, prior to their first corrective lessons, students are awfully muddled, the first and fundamental problem being the Woozle hunt for somebody called 'nobody'. Hoorah for modern logic and logic teachers! The story used to (...) justify our current logics is entirely fictional. The claims about names and quantifier phrases in English are wildly false. Two of the heroes of modern logic, Russell and Hilbert, make the very mistakes which are falsely blamed on traditional logic. The villain, Meinong, turns out to have been working a different patch. Ideas ascribed to traditional grammar are modern inventions. Neither logicians nor grammarians can be trusted to tell the history of either grammar or logic. (shrink)

This essay attempts to give substance to the claim that the liar''sparadox shows the truth predicate to be context sensitive. The aim ismodest: to provide an account of the truth predicate''s contextsensitivity (1) that derives from a more general understanding ofcontext sensitivity, (2) that does not depend upon a hierarchy ofpredicates and (3) that is able to address the liar''s paradox. Theconsequences of achieving this goal are not modest, though. Perhapssurprisingly, for reasons that will be discussed in the last section (...) ofthis essay, a natural account of the truth predicate''s contextsensitivity appears to lead naturally to a version of the correspondencetheory of truth according to which the truth predicate can be understoodas a relation holding between a sentence and a salient set of contexts.The plan of this essay is as follows. Section 1 contains a generalaccount of context sensitivity. The purpose of this section is toisolate certain features of context sensitivity and formal methods oftreating them, which we will then apply to the truth predicate. Section 2then outlines two minimal conditions to be satisfied by a truthpredicate. In Section 3, I present a version of the liar paradoxthat results from these conditions and the assumption that the truthpredicate is not context sensitive in the sense described in sectionone. Finally, in section four, I provide what appear to be naturalconsequences of a truth predicate''s context sensitivity. Section 4 isadmittedly speculative and points in the direction for future research. (shrink)

Resolution of Frege's Puzzle by denying that synonym substitution in logical truths preserves sentence sense and explaining how logical form has semantic import. Intensional context substitutions needn't preserve truth, because intercepting doesn't preserve sentence meaning. Intercepting is nonuniformly substituting a pivotal term in syntactically secured truth. Logical sentences (GG: Greeks are Greeks; gg: Greece is Greece) and their synonym interceptions (GH: Greeks are Hellenes; gh: Greece is Hellas) share factual content (extrasentential reality asserted). Semantic (cognitive) content (...) is (identifiable with) factual content in synthetic predications, but not logical sentences and interceptions. Putnam's Postulate (Logical form has semantic import) entails interception nonsynonymy. Syntax and vocabulary explain only the factual content of synthetic predications; extrasentential reality explains their truth. Construction of logical factual content explains logical necessity. Terms retain objectual reference, but logical syntax preempts their function (and thereby function of extrasentential reality) in explaining truth. Grasping the facts GG/gg assert entails understanding this. Understanding what GH states requires some recognition that GH must be true just because GmH ("Greeks" means Hellenes), and GmH ("Greeks" means what "Hellenes" means) state an empirical fact. GH (but not GG) is standardly used to express that fact. Church's <span class='Hi'>Test</span> exposes puzzles. QMi sentences ("Ex" means Ex), and QTi sentences (p≡it is true p≡"p" is true) are metalogical necessities, true by syntax. Intercepting QMi creates empirical QM contingencies ("Ex" means Ey). Synonymy turns semantic contingencies (GmH/GmH) into metalogical (GmG/GmG) and lexical (GH) necessities. That transformation is syntactic, via the syntactic duality of definite descriptions. GmH is a contingent copredication, and a lexically necessary referential identity with rigidly codesignating indexicals. Metalogical sentences may be about expressional matter or what it expresses (meaning, proposition). GG (Griechen sind Griechen) has GG's semantic content, but the referent expression switches. Metalogical syntax secures truth by self-referential quotational indexing. Metalogically, referents are identified with intrasentential replica. Extrasentential identifications are metalogically irrelevant. (shrink)

Over a period of several decades spanning the origin of the Vienna Circle, Schlick repeatedly attacked Husserl''s phenomenological method for its reliance on the ability to intuitively grasp or see essences. Aside from its significance for phenomenologists, the attack illuminates significant and little-explored tensions in the history of analytic philosophy as well. For after coming under the influence of Wittgenstein, Schlick proposed to replace Husserl''s account of the epistemology of propositions describing the overall structure of experience with his own account (...) based on the structure of language rather than on the intuition of essences. I discuss both philosophers'' accounts of the epistemology of propositions describing the structure of experience. For both philosophers, this epistemology was closely related to the general epistemology of logic; nevertheless, neither philosopher had a completely coherent account of it. Comparison of the two approaches shows that perennial and severe theoretical obstacles stand in the way of giving an epistemology of the structure of experience, a central requirement for both philosophers'' theories. Consideration of these obstacles sheds a new light on the reasons for the historically decisive split between the continental and the analytic traditions, as well as on the subsequent development of the analytic tradition away from the structural description of experience. (shrink)

The author puts forth an approach to propositional attitude contexts based upon the view that one does not have beliefs of ordinary extensional entitiessimpliciter. Rather, one has beliefs of such entities as presented in various manners. Roughly, these are treated as beliefs of ordered pairs — the first member of which is the ordinary extensional entity and the second member of which is a predicate that it satisfies. Such an approach has no difficulties with problems involving identity, such as of (...) The Morning Star and The Evening Star (section 1). Given the second members of the pairs, the modes of presentation, it is quite natural to allow exportation everywhere. There is no need for essentialism. (One also can have non-essentialistic modal logic if one grants analyticity or the like.) (section 2). Given that the second member of the pair need only be one that is satisfied by the entity that is the first member (and need not be specificative), the method has no difficulties when one is concerned only with discriminations (and not specifications) (section 3). When this method is combined with the Frege-Carnap method of descriptions, fictional entities can be accommodated; Goodman''s unicorn-picture and the like can be brought within a Tarskian semantics; and Geach''s difficulties with intentional identity appear to be handled (section 4). Given the author''s ordered pair construals, there appears to be no additional need for notional construals; i.e., the author''s one unified method appears satisfactory for dealing with both traditionalde re (relational) andde dicto (notional) construals. The Paradox of the Knower and the like do not appear formulatable against the author''s approach. (section 5). The author also argues against the basic principles behind the Church-Langford translation argument (section 6). (shrink)

Critique of Alonzo Church's Translation Test. Church's test is based on a common misconception of the grammar of (so-called) quotations. His conclusion (that metalogical truths are actually contingent empirical truths) is a reductio of that conception. Chruch's argument begs the question by assuming that translation must preserve reference despite altering logical form of statements whose truth is explained by their form.

This paper offers an expressivist account of logical form, arguing that in order to fully understand it one must examine what valid arguments make us do (or: what Achilles does and the Tortoise doesn’t, in Carroll’s famed fable). It introduces Charles Peirce’s distinction between symbols, indices and icons as three different kinds of signification whereby the sign picks out its object by learned convention, by unmediated indication, and by resemblance respectively. It is then argued that logical (...) class='Hi'>form is represented by the third, iconic, kind of sign. It is noted that icons uniquely enjoy partial identity between sign and object, and argued that this holds the key to Carroll’s puzzle. Finally, from this examination of sign-types metaphysical morals are drawn: that the traditional foes metaphysical realism and conventionalism constitute a false dichotomy, and that reality contains intriguingly inference-binding structures. (shrink)

The mathematical tools of game theory are frequently used in the social sciences and economic consultancy. But how do they explain social phenomena and support prescriptive judgments? And is the use of game theory really necessary? I analyze the logical form of explanatory and prescriptive game theoretical statements, and argue for two claims: (1) explanatory game theory can and should be reduced to rational choice theory in all cases; and (2) prescriptive game theory gives bad advice in some (...) cases, is reducible to rational choice theory in other cases, while it makes no sense in yet other cases. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a novel treatment of generic sentences, which proceeds by means of different levels of analysis. According to this account, all generic sentences (I-generics and D-generics alike) are initially treated in a uniform manner, as involving higher-order predication (following the work of George Boolos, James Higginbotham and Barry Schein on plurals). Their non-uniform character, however, re-emerges at subsequent levels of analysis, when the higher-order predications of the first level are cashed out in terms of quantification over (...) individuals: this last step, I suggest, involves knowledge concerning the lexical meaning of the predicates in question. (shrink)

Notice that each of (1)–(4) is an instance of a more general pattern. For example, we could replace ‘black’ in (1) with any of a wide range of other adjectives such as ‘furry’ or ‘hungry’ or ‘three-legged’, without rendering the entailment invalid or any less obvious. Similarly, there are a number of verbs that occur in entailments parallel to (3): ‘Moe boiled the water; so the water boiled’; ‘Bart blew up the school; so the school blew up’; ‘Homer sank the (...) boat; so the boat sank’ and so on. (shrink)

This paper does not deal with the topic of ‘the generosity of artificial languages from an Asian or a comparative perspective’. Rather, it is concerned with a particular case taken from a development in the Western tradition, when in the wake of the rise of formal logic at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century people in philosophy and later in linguistics started to use formal languages in the study of the semantics of natural languages. (...) This undertaking rests on certain philosophical assumptions and instantiates a particular methodology, that we want to examine critically. However, that in itself is still too broad a topic for a single paper, so we will focus on a particular aspect, viz., the distinction between grammatical form and logical form and the crucial role it plays in how the relationship between natural languages and formal languages is understood in this tradition. We will uncover two basic assumptions that underlie the standard view on the distinction between grammatical form and logical form, and discuss how they have contributed to the shaping of a particular methodology and a particular view on the status of semantics as a discipline. (shrink)

On Friday the 1st and Saturday the 2nd of December 1995, the Sonderforschungsbereich 340 held a workshop entitled Syntax and Semantics of Partial Wh-Movement. This volume contains most of the papers presented there.1 One of the leading ideas underlying the workshop was that detailed investigation of the partial wh-movement construction provides an excellent test ground for checking assumptions about the syntax/semantics interface.