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THE SEMANTIC FOUNDATIONS OF PHILOSOPHICAL ANALYSIS

Part of: General logic Philosophical aspects of logic and foundations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2021

SAMUEL Z. ELGIN
SAMUEL Z. ELGIN*
Affiliation:
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO 9500 GILMAN DRIVE LA JOLLA, CA 92103, USA
*
E-mail: elgin.samuel@gmail.com
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Abstract

I provide an analysis of sentences of the form ‘To be F is to be G’ in terms of exact truth-maker semantics—an approach that identifies the meanings of sentences with the states of the world directly responsible for their truth-values. Roughly, I argue that these sentences hold just in case that which makes something F also makes it G. This approach is hyperintensional and possesses desirable logical and modal features. In particular, these sentences are reflexive, transitive, and symmetric, and if they are true, then they are necessarily true, and it is necessary that all and only Fs are Gs. I motivate my account over Correia and Skiles’ [11] prominent alternative and close by defining an irreflexive and asymmetric notion of analysis in terms of the symmetric and reflexive notion.

Keywords

analysisidentificationgeneralized identitytruth-maker semantics

MSC classification

Primary: 03A05: Philosophical and critical
Secondary: 03B47: Substructural logics (including relevance, entailment, linear logic, Lambek calculus, BCK and BCI logics)
Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Symbolic Logic , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , June 2023 , pp. 603 - 623
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Association for Symbolic Logic

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Footnotes

“The business of philosophy, as I conceive it, is essentially that of logical analysis”

Bertrand Russell

References

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