There are two principles which bear the name Frege''sprinciple: the principle of compositionality, and the contextprinciple. The aim of this contribution is to investigate whether thisis justified: did Frege accept both principles at the same time, did hehold the one principle but not the other, or did he, at some moment,change his opinion? The conclusion is as follows. There is a developmentin Frege''s position. In the period of Grundlagen he followed to a strict form of contextuality. He repeatedcontextuality in later (...) writings, but became less strict. From 1914 on,pushed by the needs of research, he comes close to compositionality. Buthe could never make the final step toward compositionality forprincipled reasons, therefore he always would reject compositionality. (shrink)

In this paper it is argued that Hintikka's game theoreticalsemantics for Independence Friendly logic does not formalize theintuitions about independent choices; it rather is aformalization of imperfect information. Furthermore it is shownthat the logic has several remarkable properties (e.g.,renaming of bound variables is not allowed). An alternativesemantics is proposed which formalizes intuitions aboutindependence.

A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation Hans Kamp. INTRODUCTION Two conceptions of meaning have dominated formal semantics of natural language. ...

The ideas of contextuality and of compositionality were discussed at the beginnings of the nineteenth century in Germany, but the contextuality was the significant one. In 1880, Wundt published a work called Logik, comprising two volumes, which evolved to the German standard text on logic. Gottlob Frege, a German mathematician, logician, and philosopher, presented contextuality as his basic principle; his solution of the foundational problems is based upon it, he meant the principle literally, and would have rejected compositionality. He introduced (...) the distinction between sense and reference in his paper, “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” in 1892. He did not accept the notion the reference of an expression; instead, his approach is based upon the notion the reference of an expression in a given sentence. In the period before Tarski, logics were regarded as deductive theories. Tarski made an important step with his paper on “Truth in formalized languages,” in which he characterized the notion of a true sentence in a purely semantic way. (shrink)

Independence Friendly Logic, introduced by Hintikka, is a logic in which a quantifier can be marked for being independent of other quantifiers. Dependence logic, introduced by Väänänen, is a logic with the complementary approach: for a quantifier it can be indicated on which quantifiers it depends. These logics are claimed to be useful for many phenomena, for instance natural language semantics. In this contribution we will compare these two logics by investigating their application in a compositional analysis of the de (...) dicto - de re ambiguity in natural language. It will be argued that Independence Friendly logic is suitable, whereas Dependence Logic is not. (shrink)