Michael Friedman has recently argued that Carnap'sLogical Syntax of Language is fundamentally flawed in a way that reveals the ultimate failure of logical positivism. Friedman's argument depends crucially on two claims: (1) that Carnap was committed to the view that there is a universal metalanguage and (2) that given what Carnap wanted from a metalanguage, in particular given that he wanted a definition of analytic for an object language, he was in fact committed to a (...) hierarchy of stronger and stronger metalanguages. We argue that neither of these claims need be accepted. We show that there is no textual evidence for (1) and that if metalanguages are to be used for merely descriptive and not also justificatory purposes, Carnap does not need to define analyticity sufficiently for proving consistency, and so could have given a definition that does not entail a hierarchy of metalanguages. (shrink)

What distinguishes theology from the other uses of language? Is theology a specific language, or is it a specific situation of language, a specific way to consider language? I start with the issue of language’s inadequacy before divine revelation. By analyzing the variety of answers to this inopia verborum, I show that the theological inadequacy of language is not conceptual, but formal: it concerns the metalinguistic definition of inadequacy. Then, I formalize the relationship between (...) metalanguage and object language, and I argue that theology applies precisely to this formal relationship. From this, I deduce that the function of theology is to question the need for metalinguistic foundation and validation—given that this need characterizes human language, that is, what is not divine revelation. I end with two applications: on one hand, to the axiomatization of theology; on the other hand, to the methodology for inter-religious dialogue. (shrink)

In their (2008) article Liar-Like Paradox and Object Language Features C.S. Jenkins and Daniel Nolan (henceforth, JN) argue that it is possible to construct Liar-like paradox in a metalanguage even though its object language is not semantically closed. I do not take issue with this claim. I find fault though with the following points contained in JN’s article: First, that it is possible to construct Liar-like paradox in a metalanguage, even though this metalanguage (...) is not semantically closed. Second, that the presented examples of Liar-like paradox are supposed to be counterexamples to Tarski’s diagnosis of the classic Liar paradox. Third, that JN fail to notice Tarski’s postulate. And finally, that JN fail to recognize that the world they are pondering is not among the possible worlds. (shrink)

We argue that it would seem to be a mistake to blame Liar-like paradox on certain features of the object language, since the effect can be created with very minimal object languages that contain none of the usual suspects (truth-like predicates, reference to their own truth-bearers, negation, etc.).

The subject of my article is the principle of characterization – the most controversial principle of Meinong’s Theory of Objects. The aim of this text is twofold. First of all, I would like to show that Russell’s well-known objection to Meinong’s Theory of Objects can be reformulated against a new modal interpretation of Meinongianism that is presented mostly by Graham Priest. Secondly, I would like to propose a strategy which gives uncontroversial restriction to the principle of characterization and which allows (...) to avoid Russell’s argument. The strategy is based on the distinction between object- and metalanguage, and it applies to modal Meinongianism as well as to other so-called Meinongian theories. (shrink)

Building on the author's earlier work, this paper argues that language is a key issue in understanding human emotions and that treating English emotion terms as valid analytical tools continues to be a roadblock in the study of emotions. Further, it shows how the methodology developed by the author and colleagues, known as NSM (from Natural Semantic Metalanguage), allows us to break free of the “shackles” (Barrett, 2006) of English psychological terms and explore human emotions from a culture-independent (...) perspective. The use of NSM makes it possible to study human emotions from a genuinely cross-linguistic and cross-cultural, as well as a psychological, perspective and thus “opens up new possibilities for the scientific understanding of subjectivity and psychological experience” (Goddard, 2007). (shrink)

Context: Non-dualism suggests a new way of utilizing language without the assumption of categorically extralinguistic objects denoted by language. Problem: What is the innovative potential, what is the special value of non-dualism for science? Is non-dualism a fruitful conceptual revision or just a philosophical thought experiment with no or little significance for science? Method: We provide a concise introduction to non-dualism’s central new proposals and an overview of the papers. Results: Fourteen contributors show how this way of thinking (...) and speaking can be operationalized creatively, but also address some of its boundaries. Implications: Since not all of the aspects and problems highlighted for discussion in the original Call for Papers were answered satisfactorily, further research is necessary. For example, research is needed on the relationship between dualism’s distinction between object language and metalanguage on the one hand and non-dualism’s distinction between descriptions so far and descriptions from now on on the other; or on the infinite regress allegations by non-dualism against dualism. Constructivist content: Some authors show that non-dualist thinking is anti-essentialist, in a similar way as constructivist thinking. Some also show that comparable questions arise; for example, the question of whether non-dualism denies the material world (containing extralinguistic objects). (shrink)

ABSTRACT Massimo Dell’Utri proposes the idea of an ‘epistemological compass’, which he alleges provides a common intuitive sense of objectivity, the existence of which defenders of ‘post-truth’ positions would perversely try to deny. I argue that Dell’Utri’s choice of a compass – metaphorical or otherwise – is unfortunate because it is a device that presupposes that what appears plain to the senses is directed by hidden forces emanating from distant sources, such as the stars. More generally, the post-truth condition is (...) not about the denial of facts as ordinarily understood. Rather, it is about the denial of a privileged context in terms of which the significance of the facts should be understood. In Dell’Utri’s terms, it implies a plurality of epistemological compasses, which in turn undermines the effectiveness of the metaphor. I have described this situation as a struggle over ‘the name of the game’. In terms of philosophical logic, it is about which metalanguage provides the semantics for expressions in the object language the people try to deploy to their advantage. (shrink)

This paper aims to describe and examine Alfred Tarski's famous semantic conception of truth as well as some of the critiques presented against it. The first part of this paper is divided into five segments: criteria imposed upon every adequate definition of truth are discussed in the first segment; the second is dedicated to Tarski’s Convention T; distinction between object language and metalanguage, as well as Tarski’s attitude toward formalized and colloquial languages, is described in the third (...) segment; fourth segment is devoted to Tarski’s definition of truth using the notion of “satisfaction”; the last segment is the evaluation of Tarski’s solution of paradoxes. In the second part of this paper the selected objections against Tarski’s conception are presented with emphasis on their diversity. (shrink)

An evaluation of David Burrell's theory of the nature of analogy in Thomas Aquinas.

It is well known that Tarski proved a result which can be stated roughly as: no sufficiently rich, consistent, classical language can contain its own truth definition. Tarski's way around this problem is to deal with two languages at a time, an object language for which we are defining truth and a metalanguage in which the definition occurs. An obvious question then is: under what conditions can we construct a definition of truth for a given (...) class='Hi'>object language. Tarski claims that it is necessary and sufficient that the metalanguage be "essentially richer". Our contention, put bluntly, is that this claim deserves more scrutiny from philosophers than it usually gets and in fact is false unless "essentially richer" means nothing else than "sufficient to contain a truth definition for the object language.". (shrink)

Argument maps represent some arguments more effectively than others. The goal of this article is to account for that variability, so that those who wish to use argument maps can do so with more foresight. I begin by identifying four properties of argument maps that make them useful tools for evaluating arguments. Then, I discuss four types of argument that are difficult to map well: reductio ad absurdum arguments, charges of equivocation, logical analogies, and mathematical arguments. The difficulties presented by (...) these four types appear unrelated to one another, but I show that, in each case, the difficulty can be traced back to the use of metalinguistic reasoning. The need to represent a transition between object language and metalanguage can undermine one or more of the benefits that argument map representation would otherwise confer. (shrink)

Logical pluralists are committed to the idea of a neutral metalanguage, which serves as a framework for debates in logic. Two versions of this neutrality can be found in the literature: an agreed upon collection of inferences, and a metalanguage that is neutral as such. I discuss both versions and show that they are not immune to Quinean criticism, which builds on the notion of meaning. In particular, I show that the first version of neutrality is sub-optimal, and (...) hard to reconcile with the theories of meaning for logical constants, and the second version collapses mathematically, if rival logics, as object languages, are treated with charity in the metalanguage. I substantiate by proving a collapse theorem that generalizes familiar results. Thus, the existence of a neutral metalanguage cannot be taken for granted, and meaning-invariant logical pluralism might turn out to be dubious. (shrink)

We seek to trace how the assertion–rejection dichotomy arose, as well as in what forms it was realized in logical discourse. From this viewpoint, we observe the approaches to the concept of rejection by Łukasiewicz, Carnap, and Słupecki. We also explore the controversy between rejection and negation. Our main observation is that for a correct understanding of this dichotomy, it is necessary to distinguish between the object language and metalanguages of different levels.

This book offers a semantic and metasemantic inquiry into the representation of meaning in linguistic interaction. Kasia Jaszczolt offers a new contextualist take on the semantics/pragmatics boundary, and argues that this is the only promising stance on meaning. This approach allows the selection of the cognitively plausible object of enquiry - namely the intended, primary meaning - and its adoption as a unit of semantic analysis despite the varying provenance of the contributing information. The analysis transcends the said/implicated distinction (...) and heavily relies on the dynamic construction of meaning in discourse, using truth conditions as a tool and at the same time conforming to pragmatic compositionality. Meaning in Linguistic Interaction builds on the author's earlier work on Default Semantics, and adds new arguments in favour of radical contextualism, particularly with regard to the role of salience, the dynamic nature of the unit that forms a basis of the interpretation process, and the flexibility of word meaning. It is illustrated with examples from a variety of languages and offers formal representations of meaning in the metalanguage of Default Semantics. (shrink)

The paper explores Hegel's theory of language, from the Subjective Spirit book of his Encyclopedia. Hegel distinguishes between linguistic signs, as arbitrary signifiers and words, which occur when the signs are filled with thought or meaning. Words have greater objectivity than signs. The words of the positive, empirical sciences are taken up into Hegelian Science (system), affording it greater objectivity, which it, reciprocally re-confers on its linguistic contents.

The papers collected in this volume exemplify some of the trends in current approaches to logic, language and computation. Written by authors with varied academic backgrounds, the contributions are intended for an interdisciplinary audience. The first part of this volume addresses issues relevant for multi-agent systems: reasoning with incomplete information, reasoning about knowledge and beliefs, and reasoning about games. Proofs as formal objects form the subject of Part II. Topics covered include: contributions on logical frameworks, linear logic, and different (...) approaches to formalized reasoning. Part III focuses on representations and formal methods in linguistic theory, addressing the areas of comparative and temporal expressions, modal subordination, and compositionality. (shrink)

In this paper, we shall present a generalization of phrase structure grammar, in which all functional categories have type restrictions, that is, their argument types are specific domains. In ordinary phrase structure grammar, there is just one universal domain of individuals. The grammar does not make a distinction between verbs and adjectives in terms of domains of applicability. Consequently, it fails to distinguish between sentences like every line intersects every line, which is well typed, and every line intersects every point, (...) which is ill typed.Our generalization relates to ordinary phrase structure grammar in the same way as the higherlevel constructive type theory of Martin-Löf relates to the simple type theory of Church . Simple type theory has been used in linguistics and related with phrase structure grammar, especially in the tradition based on the work of Montague .Our definition of the grammar will be more formal than Montague's in the sense that we shall use a formal metalanguage, that of constructive type theory, for defining both the object language and its interpretation. The grammar, both syntax and semantics, is thus readily implementable in the type-theoretical proof system ALF . Inside type theory, a distinction can be made between the object language and the model, in other words, between syntactic and semantic types. It will turn out that the object language cannot be defined independently of the model, as in ordinary Tarski semantics. This is a direct consequence of introducing the typing restrictions.The grammar presented here can be seen as a formal linguistic elaboration of the work presented in Ranta 1991 and 1994. The organization of generative grammar as categorial grammar followed by sugaring should now look more familiar to the linguist, as the grammatical formalism on which sugaring operates is no longer full type theory but a set of phrase structure trees. (shrink)

Leśniewski’s metalogic is often considered to be difficult to understand because it differs greatly from its standard formulation. In this paper I try to explain the reasons of these idiosyncrasies. I claim that they have mainly two sources. First of all there is Leśniewski’s conviction that a formal system should be conceived as a set of concrete marks that can always physically and syntactically be expanded by the addition of new theses. Secondly there is Leśniewski’s conviction that definitions should neither (...) be formulas belonging to the metalanguage, nor deduction rules, but formulas belonging to the object-language and expressed with the help of the biconditional functor. The realisation of the first point is linked to the second one in so far as the metalinguistic rule for the writing out of definitions has to be formulated in a way that makes it possible to build the formal system in agreement with Leśniewski’s conception. While explaining these points I give an overview of the main peculiarities of Leśniewski’s metalogic. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 149-155. The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos ). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are composed of cells which…have a high measure of autonomy.”2 Autonomy also has ethical and political valences. De Grazia writes, “In Kant's enormously influential moral philosophy, autonomy (...) , or freedom from the causal determinism of nature, became prominent in justifying the human use of animals.”3 One of the oldest uses of autonomy in English is a description of the French civil war from the late sixteenth century: “Others of the…rebellion entred in counsell, whether they ought to admit the King vpon reasonable conditions, specially hauing their autonomy.”4 Life, and in particular human life, and in particular human politics, is well served by the usages of autonomy . What about the rest of reality, however? Should it be thought of, if it's even considered real and mind-independent, as pure stuff for the manipulation or decorative tastes of truly autonomous beings? We tend to think of things such as paperweights and iPhones as mere tools of human design and human use. To use them is to cause them to exist as fully and properly as they can. But according to Martin Heidegger, when a tool such as a paperweight is used, it disappears, or withdraws ( Entzug ). We are preoccupied with copying the page that the paperweight is holding down. We are concerned with an essay deadline, and the paperweight simply disappears into this general project. If the paperweight slips, or if the iPhone freezes, we might notice it. All of a sudden it becomes vorhanden (present-at-hand) rather than zuhanden (ready-to-hand).5 Yet Heidegger is unable to draw a meaningful distinction between what happens to a paperweight when it slips from the book I'm copying from and what happens to the paperweight when it presses on the still resilient pages of the thick paperback itself. Further still and related to this point, even when I am using the paperweight as part of some general task, I am not using the entirety of the paperweight as such. My project itself selects a thin slice of paperweight-being for the purposes of holding down a book. Even when it is zuhanden the paperweight is withdrawn. Graham Harman is the architect of this way of thinking.6 Harman discovered a gigantic coral reef of withdrawn entities beneath the Heideggerian submarine of Da-sein, which itself is operating at an ontological depth way below the choppy surface of philosophy, beset by the winds of epistemology, and infested with the sharks of materialism, idealism, empiricism and most of the other isms that have defined what is and what isn't for the last several hundred years. At a moment when the term ontology was left alone like a piece of well chewed old chewing gum that no one wants to have anything to do with, object-oriented ontology (OOO) has put it back on the table. The coral reef isn't going anywhere and once you have discovered it, you can't un-discover it. And it seems to be teeming with strange facts. The first fact is that the entities in the reef—we call them “objects” somewhat provocatively—constitute all there is: from doughnuts to dogfish to the Dog Star to Dobermans to Snoop Dogg. People, plastic clothes pegs, piranhas and particles are all objects. And they are all pretty much the same, at this depth. There is not much of a distinction between life and non-life (as there isn't in contemporary life science). And there is not much of a distinction between intelligence and non-intelligence (as there is in contemporary artificial intelligence theory). A lot of these distinctions are made by humans, for humans (anthropocentrism). And the concept autonomy has come into play in policing such distinctions. In this essay I shall to try to liberate autonomy for the sake of nonhumans. I shall do so by parsing carefully the title, which is taken from Hakim Bey's work The Temporary Autonomous Zone .8 First we shall explore the term autonomous . Then we shall explore what the full meaning of zone is. Finally, we shall investigate what temporary means. Each of these terms is of great value. An object withdraws from access. This means that its very own parts can't access it. Since an object's parts can't fully express the object, the object is not reducible to its parts. OOO is anti-reductionist. But OOO is also anti-holist. An object can't be reduced to its “whole” either, “reduced upwards” as it were. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. So we have a strange irreductionist situation in which an object is reducible neither to its parts nor to its whole. A coral reef is made of coral, fish, seaweed, plankton and so on. But one of these things on its own doesn't embody part of a reef. Yet the reef just is an assemblage of these particular parts. You can't find a coral reef in a parking lot. In this way, the vibrant realness of a reef is kept safe both from its parts and from its whole. Moreover, the reef is safe from being mistaken for a parking lot. Objects can't be reduced to tiny Lego bricks such as atoms that can be reused in other things. Nor can be reduced upwards into instantiations of a global process. A coral reef is an expression of the biosphere or of evolution, yes; but so is this sentence, and we ought to be able to distinguish between coral reefs and sentences in English. The preceding facts go under the heading of undermining . Any attempt to undermine an object—in thought, or with a gun, or with heat, or with the ravages of time or global warming—will not get at the withdrawn essence of the object. By essence is meant something very different from essentialism . This is because essentialism depends upon some aspect of an object that OOO holds to be a mere appearance of that object, an appearance-for some object. This reduction to appearance holds even if that object for which the appearance occurs is the object itself! Even a coral reef can't grasp its essential coral reefness. In essentialism, a superficial appearance is taken for the essence of a thing, or of things in general. In thinking essentialism we may be able to discern another way of avoiding OOO. This is what Harman has christened overmining .? The overminer decides that some things are more real than others: say for example human perception. Then the overminer decides that other things are only granted realness status by somehow coming into the purview of the more real entity. When I measure a photon, when I see a coral reef, it becomes what it is. But when I measure a photon, I never measure the actual photon. Indeed, since at the quantum scale to measure means “to hit with a photon or an electron beam” (or whatever), measurement, perception ( aisthesis ), and doing become the same. What I “see” are deflections, tracks in a diffusion cloud chamber or interference patterns. Far from underwriting a world of pure illusion where the mind is king, quantum theory is one of the very first truly rigorous realisms, thinking its objects as irreducibly resistant to full comprehension, by anything.9 So far we have made objects safe from being swallowed up by larger objects and broken down into smaller objects—undermining. And so far we have made objects safe from being mere projections or reflections of some supervenient entity—overmining. That's quite a degree of autonomy. Everything in the coral reef, from the fish to a single coral lifeform to a tiny plankton, is autonomous. But so is the coral reef itself. So are the heads of the coral, a community of tiny polyps. So is each individual head. Each object is like one of Leibniz's monads, in that each one contains a potentially infinite regress of other objects; and around each object, there is a potentially infinite progress of objects, as numerous multiverse theories are now also arguing. But the infinity, the uncountability, is more radical than Leibniz, since there is nothing stopping a group of objects from being an object, just as a coral reef is something like a society of corals. Each object is “a little world made cunningly” (John Donne).10 We are indeed approaching something like the political valance of autonomy . The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained “in” other objects. Let us, however, explore further the ramifications of the autonomy of objects. We will see that this mereological approach (based on the study of parts) only gets at part of the astonishing autonomy of things. Yet there are some more things to be said about mereology before we move on. Consider the fact that since objects can't be undermined or overmined, it means that there is strictly no bottom object . There is no object to which all other objects can be reduced, so that we can say everything we want to say about them, hypothetically at least, based on the behavior of the bottom object. The idea that we could is roughly E.O Wilson's theory of consilience .11 Likewise, there is no object from which all things can be produced, no top object . Objects are not emanations from some primordial One or from a prime mover. There might be a god, or gods. Suppose there were. In an OOO universe even a god would not know the essential ins and outs of a piece of coral. Unlike even some forms of atheism, the existence of god (or nonexistence) doesn't matter very much for OOO. If you really want to be an atheist, you might consider giving OOO a spin. If there is no top object and no bottom object, neither is there a middle object . That is, there is no such thing as a space, or time, “in” which objects float. There is no environment distinct from objects. There is no Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality). There is no world, if by world we mean a kind of “rope” that connects things together.12 All such connections must be emergent properties of objects themselves. And this of course is well in line with post-Einsteinian physics, in which spacetime just is the product of objects, and which may even be an emergent property of a certain scale of object larger than 10?¹?cm).13 Objects don't sit in a box of space or time. It's the other way around: space and time emanate from objects. How does this happen? OOO tries to produce an explanation from objects themselves. Indeed, the ideal situation would be to rely on just one single object. Otherwise we are stuck with a reality in which objects require other entities to function, which would result in some kind of undermining or overmining. We shall see that we have all the fuel we need “inside” one object to have time and space, and even causality. We shall discover that rather than being some kind of machinery or operating system that underlies objects, causality itself is a phenomenon that floats ontologically “in front of” them. In so doing, we will move from the notion of autonomy and begin approaching a full exploration of the notion of zone , which was promised at the outset of this essay. Since an object is withdrawn, even “from itself,” it is a self-contradictory being. It is itself and not-itself, or in a slightly more expanded version, there is a rift between essence and appearance within an object (as well as “between” them). This rift can't be the same as the clichéd split between substance and accidents , which is the default ontology. On this view, things are like somewhat boring cupcakes with somewhat less boring sugar sprinkles on them of different colors and shapes. But on the OOO view, what is called substance is just another limited slice of an object, a way of apprehending something that is ontologically fathoms deeper. What is called substance and what is called accidence are just on the side of what this essay calls appearance. The rift (Greek, chorismos ) between essence and appearance means that an object presents us with something like what in logic is known as the Liar: some version of the sentence “This sentence is false.” The sentence is true, which means that it is a lie, which means that it is false. Or the sentence is false, which means that it is telling the truth, which means that it is true. Now logic since Aristotle has tried desperately to quarantine such beasts in small backwaters and side streets so that they don't act too provocatively.14 But if OOO holds, then at least one very significant thing in the universe is both itself and not-itself: the object. An object is p ? ¬p. To cope with this fact, we shall need some kind of paraconsistent or even fully dialetheic logic, one that is not allergic to dialetheias (double-truthed things). Yet if we accept that objects are dialetheic, p ? ¬p, we can derive all kinds of things easily from objects. Consider the fact of motion. If objects only occupy one location “in” space at any “one” time, then Zeno's paradoxes will apply to trying to think how an object moves. Yet motion seems like a basic, simple fact of our world. Either everything is just an illusion and nothing really moves at all (Parmenides). Or objects are here and not-here “at the same time.”15 This latter possibility provides the basic setup for all the motion we could wish for. Objects are not “in” time and space. Rather, they “time” (a verb) and “space.” They produce time and space. It would be better to think these verbs as intransitive rather than transitive, in the manner of dance or revolt . They emanate from objects, yet they are not the object. “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” (Yeats).16 The point being, that for there to be a question, there must be a distinction—or there must not be (p ? ¬p).17 It becomes impossible to tell: “What constitutes pretense is that, in the end, you don't know whether it's pretense or not.”18 In this notion of the emergence of time and space from an object we can begin to understand the term zone . Zone can mean belt , something that winds around something else. We talk of temperate zones and war zones. A zone is a place where a certain action is taking place: the zone winds around, it radiates heat, bullets fly, armies are defeated. To speak of an autonomous zone is to speak of a place that a certain political act has carved out of some other entity. Cynically, Tibet is called TAR, the Tibetan Autonomous Region, for this very reason. In this phrase, Region tries to emulate zone : it sounds as if the place has its own rules, but of course, it is very much under the control of China. What action is taking place? “[N]ot something that just is what it is, here and now, without mystery, but something like a quest…a tone on its way calling forth echoes and responses…water seeking its liquidity in the sunlight rippling across the cypresses in the back of the garden.”19 If as suggested earlier there is no functional difference between substance and accidence; if there is no difference between perceiving and doing; if there is no real difference between sentience and non-sentience—then causality itself is a strange, ultimately nonlocal aesthetic phenomenon. A phenomenon, moreover, that emanates from objects themselves, wavering in front of them like the astonishingly beautiful real illusion conjured in this quotation of Alphonso Lingis. Lingis's sentence does what it says, casting a compelling, mysterious spell, the spell of causality, like a demonic force field. A real illusion: if we knew it was an illusion, if it were just an illusion, it would cease to waver. It would not be an illusion at all. We would be in the real of noncontradiction. Since it is like an illusion, we can never be sure: “What constitutes pretense…” A zone is what Lingis calls a level . A zone is not entirely a matter of “free will”: this concept has already beaten down most objects into abject submission. Objects are far more threateningly autonomous, and sensually autonomous, than the Kantian version of autonomy cited in the first paragraph of this essay. A zone is not studiously decided upon by an earnest committee before it goes into action. One of its predominant features is that it is already happening . We find ourselves in it, all of a sudden, in the late afternoon as the shadows lengthen around a city square, giving rise to an uncanny sensation of having been here before. Objects emit zones. Wherever I find myself a zone is already happening, an autonomous zone. It is the nonautonomous zones that are impositions on what is already the case. Or rather, these zones are autonomous zones that exclude and police. They are brittle. Every object is autonomous, but some objects try to maintain themselves through rigidity and brittleness, like (and such as) a police state. Paradoxically, the more rigidly one tries to exclude contradiction, the more virulent become the dialetheias that are possible. I can get around “This sentence is false” by imagining that there are metalanguages that explain what counts as a sentence. Then I can decide that this isn't a real sentence. This is basically Alfred Tarski's strategy, since he invented the notion of metalanguage specifically to cope with dialetheias.20 For example we might claim that sentences such as “This sentence is false” are neither true nor false. But then you can imagine a strengthened version of the Liar such as: “This sentence is not true”; or “This sentence is neither true nor false.” And we can go on adding to the strengthened Liar if the counter-attack tries to build immunity by specifying some fourth thing that a sentence can be besides true, false, and neither true nor false: “This sentence is false, or neither true nor false, or the fourth thing.” And so on.21 It seems as if language becomes more brittle the more it tries to police the Liars of this world. Why? I believe that this increasing brittleness is a symptom of a deep fact about reality. What is this deep fact? Simply that there are objects, that these objects are withdrawn, and that they are walking contradictions. This means indeed that (as Lacan put it) “there is no metalanguage,” since a metalanguage would function as a “middle object” that gave coherency and evenness to the others.22 Since there is no metalanguage, there is no rising above the disturbing illusory play of causality. This may even have political implications: no global critique is therefore possible, and attempts to smooth out or totalize are doomed to fail. To think the zone is to think the notion of temporary , which we shall now begin to discuss in greater detail. The zone is not in time: rather it “times.” But because a zone is an emanation of an object, it is based on a wavering fragility, since objects are p ? ¬p. When an object is born, that means that it has broken free of some other object. An object can be born because it and other objects are fragile. If not, no movement would be possible. Objects contain the seeds of their own destruction, a dialetheic sentence that says something like “This sentence cannot be proved.” Kurt Gödel argues that every true system of propositions contains at least one sentence that the system cannot prove. In order to be true, the system must have a minimum incoherence. To be real, it has to be fragile. Imagine a record player. Now imagine a record called I Cannot Be Played on This Record Player . When you play it on this record player, it produces sympathetic vibrations that cause the record player to shudder apart. No matter how many defense mechanisms you build in, there will always be the possibility of at least one record that destroys the record player.23 That is what being physical is. An object is inherently fragile because it is both itself and not-itself. When the rift between appearance and essence collapses, that is called destruction, ending, death. When an object breaks, several new objects are born. An opera singer sings a loud note in tune with the resonant frequency of a wine glass. (See the movie included below.) The singing is a zone, an autonomous level of intensity, opening a rift between appearance and essence. The glass ripples—for a moment it is nakedly a glass and a not-glass—almost as if it were having an orgasm, a little death. It is caught in the rift of the singing. Then its structure can't handle the coherence of the sound waves, and it breaks. It is incoherence and inconsistency that is the mark of existence, not consistency and noncontradiction. When things break or die, they become coherent. Essence disappears into appearance. I become the memories of friends. A glass becomes a dancing wave. Instantly, there are glass fragments, new temporary autonomous zones. The fragments have broken free from the glass. They are no longer its parts, but emanate their own time and space, becoming perhaps accidental weapons as they bury themselves in my flesh. Thus Hakim Bey's instructions on creating temporary autonomous zones oscillate disturbingly between performance art and politics, circus clowning and revolution. To play with the aesthetic is to play with causality, to rip from the sensual ether emanating from things new regions, new zones. Anarchist politics is the creation of fresh objects in a reality without a top or a bottom object, or for that matter a middle object: Everything in nature is perfectly real including consciousness, there's absolutely nothing to worry about. Not only have the chains of the Law been broken, they never existed; demons never guarded the stars, the Empire never got started, Eros never grew a beard. … There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin—your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.24 Bey imagines that this is because chaos is a primordial “undifferentiated oneness-of-being.” A Parmenides or a Spinoza or a Laruelle would read this a certain way. Individual objects, or decisions to talk about this rather than that, are just maggot-like things crawling around on the surface of the giant cheese of oneness.25 Yet he also describes chaos as “Primordial uncarved block, sole worshipful monster, inert & spontaneous, more ultraviolet than any mythology.” This image is of an inconsistent object, not of an undifferentiated field. An object, indeed, that can be distinguished from other things. If not, then the first part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , subtitled “The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism,” is a kind of onto-theology. Onto-theology proclaims that some things are more real than others. Bey, however, is writing poetically, and thus ambiguously. We are at liberty to read “undifferentiated oneness-of-being” as something like the irreducibility of a thing to its parts and so forth (undermining and overmining). This certainly seems closer to the language in the following paragraph: “There is no becoming … already you're the monarch of your own skin.”26 On this view, there is no difference between art and politics: “When ugliness, poor design & stupid waste are forced upon you, turn Luddite, throw your shoe in the works, retaliate.” Since Romanticism this has been the war cry of the vanguard artist.27 To say to is to fall prey to the tired axioms of the avant-garde, and we think we know how the game goes. But OOO is not simply a way to advocate “new and improved” versions of this shock-the-bourgeoisie boredom. Bey's text is certainly full enough of that. Rather, since causality as such is aesthetic, and since nonhumans are not that different from humans, the new approach would be to form aesthetic–causal alliances with nonhumans. These alliances would have to resist becoming brittle, whether that brittleness is right wing (authoritarianism) or left wing (the endless maze of critique). No “ism,” especially not the ultimate forms, nihilism and cynicism, is in any sense effective at this point. All forms of brittleness are based on the mistaken assumption that there is a metalanguage and that therefore “Anything you can do, I can do meta.” I will not be listing any approaches here, as Bey does. Such lists and manifestos belong to the vanguardism that no longer works. Why? Not because of some marvelous revolution in human consciousness, but because nonhumans have so successfully impinged upon human social, psychic and aesthetic space. It is the time after the end of the world. That happened in 1945, when a thin layer of radioactive materials was deposited in Earth's crust. Geology now calls it this era the Anthropocene . Ironically, this period, named after humans, is the moment at which even the most thick headed of us make decisive contact with nonhumans, from mercury in our blood to manta rays to magnesium. Richard Dawkins, Pat Robertson and Lady Gaga all have to deal with global warming and mass extinction, somehow. We now live in an Age of Asymmetry marked by a skewed, spiraling relationship between vast knowledge and vast nonhuman things—both become vaster and vaster because of one another and for the same reasons.28 This means that coming up with the perfect attitude or the perfect aesthetic prescription just won't work any more. Even the most hardened anthropocentrist now has to pay through the nose for basic food supplies, and has to use more sunscreen. Whether he knows it or acknowledges it, he is already acting with regard towards nonhumans. There is nothing special to think, no special critique that will get rid of the stains of coexistence. The problem won't fit into the well-established modern boxes, which is why the “mystical,” “spiritual” quality of Bey's prose is welcome. Of course, when I put it this way, you may immediately close off and decide that I am talking about perfect attitudes after all, or something outside of politics, or other ways that the radical left marshals to police its thinking of the nonhuman. Because that is what is really at stake in all this: the nonhuman in its coexistence with the human—bosons, gods, clouds, spirits, lifeforms, experiences, the sunlight rippling across the cypresses. Bey begins to get at this in a Latour litany in the second part of The Temporary Autonomous Zone , “The Assassins”: Pomegranate, mulberry, persimmon, the erotic melancholy of cypresses, membrane-pink shirazi roses, braziers of meccan aloes & benzoin, stiff shafts of ottoman tulips, carpets spread like make-believe gardens on actual lawns—a pavilion set with a mosaic of calligrammes—a willow, a stream with watercress—a fountain crystalled underneath with geometry— the metaphysical scandal of bathing odalisques, of wet brown cupbearers hide-&-seeking in the foliage—“water, greenery, beautiful faces.”29 This will be conveniently dismissed as orientalism. If we're never allowed to escape the crumbling prison of modernity for fear of imperialism there is truly no hope. In a similar way, the fear of anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism is very often staged from a place that just is anthropocentrism .30 Critique turns into ressentiment . An object radiates a zone that is aesthetic and therefore causal. Because objects “time” they are temporary. Not because they exist “in” time that eventually gets the better of them. Their very existence implies the possibility of their non-existence. Since objects are not consistent, they can cease to exist. But nothing, no one, will ever be able to insert a blade between appearance and existence, even thought there is a rift there. Now that's what I call autonomy. NOTES 1. John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 96. 2. P. B. Medawar and J. S. Medawar, The Life Science: Current Ideas in Biology (London: Wildwood House, 1977), 8. 3. David DeGrazia, Animal Rights: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 5. 4. Antony Colynet, A True History of the Civil Warres in France (London, 1591), 480. 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press, 1996) 62–71. 6. Graham Harman, Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2002). 7. Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991). 8. Graham Harman, The Quadruple Object (Ripley: Zero Books, 2011), 7–18. 9. This is not the place to get into an argument about quantum theory, but I have argued that quanta also do not endorse a world that I can't speak about because it is only real when measured. This world is that of the reigning Standard Model proposed by Niels Bohr and challenged by De Broglie and Bohm (and now the cosmologist Valentini, among others). See Timothy Morton, “Here Comes Everything: The Promise of Object-Oriented Ontology,” Qui Parle 19.2 (Spring–Summer, 2011), 163–190. 10. John Donne, Holy Sonnets 15, in The Major Works: Including Songs and Sonnets and Sermons , ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 11. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Knopf, 1998). 12. Martin Heidegger, What Is a Thing? (Washington: Regnery, 1968), 243. 13. Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory (London: Penguin, 2006); Petr Horava, “Quantum Gravity at a Lifshitz Point,” arXiv:0901.3775v2 [hep-th]. 14. Graham Priest, In Contradiction (Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege. 15. Priest, In Contradiction , 172–181. 16. William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children,” Collected Poems , ed. Richard J. Finneran (New York: Scribner, 1996). 17. Paul de Man, “Semiology and Rhetoric,” Diacritics 3.3 (Autumn, 1973), 27–33 (30). 18. Jacques Lacan, Le seminaire, Livre III: Les psychoses (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1981), 48. See Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 206. 19. Alphonso Lingis, The Imperative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 29. 20. Priest, In Contradiction , 9–27. 21. See Graham Priest and Francesco Berto, “ Dialetheism ,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2010 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. 22. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection , tr. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 311. 23. The analogy can be found at length in Douglas Hofstadter, “Contracrostipunctus,” Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 75–81. 24. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 25. This is closest to the language of François Laruelle in Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2011) 179. 26. Bey, “ Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 27. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 28. For further discussion see Timothy Morton, “From Modernity to the Anthropocene: Ecology and Art in the Age of Asymmetry,” The International Social Science Journal 209 (forthcoming). 29. Bey, “ The Assassins ,” Temporary Autonomous Zone . 30. Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 75–76. (shrink)

Alexius Meinong's Gegenstandstheorie is subject to a formal semantic paradox. The theory of defective objects originally developed by Meinong in response to Ernst Mally's paradox about self-referential thought is rejected as a general solution to paradox in the object theory. The intentionality thesis is also refuted by the counter-example of the unapprehended mountain. It is argued that despite these difficulties, an object theory is required in order to make intuitively correct sense of ontological commitment. ;A version of Meinong's (...) theory is formalized. The logic has non-standard truth value semantics and an objectual interpretation of quantifiers for a domain of existent and non-existent objects. Theories of intentional, referential, and extensional identity are offered, together with two theories of definite description, lambda abstraction, eight systems of alethic modal logic, and formal metatheory. The logic avoids the incompleteness and undecidability limitations of Godel and Church, and all logical, semantic, and set theoretical paradoxes, without type theory or Tarskian hierarchy of metalanguages. It is naively complete and mechanically decidable. ;Wittgenstein's private language argument is refuted as an obstacle to defining private mental objects in the logic. The argument is shown to be valid, but unsound. The object theory logic may therefore provide a mixed or impure private language, and its domain may contain private mental objects as well as ordinary public and non-existent objects. This means that it constitutes an object theory logic of intention, and can be used to represent the logical structure of intentional and specifically phenomenological philosophical theories that require the intelligible designation of private mental objects. ;Appendices include Henkin-type consistency, completeness, and compactness proofs ; criticism of Kazimierz Twardowski's arguments for the distinction between content and object in phenomenological psychology; translation of and commentary on Mally's essay, "Uber die Unabhangigkeit der Gegenstande vom Denken"; a discussion of the distinction between nuclear and extra-nuclear properties, and the eliminability of the modal moment; and a philosophical application of the logic to a solution of the paradox of analysis. (shrink)

An excellent introduction to communication theory, this book is a comprehensive study of its subject; fields such as linguistics, logic, mathematics, and psychology are considered in terms of their relevance for communication theory. No material that appeared in the first edition has been deleted from this second edition, but some comments have been added, some figures updated, and the bibliography extended to include the new publications in the field. Cherry begins with an examination of the concept of "communication"; he also (...) discusses social structures, considering the pattern of communication within a social group. After this introductory chapter, Cherry presents an historical review of the evolution of communication theory; he discusses codes, signs, brains, and machines, mentioning the work of such scientists as Shannon, Zipf, and Wiener. Topics such as phonetics, phonemics, object language and metalanguage, Zipf's Law, and semantics are also considered, as well as the role of the telecommunication engineer, who describes and analyzes the physical signals themselves without reference to their meanings. In the concluding chapter, psychological considerations concerning the reception of information are presented: recognition, for example, of universals, of geometric figures, of speech sounds, of distorted speech, the relevance of past experience, and the intake of information by the senses. Although technical material is presented, the book is very readable; jargon is kept at a minimum. The result is an exceedingly interesting and stimulating book.—E. M. (shrink)

In the worlds of philosophy, linguistics, and communications theory, a view has developed which understands conscious experience as experience which is 'reflected' back upon itself through language. This indicates that the consciousness we experience is possible only because we have culturally invented language and subsequently evolved to accommodate it. This accords with the conclusions of Daniel Dennett (1991), but the 'hermeneutic objection' would go further and deny that the objective sciences themselves have escaped the hermeneutic circle. -/- The (...) consciousness we humans experience is developed only within the context of crossing the 'symbolic threshold' (Percy 1975; Deacon 1997) and one of the earliest and most important symbols we acquire is that of the self, or 'the subject of experience'. It is only when we achieve self-awareness that the world, as such, comes to exist for us as an object (which contains categories and sub-categories of objects). Any consciousness imputed to prelinguistic stages of development is based on projection and guesswork, since we can know nothing directly of it. It can be said that any experience which does not separate an inner subject from an outer world is probably a continuum of sensation in which environmental stimulus and instinctive response are experienced as a unity; it may be 'lived experience' but it is experience 'lived' non-consciously. -/- Speech requires assertion and by learning to speak we find ourselves asserting, in essence, our selves into the world. The narrative form of language allows us to develop life stories, self-knowledge, and, most important, narrative memory coincident with narrative time. All this is made possible with the intersubjective 'net' of language which allows us to know ourselves by first identifying with the viewpoint of others; and, later, such allows us to identify with other minds as we anticipate their reception our communication. These three, assertion, narrative, and intersubjectivity are the essence of what language is and are the keystones that make culture possible outside of nature. (shrink)

Controversy has arisen of late over the claim that deflationism about truth requires that we explain meaning in terms of something other than truth-conditions. This controversy, it is argued, is due to unclarity as to whether the basic deflationary claim that a sentence and a sentence that attributes truth to it are equivalent in meaning is intended to involve the truth- predicate of the object language for which we develop an account of meaning, or is intended to involve (...) the truth- predicate of the metalanguage in which we develop an account of meaning. The former view is compatible with the truth-conditional theory of meaning for the object language, the latter is incompatible with it. However, the former view is also trivially true; hence we should endorse the claim that any form of deflationism worth being interested in is incompatible with understanding meaning truth-conditionally. (shrink)

Inquiry into the metaphysics of essence tends to be pursued in a realist and model-theoretic spirit, in the sense that metaphysical vocabulary is used in a metalanguage to model truth conditions for the object-language use of essentialist vocabulary. This essay adapts recent developments in proof-theoretic semantics to provide a nominalist analysis for a variety of essentialist vocabularies. A metalanguage employing explanatory inferences is used to individuate introduction and elimination rules for atomic sentences. The object-language (...) assertions of sentences concerning essences are then interpreted as devices for marking off structural features of the explanatory inferences that, under a given interpretation, constitute the contents of the atoms of the language. On this proposal, object-language essentialist vocabulary is mentioned in a proof-theoretic metalanguage that uses a vocabulary of explanation. The result is a nominalist interpretation of essence as a modality, understood in the grammatical sense as a modification of the copula, and a view of metaphysical inquiry that is closely connected to the explanatory commitments present in first-order inquiry into things like sets, chemicals, and organisms. This result illustrates that some of the presuppositions that have animated analytic metaphysics over the last few decades can be profitably substituted with more practice-oriented conceptions of the forms of reasoning at work in different domains of human knowledge. (shrink)

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In “Psychopower and Ordinary Madness” my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler’s recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler’s work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism—or, more specifically, nonhumanism—to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly’s conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This (...) paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom’s conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani’s deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog). (shrink)

Davidson approaches the notions of meaning and interpretation with the aim of characterizing semantic competence in the syntactically characterized natural language. The objective is to provide a truth-theory for a language, generating T-sentences expressed in the semantic metalanguage, so that each sentence of the object language receives an appropriate interpretation. Proceeding within the constraints of referential semantics, I will argue for the viability of reconstructing the notion of linguistic meaning within the Tarskian theory of reference. (...) However, the view proposed here involves a revision of Davidson’s con-ception of the object of semantic investigation. Taking (idealized) language-theories as the proper object of semantic characterization, provides solutions to outstanding problems in Davidson’s views, better approximates the practice in standard model-theoretic semantics, and incorporates the elements of semantic competence sought for in tradi¬tional theories of lexical analysis. Sources of evidence beyond those emphasized by Davidson will be invoked in order to allow for the selection of interpre¬tive T-sentences. In the final section, possible Quinean objections will be considered. (shrink)

SummaryMetatheory may be pursued immanently, i.e., within the object language, or transcendently in metalanguages. Immanently, the hierarchy of metalanguages gives way to a hierarchy of predicates. The immanent approach accentuates the symmetry between Russell's paradox and Cantor's theorem: class shortage versus predicate shortage. Appeal to metatheoretic models, in defining logical truth, gives way to appeal to substitutions of expressions of the object language. Can this be said also of set‐theoretic truth, despite predicate shortage? Equivalently: is substitutional (...) quantification unscathed by predicate shortage? Anyway substitutional quantification balks at impredicative cases. (shrink)

The thesis of this paper concerns the fundamental role of "ordinary objects" with respect to the structure of natural language. It ascribes their role as basic objects of reference to their being both natural and "given" individuals. Section 1 will summarize that idea. Further argument will be offered in Section 2. An objection appealing to physical theory will be answered in Section 3. Sections 4, 5, and 6 consider the implications of the thesis for current theories of the identity (...) of "ordinary objects" over time. Section 4 deals with some traditional, paradoxical, but still influen tial arguments. Section 5 focuses on four-dimensionalism and the ontology of possible worlds. Section 6 examines the theory of David Wiggins, who recognizes that biological individuals, at least, are both natural and given, but who retains a form of conceptualism. Some remarks are made through out about the wider philosophical motivations of different approaches to the topic of identity, and about the nature of philosophical "analysis.". (shrink)

Against the background of the ideal of value-free science formulated by M. Weber the paper defends the view that science is not - and cannot be - value-free, and, moreover, that values relevant to science are both cognitive and moral.Three arguments are developed to support this thesis: (1) Since there is no algorithm for making methodological decisions as to what theory should be accepted, what method should be used, etc, scientists have to pass judgements that are essentially evaluative. Those judgements (...) belong to science. The attempt to save the ideal of value-free science by distinguishing value-free object language and value-laden metalanguage (in which those evaluative judgements would be formulated) does not work. For there are no reasons to expel the methodology of a given science from that science, and even if we made this move, we would finally come to the level of evaluative judgements, unless we accept regressus ad infinitum. (2) Even if the above distinction were tenable, this would not save the ideal of value-free science. For our language is full of the so-called ,,thick ethical concepts\" that are both descriptive and evaluative. They are justifiably used at least in some sciences. We could exclude - by definition - such concepts from science, but this would result in expelling many legitimate disciplines from the realm of science. This would mean not that science was value--free but that we made it so. (3) The fact that scientific results are sometimes expressed by means of ethically thick concepts does not allow us to restrict values involved in science to epistemological values - moral values are involved as well. Moreover, apparently pure methodological concepts such as ,,good solution\" or ..sufficient evidence\" seem to be also ..ethically thick\". Such considerations allow us to draw a conclusion that science possesses intrinsic moral dimension, and separating the epistemic and moral points of view in discussions about science is unjustified. (shrink)

The essay discusses a recurrent criticism of the isomorphism-invariance criterion for logical terms, according to which the criterion pertains only to the extension of logical terms, and neglects the meaning, or the way the extension is fixed. A term, so claim the critics, can be invariant under isomorphisms and yet involve a contingent or a posteriori component in its meaning, thus compromising the necessity or apriority of logical truth and logical consequence. This essay shows that the arguments underlying the criticism (...) are flawed since they rely on an invalid inference from the modal or epistemic status of statements in the metalanguage to that of statements in the object-language. The essay focuses on McCarthy’s version of the argument, but refers to Hanson and McGee’s versions as well. (shrink)

There is an intuition, notoriously difficult to formalise, that only some predicates express real properties. J. M. Dunn formalises this intuition with relevance logic, proposing a notion of relevant predication. For each first order formula Ax, Dunn specifies another formula that is intuitively interpreted as "Ax expresses a real property". Chapter I calls such an approach an object language approach, since the claim that Ax expresses a real property is rendered as a formula in the object (...) class='Hi'>language. On a metalanguage approach, on the other hand, the claim that Ax expresses a real property would be metalinguistic, mentioning but not using the formula Ax. ;Our Introduction begins by investigating Dunn's motivation for relevant predication, and argues that it implicitly presupposes some interpretation of identity. Indeed, part of the dissertation's work is to use relevant predication as a key to a coherent account of relevant identity. ;Chapter I re-motivates relevant predication. We consider P. Geach's distinction between real and "Cambridge" change, and suggest that there is an underlying distinction between real and Cambridge predicates. We further argue that no classical object language approach can formalise this distinction. So we turn to relevance logic, remotivating relevant predication, with Geach's distinction in mind. ;In light of this new motivation, we argue that relevant prediction relies on a logically weak notion of identity, according to which "x = y" means "x and y share all relevant properties". Identity is taken up in a more technical setting in Chapters IV and V. ;Subsequent chapters investigate technical issues that flow from Chapter I. Chapter II investigates metalinguistic grammatical characterisations of relevant predication. Chapter III concerns the semantics of first order relevance logic. Chapter IV investigates the identity in R and its relationship to relevant predication. In particular, Chapter IV argues against introducing the axiom, $\to$ Ay), in relevance logic, since the resulting systems are unstable, in a sense motivated by the notion of relevant identity underlying Dunn's notion of relevant predication. Finally Chapter V investigates the possibility of a coherent theory of identity in R's modal relatives ${\bf R}\sp\square$ and E. (shrink)

In Frege’s analysis of the relationship between science and fiction there are two important aspects, which the paper will discuss. It shows that Frege makes a strict distinction between Dichtung und Wissenschaft on the level of object language but not on the level of metalanguage. In his “On Sense and Reference” and in scattered remarks elsewhere Frege explains the semantics of scientific and everyday discourse. As a kind of side product he presents an explication of the concept (...) of fictional discourse concerning questions of illocutionary force and reference. Here Frege anticipates J. R. Searle’s speech-act-theory of fictional discourse, which allows to understand works of fiction as consisting of fictional discourse. On the basis of Frege’s distinctions this approach is defended against ontological arguments, which make use of terms like ‘fictive entities’ or ‘non-existent objects’ in the Meinongian tradition. Frege excludes the connotative or figurative elements of language, called “colourings and shadings” of sense or thought, from the scientific use of language and assigns such elements to “the art of poetry” or “eloquence”. The fact that the expression ‘colouring’ is itself a figurative term, raises a paradoxical question: To what extent does understanding Frege’s own explanation of the difference between sense and colouring depend on the poetic or at least rhetoric use of language? There are reasons to believe that Frege was—even if only reluctantly—aware of this paradox. Otherwise he would not have repeatedly emphasized that explanations of categorial logical distinctions cannot dispense with “figurative expressions”. Insofar as such distinctions are “reliant upon the accommodating understanding of the reader”, they pay tribute to a rhetoric of cognition. While Frege denies that colourings contribute to cognitive content, he must still admit that they make an indispensable protreptic contribution to conveying cognition. (shrink)

J. L. Austin, in "Ifs and Cans," proclaimed the common hope that we soon "may see the birth, through the joint labors of philosophers, grammarians, and numerous other students of language, of a true and comprehensive science of language." The problem has always been with the "joint labors" part. Philosophers have always been willing to issue linguists dictums and linguists have been happy to teach philosophers "plain facts." Austin’s general view of language, and his particular notion of (...) performative utterance, can be found in the writing of J. R. Firth, the most commanding British linguist of Austin’s generation, but Austin never refers to Firth. In the present volume, however, we find clear and exciting evidence of genuinely joint labors on the part of philosophers and linguists. They stem from a summer conference in 1969 rounded out with contributions from notables. To two thick issues of Synthese the editors have added a dazzling piece by Saul Kripke, two substantial pieces by James McCawley and J. R. Ross, a short paper by Paul Ziff, and a reprint of P. F. Strawson’s "Grammar and Philosophy." This is an invaluable book and the best book among the many now available concerning the interaction of linguistics and philosophy: worth the cost, which the contributors attempted to reduce through foregoing royalties. The philosophers in this volume hold, or hold intriguing, the view that the semantics of a natural language can and must, in effect, be a theory of truth for a language in much the manner that Tarski suggested, and provided, for artificial language: the recursive specification of biconditionals in which the left hand gives the structural description of an object language sentence and the right hand, the truth conditions in the metalanguage. In "homophonic" translation this requirement can be trivially satisfied simply by mentioning the sentence on the left that one uses on the right: one makes the requirement non-trivial by forcing enough into the recursive specification so that one captures the native speaker’s implicit semantic competence. In this volume, the "orthodox" Davidsonian program, which takes the syntax of the metalanguage to be standard predicate logic, is ably argued by John Wallace ; Richard Montague, David Lewis, and Jaakko Hintikka would want an intensional logic covering modality and propositional attitudes. The linguists who find this philosophical climate most appealing are called "generative semanticists": McCawley, Ross, George Lakoff and others argue that any proposed semantic rule will eventually prove necessary to syntax too and that, hence, the deepest level of syntactical form will be equivalent to semantic form. Whatever the ultimate fate of this joint program, it leads here to much exciting interaction between linguists and philosophers: linguists who welcome the machinery and conceptual standards of modern logic, and philosophers who try to grasp the specifics of crucial issues in recent linguistic theory. Even if Quine’s doubts, here sketched, and Chomsky’s currently unpublished more technical objections should be well-founded, nonetheless the joint labor will have been very much worthwhile. Aside from this general debate about semantics, there are several papers covering more specific issues. The papers of J. A. Fodor, Terence Parsons, and Ross concern adverbs and the logical form of action sentences; several papers, particularly B. H. Partee’s, examine "Opacity, Coreference, and Pronouns." In all these papers one notes the fulfillment of Austin’s hope that philosophic and linguistic arguments should become intermixed, if not at times properly indistinguishable. Perhaps the most enjoyable and exciting paper stands aside from linguistics: Saul Kripke’s "Naming and Necessity." Kripke here argues quite informally for the separation of analytic, a priori, and necessary that is required for a Kripke style, S5, modal logic with de re modalities. "Gold is a yellow metal," for example, turns out to be contingent, while "Heat is the motion of particles" is necessary but a posteriori ; and that philosopher’s stone of stones, "The morning star is the evening star," is discovered to be necessary but a posteriori.—J. L. (shrink)

Book reviewed:;Jerrold J. Katz, Language and OtherObjects;Book reviewed:;Jerrold J. Katz, Language and Other Abstract Objects;Book reviewed:;Jerrold J. Katz, Language and Other Abstract Objects;Book reviewed:;Jerrold J. Katz, Language and Other Abstract Objects;Book reviewed:;Jerrold J. Katz, Language and Other Abstract Objects;Book reviewed:;Jerrold J. Katz, Language and Other Abstract Objects;Book reviewed:;Jerrold J. Katz, Language and Other Abstract Objects;Book reviewed:;Jerrold J. Katz, Language and Other Abstract Objects;Book reviewed:;Jerrold J. Katz, Language and Other Abstract Objects;Book reviewed:;Jerrold (...) J. Katz, Language and Other Abstract Objects. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung Dieser Beitrag beschäftigt sich am Beispiel des islamischen Diskursfeldes mit der metasprachlichen Beschreibung objektsprachlicher Ab- und Ausgrenzungsdiskurse. Dies bringt zwangsläufig eine Auseinandersetzung mit den Dynamiken zwischen objekt- und metasprachlicher Begriffsebene mit sich. Der Artikel diskutiert in einem ersten Schritt Talal Asads Konzeption islamischer Orthodoxie und den ihr zugrundeliegenden Traditionsbegriff. In einem zweiten Schritt werden anhand von Beispielen aus dem nordamerikanischen Sufidiskurs und dem modernen türkischen Religionsdiskurs objektsprachliche Grenzziehungsdynamiken innerhalb des islamischen Diskursfeldes analysiert. Der letzte Teil des Aufsatzes widmet sich (...) der Metaebene und führt, in Abgrenzung zum statischen Stammbaummodell, einen dynamischen Begriff von religiöser Tradition ein, der es ermöglichen soll, Überlagerungen zwischen religiösen Formationen niedrigen Verdichtungsgrades sowie Prozesse der Religionisierung ins Blickfeld zu nehmen. (shrink)

What's wrong with modalities in (Wittgenstein 1922)? In (Suszko 1968), the writer argued that "Wittgenstein was somewhat confused and wrong in certain points. For example, he did not see the clear-cut distinction between language (theory) and metalanguage (metatheory): a confusion between use and mention of expressions". Furthermore, a modal logic was proposed in (von Wright 1986) as depicting Wittgenstein's bipolarity thesis in a S5 frame. -/- The aim of the present paper is to deal with the specific case (...) of epistemic modal logic: such a logic of propositional attitudes assumes a philosophy of language that would violate Wittgenstein's two main assumptions. (shrink)

The paper reconstructs the three main stages in the development of Carnap’s semantics in the years 1935–1947. It starts with Carnap’s approach to metalogic in his Zirkelprotokolle (1931) and his Logische Syntax der Sprache (1934) from the point of view of one-level approach to the relation between metalanguage and its object-language. It then analyzes Tarski’s turn to semantics in his paper presented at the Paris conference in September 1935, as well as the implications of his view for (...) Carnap’s approach to semantics from 1935 until 1943. Finally, it analyzes Church’s rediscovery of Frege and its impact on Carnap’s shift to the extension/intension distinction in his semantics in the years 1943–1947. (shrink)

Understanding the language of rejections and objections is an important part of the analysis and practice of argument. In order to strengthen this understanding, we might turn to diagramming, as it has been shown to have the virtue of improving critical thinking skills. This paper discusses what reliable meaning can be taken from words and phrases related to rejections and objections, and then how to diagram them.

Alexander Pruss has given a quick argument against the claim that consistency is possibility using Gödel’s second incompleteness theorem. The argument does not distinguish metalanguage claims of consistency from object-language ones, rendering it unsound.

This paper develops some modal metatheory for quantified modal logic. In such a theory, the logic of a first-order modal object-language is made sensitive to the modal facts, stated in the metalanguage. This is radically different from possible worlds semantics, which reduces questions of validity to questions of nonmodal set theory. We consider theories which characterize a notion of truth under a second-order interpretation, where an operator for metaphysical necessity is treated homophonically. The form they take is (...) crucially influenced by whether the Barcan formulas are part of the metalogic. The main result is that, with the Barcan formulas, formulating a modal metatheory is easy; principles of classical semantics transfer over smoothly with natural adaptations to the modal setting. Without the Barcan formulas, it seems to be much harder. Several options are considered, but each involves commitments plausibly in tension with the underlying philosophical motivations for rejecting them. (shrink)

Book reviewed:Jerrold J. Katz, Language and Other Abstract Objects.

The history of contemporary modal logic dates back to the writings of C. S. Lewis in the early part of this century. Since then, a growing body of literature has attested to professional interest in the area, and in a number of related issues in philosophical logic which have received wide attention. The recent development of powerful formal techniques for modal system building, together with an increasing interest in modal logic as a tool for philosophical analysis, have created a need (...) for an up-to-date text to introduce students to this material. Snyder's book attempts to answer this need. Assuming an understanding of elementary propositional logic, Snyder introduces a reductive technique called cancellation for detecting the theorems of a system of logic. This technique, analogous to the construction of Smullyan trees but more compact, is extended to modal and quantified contexts. Cancellation versions of the systems M and Mn of G. H. von Wright, and S4 and S5 of Lewis are developed. Snyder uses a Hintikka type of semantics, showing how the various formal systems are differentiated at the semantic level by differing conditions which must be imposed on the model systems used as interpretations for them. These model systems, and the conditions imposed upon them, are in turn described by means of a metalanguage which is essentially first-order quantificational logic. The power of this technique stems from the fact that for every object language formula of a system, there is a corresponding formula in the metalanguage which describes the conditions an interpretation must meet in order to satisfy the original formula. The conditions that the interpretations of a given system of logic must meet are reflected in this metalanguage as "antecedent assumptions," and these in turn correspond to cancellation rules for the object language. This correspondence is constructed in such a way that the metalinguistic counterpart of each theorem of the system will be a theorem of first-order logic. Snyder's primary interest is in showing how modal logic can be used, with the help of these techniques, to build a large variety of formal systems and to "tailor" such systems to meet a variety of analytical tasks. Simple modal systems are developed for the articulation of a number of modal concepts, in addition to the classic alethic ones. Examples are taken from temporal, deontic, and epistemic logic to show how specific interpretations of the meanings of the relevant operators lead to the incorporation of appropriate conditions in the formal systems used to articulate them. An entire chapter is devoted to a discussion of the paradoxes of material and strict implication, and to an attempt to articulate the notion of entailment through the development of formal systems which include a dyadic modal operator that is free of these paradoxes. The final chapter discusses such classical issues as proper names, reference, fictional entities, definite descriptions, and existence presuppositions. Appendices deal with such matters as the equivalence of the cancellation systems to more classical axiomatic-deduction systems, and the sketch of a proof of soundness and completeness for all the modal systems presented. While designed as a text, this volume should be of interest to both logicians and those working in metaphysics and language analysis, since the primary concern of the author is to develop techniques that will facilitate the usefulness of modal logic as a tool for philosophical analysis. The instructor's manual contains many suggestions derived from the author's experience in teaching this non-standard treatment of the subject.--K. T. (shrink)