Existence and identity in quantified modal logics.

The semantical structure of fictional discourse

Choice and descriptions in enriched intensional languages — I

The ancient principle of distributivity of necessity (DN for short), that necessary propositions only entail necessary propositions, has acquired an upstart companion, the distributivity of contingency (DC), which threatens to borrow some plausibility from DN; violations of these principles are sometimes lumped together as "fallacies of modality".' The DC principle, according to which contingent statements only entail contingent statements, has played a specially important role in the discussion of entailment; and in particular it has taken a central part in Anderson and Belnap's important theory of entailment E. The DC principle has also had a major part in attacks on linguistic theories of logical necessity. We contend, however, that the principle and minor modifications of it, are false. We argue that the principle provides an example of a strong false thesis drawing its plausibility from its association with a weak but trivial counterpart which cannot however perform the task of the strong principle. We also explain in detail why no version of the principle can fulfill the role for which it is needed in E.

A fallacy of modality

Indulging in intellectual autobiography, I sketch the reasons and ways I became a practicing Meinongian logician. The path involves a chain of transgressions, especially of extensionalist presuppositions, and a struggle against widespread misinterpretations of Meinong’s object theory. Although the opposition toward Meinong’s theory of object persists in analytic philosophy, its main insights, that thought is intentional and that logic must be ontically neutral, have not lost their attraction. Moreover, there is no substantive criticism to show that we cannot refer to and truly predicate properties of intended objects regardless of their ontic status. The discussion affords an opportunity to discuss some difficult topics in object theory, and the sociology of Meinong’s scandalously biased lack of reception in the history of mainstream analytic philosophy. My commitment to seeking an ontically neutral adequate semantics for the propositions of science that turn out to be false, the hypotheses that are disconfirmed, as well as the logic of fiction, continues to drive my interest in seeing Meinongian logic, not merely take its place in some form alongside referentially extensionalist logics, but to engulf, encompass and supplant existence-presuppositional traditional conventional analytic philosophy-favored purely referentially extensionalist logics.

Confessions of a Meinongian Logician

An Adequate theory of meaning and truth is semantically important. Such a theory necessarily includes in its analysis nonentities, items that do not exist. So what is semantically, and hence logically, important is bound to include nonentities. In virtue of the modifier ‘semantically“, the first premiss is analytic (what is semantically important may not be important), and it is comparatively uncontroversial. By contrast the second premise of the syllogism, which we want to stick to, is decidedly controversial. So too is the thesis (advanced in [2] and [3] and in Chisholm [15]) – which implies the inadequacy of classical logical theories – that there are a great many natural language statements, statements an adequate theory should be able to treat of, which cannot be analysed logically, and semantically, without the equivalent of an appeal to nonentities. Defence of the thesis has been somewhat piecemeal, taking the form that all the theories so far offered which try to dispense with nonentities break down or run into insuperable difficulties, difficulties which are readily surmounted given appropriate talk about nonentities. In what follows we shall outline more general sorts of argument for the thesis, designed to show that no theory which dispenses with nonentities as objects of discourse can do justice to the data.

The (logical) importance of not existing

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Existence and identity in quantified modal logics.

Citations

The semantical structure of fictional discourse

Choice and descriptions in enriched intensional languages — I

A fallacy of modality

Confessions of a Meinongian Logician

The (logical) importance of not existing

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