In a recent article, ‘An Immaculate Conception of Modality’, Brian Skyrms [14] has shewn how to interpret the necessity operator in various modal systems as a metalinguistic predicate of sentences. The principal task of the present paper will be to shew that any intensional operator may be construed in this way. I will then make some remarks about the philosophical importance of this fact, the burden of which will be that it frees a philosopher to do things intensionally or metalinguistically according to taste. I will then link the equivalence proofs with some suggestions Robert Stalnaker has made in connection with the problem of the semantics of propositional attitudes. The paper is self-contained but I suspect that a better appreciation of what is going on will be aided by a careful reading of Skyrms’ paper. Also, some familiarity with Stalnaker’s use of double indexing in, e.g., [16] will help in the later sections. I would like to thank Steve Boer who drew my attention to the Skyrms article when he was in Wellington in July and August of 1979.

Logics and languages

We are All Children of God

\n \n \nAccording to Richard Routley, a comprehensive theory of fiction is impossible, since almost anything is in principle imaginable. In my view, Routley is right: for any purported logic of fiction, there will be actual or imaginable fictions that successfully counterexample the logic. Using the example of ‘impossible’ fictions, I test this claim against theories proposed by Routley’s Meinongian contemporaries and also by Routley himself (for what he called ‘esoteric’ works of fiction) and his 21st century heirs. I argue that the phenomenon of impossible fictions challenges even today’s modal Meinongians. \n \n \n

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Sylvan's Bottle and other Problems

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Do we need functional abstraction

In questa comunicazione, non intendo contribuire all’analisi di questa o quella classe di espressioni linguistiche. Vorrei invece dare un contributo alla nostra consapevolezza (chiamiamola pure “filosofica”) della funzione che il concetto di forma logica svolge nelle nostre analisi. Piu in particolare, vorrei mettere in guardia contro certe possibili conseguenze di quello che a me pare un uso “metafisico” dell’idea di forma logica. Vorrei dimostrare che una certa eredita filosofica, per lo pi...

Logics and languages

Citations

We are All Children of God

Sylvan's Bottle and other Problems

Do we need functional abstraction

Le ambigue virtù della forma logica

Artificial intelligence and the study of language

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