notion of 'common, public language' that remains mysterious...useless for any form of theoretical explanation....There is simply no way of making sense of this prong of the externalist theory of meaning and language, as far as I can see, or of any of the work in theory of meaning and philosophy of language that relies on such notions, a statement that is intended to cut rather a large swath. (C...

conception of linguistic information is characterised by the rise of ‘meaning proper’ in the wake of the development of modern logic, mainly through the work of Frege, Russell, and early Wittgenstein. One of the hallmarks of Frege’s philosophy of logic is his anti-psychologism: in order to give logic its proper due, he claims, we need to separate it from ‘psychology’, i.e., we need to distingui...

It is a common misconception among logicians to think that intuitionism is necessarily tied-up with single conclusion (sequent or Natural Deduction) calculi. Single conclusion calculi can be used and are convenient, but they are by no means necessary, as shown by such influential authors as Kleene, Takeuti and Dummett, to cite only three. If single conclusions are not necessary, how do we guara...

In what follows I consider the apparent contrast between two kinds of theories of context: a theory of objective context-exempliied in the works of Kaplan and Lewis-and a theory of subjective context-exempliied in the works of McCarthy and Giunchiglia. I consider then some diiculties for the objective theory. I don't give any formalization; instead I give some theoretical points about the probl...

The German mathematician and one of the founding fathers of modern logic, Gottlob Frege (1848-1925), was the first to clearly realize that semantics has little to do with psychology, and that it could be usefully explicated in mathematical terms (see Dummett, 1973; 1981). His depsychologization of semantics followed from his depsychologization of logic. Frege understood how crucial it was for t...

The purpose of this thesis is to demonstrate that metaphysics is a necessary discipline – necessary in the sense that all areas of philosophy, all areas of science, and in fact any type of rational activity at all would be impossible without a metaphysical background or metaphysical presuppositions. Because of the extremely strong nature of this claim, it is not possible to put forward a very s...

Most of us create and use a panoply of non-sentential representations throughout our ordinary lives: we regularly use maps to navigate, charts to keep track of complex patterns of data, and diagrams to visualize logical and causal relations among states of affairs. But philosophers typically pay little attention to such representations, focusing almost exclusively on language instead. In partic...

Introduction With his Introduction to Operative Logic and Mathematics, which first appeared in 1955, Paul Lorenzen became an exponent of an approach to the foundations of logic and mathematics, which is both formalistic and intuitionistic in spirit. Formalistic because its basis is the purely syntactical handling of symbols — or “figures”, as Lorenzen preferred to say —, and intuitionistic beca...

This paper is a response to the last question in the CFP, about alternatives to model-theoretic semantics (MTS). I do not present any specific results, just argue for proof-theoretic semantics (PTS) as such an alternative. PTS is well-established within Logic (e.g., [8]). See [11] for an overview. I have extended PTS to fragments of English. The paper has two parts: 1. a brief exposition of PTS...

1 1. Burge on Sense and Meaning When " Sinning Against Frege " was published in 1979 I thought it should have given a real turn in the discussion on Frege's ideas. Actually the impact was less then I imagined, and the problem was that – at the end of the story – Tyler Burge's interpretation should have posed a shadow on the direct reference theories and the Millean criticism of descriptivist th...