GÖDEL’S THEOREM AND DIRECT SELF-REFERENCE

Direct Reference and Implicature

2 I. According to some formulations of the theory of Direct Reference the semantic value, relative to a context of utterance, of rigid singular terms such as proper names and indexicals is just their referent. This position seems to preclude an accurate account of such terms as they behave in natural languages, since it is easy to construct examples of coreferential rigid singular terms embedde...

Parikh's Theorem: A simple and direct construction

Parikh’s theorem states that every context-free language has the same Parikh image as some regular language. We present a very simple construction that, given a context-free grammar, produces a finite automaton recognizing such a regular language. The Parikh image of a word w over an alphabet {a1, . . . , an} is the vector v = (v1, . . . , vn) ∈ N such that vi is the number of occurrences of ai...

Inclosures, Vagueness, and Self-Reference

In this paper, I start by showing that sorites paradoxes are inclosure paradoxes. That is, they fit the Inclosure Scheme which characterizes the paradoxes of self-reference. Given that sorites and self-referential paradoxes are of the same kind, they should have the same kind of solution. The rest of the paper investigates what a dialetheic solution to sorites paradoxes is like, connections wit...

Direct Reference, Empty Names and Implicature

Rigid Designation, Direct Reference, and Modal Metaphysics

(Nov/03 draft, forthcoming in " Pacific Philosophical Quarterly " , comments to [email protected]) abstract In this paper I argue that questions about the semantics of rigid designation are commonly and illicitly run together with distinct issues, such as questions about the metaphysics of essence and questions about the theoretical legitimacy of the possible-worlds framework. I discuss in depth t...