Francesca Boccuni On the Consistency of a Plural Theory of Frege ’ s

From Lagrange to Frege: Functions and Expressions

When one is concerned with specifying the original reference [Bedeutung ] of the word ‘function’ in its mathematical usage, it is easy to fall into calling function of x an expression [Ausdruck ] formed from ‘x’ and particular numbers by means of the notations [Bezeichnungen] for sum, product, power, difference, and so on. This is inappropriate [unzutreffend ] because in this way a function is ...

A Study of Frege’s Influence on A. J. Ayer’s Theory of Emotivism

No doubt, Gottlob Frege and A. J. Ayer are considered to be among the most prominent contemporary philosophers. Insofar as one of them has revolutionized the linguistic domain while the other has influenced the domain of ethics in a diametrical fashion. Ayer’s theory of emotivism is regarded as one of the most controversial moral theories in the past century. We believe that Frege, as a linguis...

The Study of Stage-like Development of Morpho-syntactic Structures in EFL Learners’ Writing Performance: A Processability Theory Account for Cases of “Plural -s” and “Adverb Fronting”

Plural Predication

My thesis consists of three self-contained but interconnected papers. In the first one, 'Word and Objects', I assume that it is possible to quantify over absolutely everything, and show that certain English sentences containing collective predicates resist paraphrase in first-order languages and even in first-order languages enriched with plural quantifiers. To capture such sentences I develop ...

Propositional Consistency Proofs

Partial consistency statements can be expressed as polynomial-size propositional formulas. Frege proof systems have polynomial-size partial self-consistency proofs. Frege proof systems have polynomialsize proofs of partial consistency of extended Frege proof systems if and only if Frege proof systems polynomially simulate extended Frege proof systems. We give a new proof of Reckhow’s theorem th...