Intensionality phenomena were first discussed by Frege (1893) in the context of sentential complement constructions like (1a,b). Frege noted that substitution of co-referring terms in clausal complements needn’t preserve truth (1a,b).1 Another feature of these environments is that the presence of a nonreferring or nondenoting term needn’t yield a false sentence (2a). Furthermore, an indefinite ...

I resolve the major challenge to an Expressivist theory of the meaning of normative discourse: the Frege–Geach Problem. Drawing on considerations from the semantics of directive language (e.g., imperatives), I argue that, although certain forms of Expressivism (like Gibbard’s) do run into at least one version of the Problem, it is reasonably clear that there is a version of Expressivism that do...

Philosophers' Imprint Volume 4, No. 2 August 2004 ©2004 Kevin C. Klement §

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...

Frege supposedly believed that vague predicates have no Bedeutung. But given other things he evidently believes, such a position would seem to commit him to a suspect nihilism according to which assertoric sentences containing vague predicates are neither true nor false. I argue that we have good reason to resist ascribing to Frege the view that vague predicates have no Bedeutung and thus good ...

1 The closed world view In his book The Value of Science Poincaré criticizes a certain view on the growth of mathematical knowledge: " The advance of science is not comparable to the changes of a city, where old edifices are pitilessly torn down to give place to new ones, but to the continuous evolution of zoological types which develop ceaselessly and end by becoming unrecognizable to the comm...

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...

This paper studies some properties of the so-called semilattice-based logics (which are defined in a standard way using only the order relation from a variety of algebras that have a semilattice reduct with maximum) under the assumption that its companion assertional logic (defined from the same variety of algebras using the top element as representing truth) is algebraizable. This describes a ...