This paper is concerned with Wittgenstein’s early doctrine of the independence of elementary propositions. Using the notion of a free generator for a logical calculus—a concept we claim was anticipated by Wittgenstein— we show precisely why certain difficulties associated with his doctrine cannot be overcome. We then show that Russell’s version of logical atomism—with independent particulars in...

Recent work in philosophy of language has raised significant problems for the traditional theory of propositions, engendering serious skepticism about its general workability. These problems are, I believe, tied to fundamental misconceptions about how the theory should be developed. The goal of this paper is to show how to develop the traditional theory in a way which solves the problems and pu...

Recently, Wadler presented a continuation-passing translation from a session-typed functional language, GV, to a process calculus based on classical linear logic, CP. However, this translation is one-way: CP is more expressive than GV. We propose an extension of GV, called HGV, and give translations showing that it is as expressive as CP. The new translations shed light both on the original tra...

This paper concerns itself with the relation between two important semantic notions: the traditional notion of proposition and a more recent notion of context as an information state. The notion of proposition has traditionally played an important role in the theory of meaning: propositions are entities that have independent truth conditions and act as the meaning of both independent and embedd...

Talking even about rather ordinary circumstances appears to implicate directly certain metaphysically loaded identifications. For example, if Dr. Gustav Lauben is a doctor then it seems to follow that he has the property of being a doctor; just as if he is injured, he has the property (or the characteristic) of being injured. Moreover, if Frege should come to believe that the good doctor is inj...

Standard implementations of Grice’s theory of conversational implicature assume that the derivation an implicature always begins with a single proposition expressed by means of a sentence in a given context. Against this received view, I argue that, in at least three ways, implicatures are discourse-based rather than proposition-based. First, in some cases an implicature can only be derived fro...

The standard dictionary definition of a formally valid argument in classical, bivalent, deductive logic proceeds as follows: An argument is valid if it is impossible for all its premises to be true and its conclusion to be false. A valid argument, unlike a sound one, can have false premises or it can have a mixture of true and false premises, but if all of its premises are true, then its conclu...