The paper argues that intensional phenomena can be explained without appealing to "exotic" entities: one that don't exist, are merely possible, or are essentially abstract.

ARISTOTLE'S PROGRAM Aristotle says outright that the law of non-contradiction cannot be demonstrated: you can't prove everything, and among the things you ...

I argue against a standard conception of classification, according to which concepts classify by drawing boundaries. This conception cannot properly account for "higher-order vagueness." I discuss in detail claims by Crispin Wright about "definitely," and its connection with higher-order vagueness. Contrary to Wright, I argue that the line between definite cases of red and borderline ones is not sharp. I suggest a new conception of classification: many concepts classify without drawing boundaries; they are boundaryless. Within this picture, there are no (...) orders of vagueness, though the phenomena which suggest the description "higher-order vagueness" are real enough. (shrink)

Originally published in 1958. A study in the logical foundations of modern theoretical semantics, this book is concerned with notions of designation and consistency as well as denotation and truth. It presents several semantical theories, each of which with what were new concepts or treatments from the author. Talking at a time when semantical theory was gained great ground, this book also looks at the methodology of the sciences and the semantics of scientific language alongside analysis of meaning and expression. (...) It is influenced by the writings of Carnap, Church, Frege, Goodman, Quine, Russell and Tarski. (shrink)

First Published in 1979. Paperback 1985. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informal company. This is an overview of Russell's philosophy, focussing in particular on his earlier work. Carter headings: Meaning; Names; Descriptions; The Perfect Language; Knowledge; Ontology; Mathematics.

MY AIM in writing this paper is to ask help in the laying of a pair of ghosts who continue to haunt moral philosophy. Their names are ‘objectivism’ and ’subjectivism'; but the second sometimes assumes the name of ‘relativism'. I have long been convinced that the supposed battles between these two have no real substance; but for all that, they go on confusing many moral philosophers. It would be a great benefit to our profession if somebody could put an end (...) to the confusion once for all; but it has proved harder than might have been hoped, and that is my excuse for trying again. (shrink)

The issue on which I intend to focus is whether there is anything else, anything more than ontological economy, which, in Russell's mature account of the constituents of propositions, is gained by his rejection of denoting concepts. I will argue that in order to answer this question, it is necessary to appreciate that by the time of "On Denoting," Russell was not merely advancing a claim of philosophical logic or a theory of the logical form of the descriptive phrases of (...) English. (edited). (shrink)

Wittgenstein's Tractatus contains a wide range of profound insights into the nature of logic and language – insights which will survive the particular theories of the Tractatus and seem to me to mark definitive and unassailable landmarks in our understanding of some of the deepest questions of philosophy. And yet alongside these insights there is a theory of the nature of the relation between language and reality which appears both to be impossible to work out in detail in a way (...) which is completely satisfactory, and to be bizarre and incredible. I am referring to the so-called logical atomism of the Tractatus . The main outlines of this theory at least are clear and familiar: there are elementary propositions which gain their sense from being models of possible states of affairs; such propositions are configurations of names of simple objects, signifying that those simples are analogously configured; every proposition has its sense through being analysable as a truth-functional compound of elementary propositions, thus deriving its sense from the sense of the elementary propositions when this view is taken in conjunction with the idea that the sense of a proposition is completely specified by specifying its truth-conditions. In this way the Tractatus incorporates in its working out a philosophical system analogous to the classical philosophical systems of Leibniz or Spinoza which are regarded by many people, in a sense rightly, as the prehistoric monsters of philosophy which are not to be studied as living organisms, but studied as the curiosities of human thought. And we may here agree that in the end we must simply reject a philosophy which incorporates such features as its postulation of simple eternal objects, or of a possibility of an analysis of a proposition which was presented as a pre-condition for the propositions that we ordinarily utter to make sense, and yet the specific form of which we are unaware of, and so on. (shrink)

In concluding section 2, chapter VI of part II of [6], Duhem claimed:... the physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a whole group of hypotheses...... when the experiment is in disagreement with his predictions, what he learns is that at least one of the hypotheses constituting this group is unacceptable and ought to be modified; but the experiment does not designate which one should be changed'.