Quantifiers, Quantifiers and Quantifiers: Themes in logic, metaphysics and language

✍ Scribed by Alessandro Torza (editor)

• Publisher: Springer International Publishing
• Year: 2015
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 519
• Series: Synthese Library 373
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume covers a wide range of topics that fall under the 'philosophy of quantifiers', a philosophy that spans across multiple areas such as logic, metaphysics, epistemology and even the history of philosophy. It discusses the import of quantifier variance in the model theory of mathematics. It advances an argument for the uniqueness of quantifier meaning in terms of Evert Beth’s notion of implicit definition and clarifies the oldest explicit formulation of quantifier variance: the one proposed by Rudolf Carnap.

The volume further examines what it means that a quantifier can have multiple meanings and addresses how existential vagueness can induce vagueness in our modal notions. Finally, the book explores the role played by quantifiers with respect to various kinds of semantic paradoxes, the logicality issue, ontological commitment, and the behavior of quantifiers in intensional contexts.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-viii
Introduction....Pages 1-15
Front Matter....Pages 17-17
Which Quantifiers Are Logical? A Combined Semantical and Inferential Criterion....Pages 19-30
Implicit Definitions, Second-Order Quantifiers, and the Robustness of the Logical Operators....Pages 31-49
Quantifiers Are Logical Constants, but Only Ambiguously....Pages 51-70
Front Matter....Pages 71-71
Conjunctive, Disjunctive, Negative Objects and Generalized Quantification....Pages 73-95
Quantifiers and Referential Use....Pages 97-124
Quantification and Logical Form....Pages 125-140
Quantification with Intentional and with Intensional Verbs....Pages 141-168
Front Matter....Pages 169-169
Life on the Range: Quine’s Thesis and Semantic Indeterminacy....Pages 171-189
Chalmers, Quantifier Variance and Mathematicians’ Freedom....Pages 191-219
“There Is an ‘Is’ in ‘There Is”’: Meinongian Quantification and Existence....Pages 221-240
Qualifying Quantifying-in....Pages 241-269
Carnap, Quine, Quantification and Ontology....Pages 271-299
Quantifier Variance, Intensionality, and Metaphysical Merit....Pages 301-319
Front Matter....Pages 321-321
Making Quantified Truths True....Pages 323-338
Absolute Generality and Semantic Pessimism....Pages 339-366
Necessarily Maybe: Quantifiers, Modality and Vagueness....Pages 367-387
What’s in a (Mental) Picture....Pages 389-406
Front Matter....Pages 407-407
Cross-World Identity, Temporal Quantifiers and the Question of Tensed Contents....Pages 409-461
What’s So Bad About Second-Order Logic?....Pages 463-487
Front Matter....Pages 407-407
....Pages 489-526

✦ Subjects

Epistemology; Mathematical Logic and Foundations; Semantics