Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 95

Philosophical Logic

edited by Timothy Smiley

Published 1998
for the British Academy by Oxford University Press

234 × 156 mm; 168 pages
hardback, ISBN 978-0-19-726182-8      UK price £20.00
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If meaning is the minimum that must be grasped in order to understand speech, then meaning is specified when speech is reported. What follows from this hypothesis, and how do constraints on reported speech compare with Frege’s ‘modes of presentation’ as a guide to the concept of meaning? Or take iterated attitudes: two sentence operators may be extensionally equivalent, yet satisfy different principles. Does this phenomenon destroy the celebrated argument against mechanism from Gödel’s theorem, and what other implications does it have? Or again, does natural language tell for or against second-order logic? For example, is second-order quantification really substitutional, and is our use of plurals best represented in second-order terms?

Five philosophers and a linguist debate these issues here. The volume will be of interest to anyone concerned with semantics and logical theory, whether they work in philosophy, logic or linguistics.

The volume is edited by Timothy Smiley, Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

The papers arise from a conference on ‘Philosophical Logic’ held at the Academy in March 1996. The three principal lectures are all British Academy Philosophical Lectures.

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