Mark Textor

Bolzano holds that every sentence can be paraphrased into a sentence of the form "A has b". Bolzano's arguments for this claim are reconstructed and discussed. Since they crucially rely on Bolzano's notion of paraphrase, this notion is investigated in detail. Bolzano has usually been taken to require that in a correct paraphrase the sentence to be paraphrased and the paraphrasing sentence express the same proposition. In view of Bolzano's texts and systematical considerations this interpretation is rejected: Bolzano only holds that the sentence to be paraphrased and the paraphrasing sentence must be equipollent ("gleichgeltend"). It is shown that even this modest view of paraphrase does not help Bolzano in sustaining his claim that all sentences have the form "A has b".

According to Frege, neither demonstratives nor indexicals are singular terms; only a demonstrative together with ‘circumstances accompanying its utterance’ has sense and singular reference. While this view seems defensible for demonstratives, where demonstrations serve as non-verbal signs, indexicals, especially pure indexicals like ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘now’, seem not to be in need of completion by circumstances of utterance. In this paper I argue on the basis of independent reasons that indexicals are in fact in need of completion; I identify the completers as uses of circumstances of utterance by the speaker; and I show how these uses together with the utterance of indexical sentences express thoughts. The starting point of the paper is a criticism of Kripke’s and Künne’s alternative treatment of indexicals in Frege’s framework

Does (affirmative) judgement have a logical dual, negative judgement? Whether there is such a logical dualism was hotly debated at the beginning of the twentieth century. Frege argued in ?Negation? (1918/9) that logic can dispense with negative judgement. Frege's arguments shaped the views of later generations of analytic philosophers, but they will not have convinced such opponents as Brentano or Windelband. These philosophers believed in negative judgement for psychological, not logical, reasons. Reinach's ?On the Theory of Negative Judgement? (1911) spoke to the concerns of these philosophers. While Frege took the distinction between affirmative and negative judgement to be logically redundant, Reinach argued that it is the result of confusing judgement with a different mental act. In this article, I present Reinach's arguments against the ?old logical dualism? in context, analyse them and discuss Reinach's innovative use of the notion of focus in the theory of judgement. Recently, there has been a revival of the view that sentential negation is grounded in a prior mental act of rejection. In the final section, I argue that Reinach's analysis of rejection poses a challenge for the revivalists

Ever since Frege, propositions have played a central role in philosophy of language. Propositions are generally conceived as abstract objects that have truth conditions essentially and fulfill both the role of the meaning of sentences and of the objects or content of propositional attitudes. More recently, the abstract conception of propositions has given rise to serious dissatisfaction among a number of philosophers, who have instead proposed a conception of propositional content based on cognitive acts (Hanks, Moltmann, Soames). This approach is not entirely new, though, but has important precedents in early analytic philosophy and phenomenology. The aim of this volume is bring together some of the most important texts from the relevant historical literature and new contributions from contemporary proponents of act-based conceptions of propositional content.

Frege held that singular terms can refer only to objects, not to concepts. I argue that the counter-intuitive consequences of this claim ('the concept paradox') arise from Frege's mirroring principle that an incomplete expression can only express an incomplete sense and stand for an incomplete reference. This is not, as is sometimes thought, merely because predicates and singular terms cannot be intersubstituted salva veritate ( congruitate ). The concept paradox, properly understood, poses therefore a different, harder, challenge. An investigation of the foundations of the mirroring principle also sheds light on the role which language plays in Frege's epistemology of logic.

Nelson Goodman and, following him, Catherine Z. Elgin and Keith Lehrer have claimed that sometimes a sample is a symbol that stands for the property it is a sample of. The relation between the sample and the property it stands for is called 'exemplification' (Goodman, Elgin) or 'exemplarisation' (Lehrer). Goodman and Lehrer argue that the notion of exemplification sheds light on central problems in aesthetics and the philosophy of mind. However, while there seems to be a phenomenon to be captured, Goodman's account of exemplification has several flaws. In this paper I will offer an alternative account of exemplification that is inspired by Grice's idea that one can communicate something by providing one's audience with intention-independent evidence and letting them draw the obvious conclusion for themselves. This explication of exemplification will solve the problems that arose for Goodman's theory in the spirit of his approach.1.

Proper names play an important role in our understanding of linguistic ‘aboutness’ or reference. For instance, the name-bearer relation is a good candidate for the paradigm of the reference relation: it provides us with our initial grip on this relation and controls our thinking about it. For this and other reasons proper names have been at the center of philosophical attention. However, proper names are as controversial as they are conceptually fundamental. Since Kripke’s seminal lectures Naming and Necessity the controversy about proper names has taken the form of a debate between two main camps, descriptivists and non-descriptivists like Kripke himself.The lectures were given in Princeton in 1970 and published in book form as Naming and Necessity .Descriptivists hold that there is a close connection between proper names and definite descriptions: the meaning or sense of a proper name can be given by a definite description. Th ..

Keith Hossack argues in his The Metaphysics of Knowledge(2007) that knowledge is a simple and metaphysically fundamental relation between a thinker and a fact: knowledge is uptake of fact. Facts are conceived as combinations of particulars and universals, distinct from true propositions. Hossacks's general argument is, roughly, that one can define central philosophical concepts (belief, content, justification, etc.) if one assumes that knowledge is primitive, but that knowledge cannot be defined in terms of such concepts. In this paper, I will question Hossack's view of knowledge and his use of knowledge in the theory of content. To anticipate one of the main points: there is knowledge that cannot be uptake of a fact, because there is no fact to be taken up. The conclusion is that Hossack needs either to revise his theory of facts or his metaphysics of knowledge. Something has to give

Inhaltsverzeichnis/Table of Contents: Vorbemerkung/Preface. Dagfin FØLLESDAL: Bolzano's Legacy. Jan BERG: Bolzano, the Prescient Encyclopedist. Jan SEBESTIK: Bolzano, Exner and the Origins of Analytical Philosophy. Paul RUSNOCK: Bolzano and the Traditions of Analysis. Peter SIMONS: Bolzano on Collections. Ali BEHBOUD: Remarks on Bolzano's Collections. Mark SIEBEL: Variation, Derivability and Necessity. Edgar MORSCHER: Bolzano's Method of Variation: Three Puzzles. Rolf GEORGE: Bolzano's Programme andObjects. Mark TEXTOR: Bolzano's Sententialism. Wolfgang KÜNNE: Propositions in Bolzano and Frege. Michael DUMMETT: Comments on Wolfgang Künne's Paper. Carsten Uwe GIESKE: Bolzano's Notion of Testifying.

The truth-conditional theory of sense holds that a theory of truth for a natural language can serve as a theory of sense: if knowledge of a theory of truth for a language L is sufficient for understanding utterance of L-sentences, the T-sentences of the theory 'show' the sense of the uttered object-language sentences. In this paper I aim to show that indexicals create a serious problem for this prima facie attractive theoretical option. The so-called 'instantiation problem' is that a truth-theory for indexical languages needs to contain universal statements that show how the reference of indexicals depends on features of the utterance context. Now one can deduce from such statements T-sentences that do not show the sense of an indexical sentence on an occasion of use. I survey proposed solutions to the instantiation problem by Evans and Sainsbury and, unfortunately, find them all wanting. Perhaps there is nothing like the sense-giving truth-condition for an indexical sentence.

Bolzano holds that every sentence can be paraphrased into a sentence of the form "A has b". Bolzano's arguments for this claim are reconstructed and discussed. Since they crucially rely on Bolzano's notion of paraphrase, this notion is investigated in detail. Bolzano has usually been taken to require that in a correct paraphrase the sentence to be paraphrased and the paraphrasing sentence express the same proposition. In view of Bolzano's texts and systematical considerations this interpretation is rejected: Bolzano only holds that the sentence to be paraphrased and the paraphrasing sentence must be equipollent ("gleichgeltend"). It is shown that even this modest view of paraphrase does not help Bolzano in sustaining his claim that all sentences have the form "A has b".

Hector-Neri Castaneda claimed in several papers that a proposition expressed by an indexical sentence can be re-expressed by means of an oratio obliqua clause that contains a quasi-indicator. Robert M. Adams and Rogers Albritton have presented a counter-argument that is accepted by Castaneda himself. I will argue that the Adams/Albritton argument is not convincing: The argument uses several assumptions which could be disputed. The paper tries to develop a more direct argument against Castaneda’s central claim. If Castaneda’s thesis is false, what then is achieved by quasi-indexicals in oratio obliqua? Adams and Castaneda answer this question with a picture: the quasi-indexical clause portrays an indexical proposition. I use Perry’s idea that quasi-indicators could be seen as expressions that bind special sense variables to give a less metaphorical account of the functioning of quasi-indicators. Finally, I explore the consequences of this account for iterated knowledge-ascriptions with quasi-indicators and for truth-conditional theories of meaning

L'auteur expose la tentative faite par Bolzano de définir le concept de proposition en soi analytique à l'aide du concept de variation de représentation. Puis, il discute les difficultés qui résultent de ce modèle quant à la définition bolzanienne du concept étroit de vérité logiquement analytique ou de vérité logique. En conclusion, il compare la définition bolzanienne du concept de proposition en soi analytique et la définition husserlienne: celle-ci se découvre être une application de l'idée fondamentale de Bolzano — employer la variation de représentation pour définir les concepts logiques fondamentaux. The author tries to outline Bolzano's proposal to define the concept of an analytic proposition by using the concept of idea variation. He discusses the problems that arise for Bolzano's attempt to define the concept of a logical truth on the same lines. He ends by comparing Bolzano's and Husserl's definition of the concept of an analytical proposition: Husserl's definition can be seen as an original application of Bolzano's basic idea to define basic logical notions with recourse to the concept of idea variation