Charles Sayward

Suppose there is a domain of discourse of English, then everything of which any predicate is true is a member of that domain. If English has a domain of discourse, then, since ‘is a domain of discourse of English’ is itself a predicate of English and true of that domain, that domain is a member of itself. But nothing is a member of itself. Thus English has no domain of discourse. We defend this argument and go on to argue to the same conclusion without relying on the supposition that English is a language which contains the predicate ‘is a domain of discourse of English’.

The force of sceptical inquiries into out knowledge of other people is a paradigm of the force that philosophical views can have. Sceptical views arise out of philosophical inquiries that are identical in all major respects with inquiries that we employ in ordinary cases. These inquiries employ perfectly mundane methods of making and assessing claims to know. This paper tries to show that these inquiries are conducted in cases that lack certain contextual ingredients found in ordinary cases. The paper concludes that these ordinary methods of inquiry, when employed in these limited cases, put us in a position in which we actually cannot know. Thus our ability to know will be a function of the added contextual elements that are found in ordinary cases. A second conclusion is that we come literally to observe bodily behaviour in the course of the sceptical inquiry; while in ordinary cases we observe pain-behaviour

A type theory constructed with reference to a particular language will associate with each monadic predicate P of that language a class of individuals C(P) of which it is categorically significant to predicate P (or which P spans, for short). The extension of P is a subset of C(P), which is a subset of the language’s universe of discourse. The set C(P) is a category discriminated by the language. The relation 'is spanned by the same predicates as' divides the language’s universe of discourse into equivalence classes. These are the types discriminated by the language. This paper criticizes an attempt by Peter Strawson to explain terms peculiar to type theory in terms of other notions not peculiar to type theory

Whereas arithmetical quantification is substitutional in the sense that a some-quantification is true only if some instance of it is true, it does not follow (and, in fact, is not true) that an account of the truth-conditions of the sentences of the language of arithmetic can be given by a substitutional semantics. A substitutional semantics fails in a most fundamental fashion: it fails to articulate the truth-conditions of the quantifications with which it is concerned. This is what is defended in the paper. In particular, it is defended against remarks to the contrary in a well known paper on the subject.

On the basis of observations J. J. C. Smart once made concerning the absurdity of sentences like 'The seat of the bed is hard', a plausible case can be made that there is little point to developing a theory of types, particularly one of the sort envisaged by Fred Sommers. The authors defend such theories against this objection by a partial elucidation of the distinctions between the concepts of spanning and predicability and between category mistakenness and absurdity in general. The argument suggests that further clarification of the concepts of spanning and category mistakenness should be sought in reflection upon the more familiar concepts of a sort of thing and a predicate category.