Mario Gomez-Torrente

Is there a theoretically interesting notion that is a natural extension of the concept of rigidity to general terms? Such a notion ought to satisfy two Kripkean conditions. First, it must apply to typical general terms for natural kinds, stuffs, and phenomena, and fail to apply to most other general terms. Second, true 'identification sentences' (such as 'Cats are animals') containing general terms that the notion applies to must be necessary. I explore a natural extension of the notion of rigidity to general terms, the notion of an essentialist predicate. I argue that, under natural assumptions, this notion satisfies the two Kripkean conditions.

Contrary to what often seems to be the implicit belief, Tarski's 1933 version of the theorem on the indefinability of truth did not mention semantic notions, either defined or intuitive. I state this version in a somewhat modernized form and explain briefly the self-imposed mathematico-philosophical constraints that led Tarski to formulate it as he did. I also point out that close attention to its content suggests a refined view of the exact contrast between Tarski's achievement and Gödel's achievement in his earlier discovery of another version of the result

This paper examines the question of the extensional correctness of Tarskian definitions of logical truth and logical consequence. I identify a few different informal properties which are necessary for a sentence to be an informal logical truth and look at whether they are necessary properties of Tarskian logical truths. I examine arguments by John Etchemendy and Vann McGee to the effect that some of those properties are not necessary properties of some Tarskian logical truths, and find them unconvincing. I stress the point that since the hypothesis that Tarski's definitions are extensionally correct is deeply entrenched, the burden of proof is still on the shoulders of Tarski's critics, who have not lifted the burden.

Logic is formal in the sense that all arguments of the same form as logically valid arguments are also logically valid and hence truth-preserving. However, it is not known whether all arguments that are valid in the usual model-theoretic sense are truthpreserving. Tarski claimed that it could be proved that all arguments that are valid (in the sense of validity he contemplated in his 1936 paper on logical consequence) are truthpreserving. But he did not offer the proof. The question arises whether the usual modeltheoretic sense of validity and Tarski's 1936 sense are the same. I argue in this paper that they probably are not, and that the proof Tarski had in mind, although unusable to prove that model-theoretically valid arguments are truth-preserving, can be used to prove that arguments valid in Tarski's 1936 sense are truth-preserving

Tarski implicitly postulated that a certain pre-theoretical concept of logical consequence and his technical concept of logical consequence are co-extensional. This chapter makes explicit a few theses about logical consequence or logical truth that sound Tarskian somehow, including one that most deserves the name ‘Tarski's Thesis’. Some of these theses are probably true or close to true but weaker than Tarski's. Some are false but stronger than Tarski's. Tarski's Thesis plausibly postulated that a sentence of a classical language possibly extended with non-traditional extensional logical constants is logically true, if it is true in all classical interpretations of all its non-logical constants. But it is noted that this thesis turns out to be false on most conceptions of logical truth, for some sentences of a classical language extended with extensional logical constants are true in all classical interpretations of all its non-logical constants, but are not necessary.

The purpose of this paper is to examine some passages of Tarski‘s paper ’On the concept of logical consequence’ and to show that some recent readings of those passages are wrong. John Etchemendy has claimed that in those passages Tarski gave an argument purporting to show that the notion of logical consequence defined by him (as opposed to some pretheoretic notion of logical consequence) possesses certain modal properties. Etchemendy further claims that the argument he attributes to Tarski is fallacious. Some of Etchemendy’s critics have granted him that Tarski did give an argument purporting to show that the defined notion possesses certain modal properties ; but they have claimed that Tarski’s argument was not a fallacious one. I will show that both Etchemendy and his critics are wrong; in the relevant passages, Tarski did not offer (nor did he intend to offer) an argument that the defined notion of logical consequence possesses any modal properties

When quotations are used with a purely referential purpose, they are mostly used with the purpose of referring to expressions, in the sense of rather abstract expression types. However, in many cases purely referential quotations are used with the purpose of referring to things other than very abstract expression types, such as boldface types, sounds, particular tokens, etc. The paper deals with the question of what mechanism underlies the possibility of successfully referring to different things and kinds of things with one and the same quotation. I defend the view that a quotation has as its semantic reference a certain very abstract expression type, and that the possibility of referring to other things by means of it is to be explained as a pragmatic phenomenon of felicitously conveyed speaker reference.