Charles Sayward

Quine argues that if sentences that are set theoretically equivalent are interchangeable salva veritate, then all transparent operators are truth-functional. Criticisms of this argument fail to take into account the conditional character of the conclusion. Quine also argues that, for any person P with minimal logical acuity, if ‘belief’ has a sense in which it is a transparent operator, then, in that sense of the word, P believes everything if P believes anything. The suggestion is made that he intends that result to show us that ‘believes’ has no transparent sense. Criticisms of this argument are either based on unwarranted assertions or on definitions of key terms that depart from Quine’s usage of those terms.

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’.

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

This paper is a discussion of Frege's maxim that it is only in the context of a sentence that a word has a meaning. Quine reads the maxim as saying that the sentence is the fundamental unit of significance. Dummett rejects this as a truism. But it is not a truism since it stands in opposition to a conception of meaning held by John Locke and others. The maxim denies that a word has a sense independently of any sentence in which it occurs. Dummett says this denial is inconsistent with the fact that people understand sentences they have never heard before. The maxim is defended against this attack.

Let C1 and C2 be distinct moral codes formulated in English. Let C1 contain a norm N and C2 its negation. The paper construes the moral relativist as saying that if both codes are consistent, then, in the strongest sense of correctness applicable to moral norms, they are also both correct in the sense that they contain only correct moral norms. If we believe that the physical statements of English are true (false) in English, we will reject an analogous statement made of physical theories. We will hold that the strongest sense of correctness applicable to physical statements is not system-relative. The moral relativist denies that there is any corresponding sense of correctness applicable to moral norms. That is, there is no notion of moral correctness that is not system-dependent. It is argued that, while the position may not be true, there is not a strictly logical basis for refuting it.

Conversational implicatures are easy to grasp for the most part. But it is another matter to give a rational reconstruction of how they are grasped. We argue that Grice's attempt to do this fails. We distinguish two sorts of cases: (1) those in which we grasp the implicature by asking ourselves what would the speaker have to believe given that what he said is such as is required by the talk exchange; (2) those in which we grasp the implicature by asking ourselves why it is that what the speaker said is so obviously not such as is required by the talk exchange. We argue that Grice's account does not fit those cases falling under (2).

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.