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Facts and tautological entailmentsJournal of Philosophy 66 (15): 477-487. 1969.
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Prior to Kripke's seminal work on the semantics of modal logic, McKinsey offered an alternative interpretation of the necessity operator, inspired by the Bolzano-Tarski notion of logical truth. According to this interpretation, `it is necessary that A' is true just in case every sentence with the same logical form as A is true. In our paper, we investigate this interpretation of the modal operator, resolving some technical questions, and relating it to the logical interpretation of modality a…Read more
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Free logicStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2021.
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New Essays in Free Logic: In Honour of Karel LambertSpringer Verlag. 2001.Free logic - i.e., logic free of existential presuppositions in general and with respect to singular terms in particular- began to come into its own as a field of research in the 1950s. As is the case with so many developments in Western philosophy, its roots can be traced back to ancient Greek philo sophy. It is only during the last fifty years, however, that it has become well established as a branch of modern logic. The name of Karel Lambert is most closely connected with this development: he…Read more
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Partial Semantics for Quantified Modal LogicJournal of Philosophical Logic 47 (6): 1049-1060. 2018.When it comes to Kripke-style semantics for quantified modal logic, there’s a choice to be made concerning the interpretation of the quantifiers. The simple approach is to let quantifiers range over all possible objects, not just objects existing in the world of evaluation, and use a special predicate to make claims about existence. This is the constant domain approach. The more complicated approach is to assign a domain of objects to each world. This is the varying domain approach. Assuming tha…Read more
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Bielefelder Philosophische VorlesungenAcademia Verlag. 1997.
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Introduction: Logic, Meaning, and Truth-Making States of Affairs in Philosophical SemanticsTopoi 29 (2): 87-89. 2010.Philosophical semantics requires an ontology that includes negative as well as positive states of affairs as truth-makers and truth-breakers. Theories that try to do without negative states of affairs while interpreting propositional truth as positive correspondence with existent states of affairs are inherently inadequate and incomplete. A semantics and ontology of negative states of affairs can also do justice to positive states of affairs, since the iterated negative state of affairs that a n…Read more
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