Paolo Bonardi

In his book Semantic Relationism, Kit Fine propounds an original and sophisticated semantic theory called ‘semantic relationism’ or ‘relational semantics’, whose peculiarity is the enrichment of Kaplan’s, Salmon’s and Soames’ Russellian semantics (more specifically, the semantic content of simple sentences and the truth-conditions of belief reports) with coordination, “the very strongest relation of synonymy or being semantically the same”. In this paper, my goal is to shed light on an undesirable result of semantic relationism: a report like “Tom believes that Cicero is bald and Tom does not believe that Tully is bald” is correct according to Fine’s provided truth-conditions of belief reports, but its semantic content is (very likely) a contradiction. As I will argue in the paper, even the resort to the notion of token proposition, introduced in Fine’s recent article “Comments on Scott Soames’ ‘Coordination Problems’”, does not suffice to convincingly eliminate the contradiction; moreover, it raises new difficulties

This manuscript focuses on a problem for Millian Russellianism raised by Fine : “[Assuming] that we are in possession of the information that a Fs and the information that a Gs, it appears that we are sometimes justified in putting this information ‘together’ and inferring that a both Fs and Gs. But how?” It will be my goal to determine a Millian-Russellian solution to this problem. I will first examine Nathan Salmon’s Millian-Russellian solution, which appeals to a non-semantic and subjective notion of coordination defined in terms of guises. I will object that in order to convincingly solve a specific version of Fine’s problem, identity conditions for guises must be provided. On the other hand, the most plausible way to individuate guises is by means of the equivalence classes of coordination itself. But, if so, the guise-based strategy to solve Fine’s problem risks being circular; in addition, there are serious doubts that coordination is transitive. An alternative Millian-Russellian solution to Fine’s problem will then be explored, which gives up guises and employs, instead, a non-semantic and subjective relation of coordination not defined in terms of guises, along with occurrences of Russellian propositions of a special sort, for which identity conditions will be provided and via which token attitude states intuitively more fine-grained than guises will be individuated.

This paper will critically examine two solutions to Frege’s puzzle: the Millian-Russellian solution proposed by Salmon and Braun, which invokes non-semantic modes of presentation (guises, ways of believing or the like); and Fine’s relationalist solution, which appeals to semantic coordination. Special attention will be devoted to discussing the conception of modes of presentation as mental files and to elucidating the nature of coordination. A third solution to Frege’s puzzle will be explored which, like Salmon’s and Braun’s, adopts the Millian-Russellian semantics but, like Fine’s, involves coordination instead of modes of presentation; however, coordination will not be conceived as a semantic relation but as a cognitive and subjective relation, which provides no contribution to semantic content. This novel Millian-Russellian account involving cognitive coordination will be labelled cognitive relationism.

Millianism is the doctrine according to which the semantic content of a proper name is exhausted by its referent. This article raises and attempts to solve a dilemma for Millians: either a proper name of a truth bearer is in turn a truth bearer ; or having a truth bearer as semantic content is not sufficient for a linguistic expression to be a truth bearer. As it will be shown in the manuscript, the dilemma does not arise with “that”-clauses in the place of proper names, if “that”-clauses are taken to be non-Millian designators whose semantic content is not a truth bearer. An account of “that”-clauses having such features and originating with Salmon, Frege's Puzzle, will be defended.

_ Source: _Page Count 28 In his article “Opacity”, David Kaplan propounded a counterexample to the thesis, defended by Quine and known as _Quine’s Theorem_, that establishes the illegitimacy of quantifying from outside into a position not open to substitution. He ingeniously built his counterexample using Quine’s own philosophical material and novel devices, _arc quotes_ and _$entences_. The present article offers detailed analysis and critical discussion of Kaplan’s counterexample and proposes a reasonable reformulation of Quine’s Theorem that bypasses both this counterexample and another, in the author’s opinion, more persuasive counterexample, also discussed in this paper and somehow implicit in “Opacity”, which involves _Russellian propositions_ instead of the Quinean apparatus.

This paper aims to solve the following twofold problem. Suppose that a rational speaker, Ralph, mistakenly takes (for some reason) the Roman orator Cicero and the World War II German spy Cicero to be the same individual. By sincerely uttering the sentence “Cicero is an orator and a spy”, (a) does Ralph use the name “Cicero” of the Roman orator or the name “Cicero” of the German spy or another name of the genus “Cicero”? And (b) which Cicero does Ralph refer to: the Roman orator, the German spy, both of them or neither of them? After drawing a distinction between the notion of mistaking one individual for another (exemplified by Kripke's “Jones”/“Smith” case and Putnam's “water”/“water” case) and the notion of wrongly taking two individuals to be one and the same individual (exemplified by the “Cicero”/“Cicero” case under discussion), I will defend the following solution to the last puzzling case: Ralph inadvertently creates an abstract individual playing the role of “fusion” or “amalgam” of the two Ciceros and also inadvertently creates a new name “Cicero” referring to such an individual.