Drag to reposition

Call a semantics for singular terms *extensionalist* if it embraces and *classical* if it embraces. -/- 1. The meaning of a singular term is exhausted by its reference. 2. The reference of a singular term is an entity that is logically simple. -/- Call a semantics *adequate* if it distinguishes material identity from formal identity. -/- Frege reacts to the inadequacy of classical extensionalist semantics by rejecting. This he does without a sideways glance at, whose background ontology, an "ontology of individuals", Frege implicitly accepts. -/- In contrast, my account of the difference between material and formal identity replaces that background ontology with one whose ground-level objects are ontologically differentiated and logically complex. The semantics I urge for singular terms, while *extensionalist* in the sense of, is thus a non-classical semantics in which singular terms take structured individuals, or complexes, as their referents. For such individuals, unlike those of Frege's ontology, keep a = b and a = a apart. -/-.

The difficulties encountered by attempts to treat identity as a relation between an object and itself are well-known: "...the sentence 'The morning star is...the morning star' is analytic and a truism, while...'The morning star is the evening star' is synthetic and represents a 'valuable extension of our knowledge'... But if {the morning star} and {the evening star} are the same object, and identity is taken as a relation holding between this object and itself, then it is impossible to explain how the two sentences can differ in cognitive content... ". Russell's solution to these difficulties rejects the identification of logical with grammatical form, in effect denying that such sentences assert relations between the morning star and itself. The logical representations which the Russellian proposes, contain quantifiers, predicate letters, and individual variables, but no expressions standing for particulars. The Fregean solution, while admitting logical representations whose nominal expressions stand for particulars, insists that the meaning of such expressions is different from their reference. Frege-Russell analyses thus both deny that the morning star is involved qua particular in the meaning of the sentences in question. ;Rather than replace the morning star as ontological subject of these sentences, I suggest that their difference in meaning arises from the kind of particular that the identity-relation relates--a particular which, unlike its Frege-Russell counterpart, is two-sided and multi-faceted. Such a particular requires an ambiguous singular term. In Chapter 1, I utilize such a term to provide a surfacist account of belief-context ambiguity requiring neither differences in relative scope nor distinctions between sense and reference. In Chapter 2, I go on to provide an account of negative existentials, necessity- and identity-statements which resolves philosophical problems that Russell-Frege analyses only avoid. To solve these problems, I show that it is necessary to reject two canons of philosophical logic, the Law of Identity and the Indiscernibility of Identicals