Gottlob Frege

The idea for this book, as well as the series of which it is a
part, was first expressed in the epilogue to volume 2 of Philosophical
Analysis in the Twentieth Century, when, voicing my belief
that it is a mistake to look for one big, systematic, and unifying
picture of philosophy in our era, I characterized what we need
as “a collection of more focused pictures, each giving a view of
the major developments of related lines of work, and each drawn
with an eye to illuminating the larger lessons for work in neighboring
subfields” (464). What follows is my own vision of where
we have been, where we stand today, and where we are, or should
be, going in the philosophy of language. The concrete proposal
for the book, and the series, was presented to Ian Malcolm, the
philosophy editor of the Princeton University Press, in the spring
of 2006 at an APA conference in Portland, Oregon. Since then Ian
has been a staunch backer of the project, who has cleared away
obstacles and pushed it forward at every step. I couldn’t ask for a
better editor and publisher. Nor could I ask for a better copyeditor
than Princeton’s Jodi Beder, who, in addition to doing her normal
excellent job, both alerted me to passages requiring clarification,
and saved me from several philosophical errors. As for the book
itself, I am grateful to Josh Dever and John Burgess for reading
and commenting on drafts of specific chapters, and to Kent Bach,
Jeff King, Jeff Speaks, and Eduardo Villanueva for reading, and
providing extensive comments on, the entire manuscript. I have
profited greatly from their help. Most of all, I want to thank my
wife Martha for continuing to put up with me through this, as
well as my many other, projects. Without her continuing support
none of this would have come to fruition.

John McDowell zählt einer der einflussreichsten und meistdiskutierten Philosophen der Gegenwart. Sein philosophisches Interesse erreicht von der griechischen Philosophie über die Metaphysik und Sprachphilosophie bis hin zur Epistemologie und Ethik

ABSTRACT
From human relations to philosophy, many problems arise because of the indefiniteness or indeterminacy of terms. In order to solve such problems, we need to determine the whatness or quiddity of the meaning of any term, sentence or statement. Questioning such quiddity requires the determination of how the terms of the language acquire their meaning in the first place. Most of the terms the meanings of which we need to determine the meanings are used to inform us about the objects in the external world. It is not possible to complete the semantics of natural languages without doing semantics of context sensitive terms like indexicals. In our work we present David Kaplan's theory of context sensitive terms. In cases of such terms any inquiry into the determination of the meanings of terms as well involve an answer to the question how we decide the reference of the terms. For this purpose, many philosophers like Frege and Russell in order to eliminate ambiguity in language and make language into a more objective endeavor to do semantics of names and descriptions. But they did not work on the
semantics of indexical terms which encompass a large portion of language. It is not possible to complete the semantics of
natural languages without doing semantics of context sensitive terms like indexicals. In our article we present and critically
discuss David Kaplan’s theory of indexical terms.

Entre 1892 et 1895, Frege écrit : « Les concepts ne peuvent jamais
être dans les mêmes relations que les objets. Penser qu’ils le
peuvent ne serait pas faux mais impossible ». Certains y voient
quelque chose de romantique ou de mystérieux : la structure
du sens serait manifeste, mais resterait indicible. Or, Frege
s’est trompé. Au fond, il confond le catégoriel et le relationnel.
Cet article cherche d’abord à comprendre les raisons de cette
distinction, puis à expliquer la confusion qui en résulte.

Nesta monografia, pretendo demonstrar que o conceito de “construção lógica” ou “ficção lógica” apresentada no livro “Introdução à Filosofia Matemática” (RUSSELL, 1918) indica que o autor desistiu do Realismo dos objetos matemáticos, abandonando, assim, a essência do projeto logicista e qualquer tentativa de estabelecer as fundações da matemática.

Recently some philosophers have started to naturalize propositions by reconceptualizing them in act-theoretic terms. The works of Scott Soames and Peter Hanks represent two fundamentally opposed ways of going about this.
Soames’s proposal preserves the traditional dichotomy of force and propositional content, as he suggests we can predicate a property of an object by merely entertaining a proposition, for example, in imagination or hypothesis, without committing to its truth. This would be a further step we would take in asserting its truth or otherwise acknowledging or endorsing it. Hanks has criticized this proposal and argued that only something that is forceful and committal and takes a position with regard to whether an object actually has the property predicated of it can be a truth value bearer. The traditional separation of propositions as truth value bearers from force is therefore untenable. A proposition can only be a unified truth value bearer through the forceful act of a subject. He further claims that if an act of predication has represented inaccurately, its subject must have made a mistake.
I believe that Hanks is right that a truth value bearer must take a position with regard to whether things hang together as it represents them. Otherwise it does not make sense to say that it is true, that is, that it has represented things succesfully, as they are. At the same time it seems that Soames is right that there are contexts such as those of imagining or doubting, those created by conditionals or disjunctions, or fictional contexts created by acts of pretense, in which the subject is not committed to things being as they are represented, and in which it would also be wrong to say that the subject has made a mistake. For example, in a conditional the subject is not committed to the truth of the antecedent and therefore has not made a mistake if it turns out to be false.
In my contribution I will argue that there is a way to reconcile these seemingly conflicting claims. We should think of imagining, doubting or questioning, but also of conditionalizing or pretending as higher-level acts, which operate on forceful acts such as assertions or directives themselves rather than on something supposedly distinct from them such as propositions. Propositions just are assertions as put forward for consideration by higher-level acts. The first crucial step here is a distinction between commitment in and commitment to an act. An assertion is a commitment to the reality of a state of affairs (SOA) from a theoretical position, a directive from a practical position. Through e.g. questioning, conditionalizing or other higher-level acts we present an assertion (or directive) while suspending commitment to it. Put differently, we entertain a commitment, but suspend commitment to it. But how is it possible for an act to contain a commitment if its subject is not committed? The second crucial step is a representational account of force indicators as presenting the subject’s position vis-à-vis the relevant SOA. The act can contain a commitment in the sense that it represents a committal position, even thought the subject is not commited to this position because it has performed a higher level act such as questioning or conditionalizing which suspends commitment to the act of which this representation is a part.

Frege's famous definition of number (in)famously uses the concept of “extension”. Extensions, in the Fregean framework, are susceptible to bringing many difficulties, and, some say, even paradoxes. Therefore, neo-logicist programs want to avoid the problems and to replace the classical Fregean definition of number with Hume's Principle (where Frege does not use extensions). I argue that this move, even if it makes sense from a computational point of view, is at odds with Frege's larger philosophical project. For Frege, I claim, extensions were an important part of his philosophical program of logic-as-an-universal-language. This is why Frege places his project in line with Leibniz' philosophical project of finding a lingua characterica universalis.

With the quest for a solid foundation for mathematics raging for over a century, the debate within the philosophical community has shifted from the initial concerns shared by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell over whether or not mathematics, more specifically arithmetic, is reducible to logic. Set theory, with all of its ontological commitments has given rise to a new debate in the philosophy of mathematics over whether or not it requires an interpretation before establishing itself as a foundation for mathematics. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate particularly whether the naïve conception of sets is adequate for grounding the system of numbers. Within this discussion we shall briefly examine rival theories or conceptions of sets. One of the main defenders of the naïve conception is Alan Weir. We shall examine his work to defend it and assess its strength. By reviewing the traditional paradoxes associated with naïve set theory, I will provide Weir's answer to them within the framework of naïve set theory. His strategy will be shown to be erroneous. We shall also compare the naïve conception of sets to other conceptions to see how it squares within the debate over the foundations of mathematics. One such conception is known as the iterative conception, which claims that sets are formed by sequences of previous members; this view is exemplified in the work of Ernest Zermelo and George Boolos. A similar strategy provided by Linnebo will also be presented in this paper for discussion. We shall conclude by demonstrating that thus far no conception of sets provided by logicians and philosophers has adequately answered all questions of consistency without compromising strength in its axioms. It shall be evident that the naïve conception of sets is yet another theory that faces problems in accounting for the foundations of mathematics.