Fitting and Mendelsohn present a thorough treatment of first-order modal logic, together with some propositional background. They adopt throughout a threefold approach. Semantically, they use possible world models; the formal proof machinery is tableaus; and full philosophical discussions are provided of the way that technical developments bear on well-known philosophical problems.
The book covers quantification itself, including the difference between actualist and possibilist quantifiers; equality, leading to a treatment of Frege's morning star/evening star puzzle; the notion of existence and the logical problems surrounding it; non-rigid constants and function symbols; predicate abstraction, which abstracts a predicate from a formula, in effect providing a scoping function for constants and function symbols, leading to a clarification of ambiguous readings at the heart of several philosophical problems; the distinction between nonexistence and nondesignation; and definite descriptions, borrowing from both Fregean and Russellian paradigms.
ISBN: | 9780792353355 |
Publication date: | 31st August 1999 |
Author: | M Fitting, Richard L Mendelsohn |
Publisher: | Springer an imprint of Springer Netherlands |
Format: | Paperback |
Pagination: | 292 pages |
Series: | Synthese Library |
Genres: |
Philosophy: logic Mathematical logic Computational and corpus linguistics Mathematical foundations |