Overview
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.
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Details
- ISBN-13: 9780792353348
- ISBN-10: 079235334X
- Publisher: Springer
- Publish Date: October 1998
- Dimensions: 9.21 x 6.14 x 0.75 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.34 pounds
- Page Count: 292
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