Propositions and Paradoxes.

Propositions are more than the bearers of truth and the meanings of sentences: they are also the objects of an array of attitudes including belief, desire, hope, and fear. This variety of roles leads to a variety of paradoxes, most of which have been sorely neglected. Arguing that existing work on these paradoxes is either too heavy-handed or too specific in its focus to be fully satisfactory, I develop a basic intensional logic and pursue and compare three strategies for addressing the paradoxes, one employing truth-value gaps, one restricting propositional quantification, and one restricting our ability to have attitudes like belief and desire. This results in four distinct resolutions of the paradoxes, all but one of which are novel and all of which receive novel and general implementations. While resolving the paradoxes is of course the ultimate goal, I do not here argue that any one of the resolutions is superior. These paradoxes have been so little studied that my primary goal is only to identify the most fundamental costs and benefits of the various approaches one can take to addressing them. Each resolution I develop has significant drawbacks, which I argue highlight tensions between the different roles propositions play. Past researchers have skirted these tensions, and the issues raised by these paradoxes more generally, by focusing on non-propositional paradoxes, such as the most familiar forms of the Liar paradox. At the least, then, I hope this dissertation establishes that the propositional paradoxes deserve attention not only because of their consequences for intensional logic, but also because of their consequences for our understanding of content, truth, quantification, and a host of mental attitudes.Ph.D.PhilosophyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/89611/1/dtuck_1.pd

Wittgenstein and the Grammar of Physics: A Study of Ludwig Wittgenstein\u27s 1929-1930 Manuscripts and the Roots of His Later Philosophy

In 1929 Wittgenstein began to work on the first philosophical manuscripts he had kept since completing the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP) in 1918. The impetus for this was his conviction that the logic of the TLP was flawed: it was unable to account for the fact that a proposition that assigns a single value on a continuum to a simple object thereby excludes all assignments of different values to the object (the color exclusion problem). Consequently Wittgenstein\u27s atomic propositions could not be logically independent of one another. Initially he thought he could replace the logically perfect language of the TLP with a phenomenological language in which experiential propositions about various spaces (e.g., visual space ) would form systems. The system described by a phenomenological language would be independent of the one described by ordinary physicalistic language; the physical world was known only by inference from the phenomenological. But he soon realized there was a fundamental error in this conception: phenomenology has to describe the same world as physics or it fails to provide a foundation for it. This suggests that there is only one world, and one language with two different modes of expression. Wittgenstein\u27s now comes to his fundamental insight: ordinary language is biased towards the description of physical objects and their relations, but it is our only method of expressing phenomenological or abstract concepts. Failure to recognize this difficulty leads to the misapplication of physicalistic concepts, i.e., to grammatical errors. This insight had the following impact: (a) the task of philosophy is not to invent logical or phenomenological languages, but to understand the grammar of ordinary language; (b) the notion of a language of pure experience was itself connected with a false, physicalistic idea of the soul as an observer of a private world; (c) the conception of analysis that had guided philosophy since Frege was based on a misused metaphor taken from the grammar of physics: the analysis of an object into its parts or chemical constituents. These ideas reach their ultimate expression in Wittgenstein\u27s Philosophical Investigations. Thus his later work actually begins with these 1929–30 manuscripts

Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume I: The Humean Conception

The Humean conception of the self consists in the belief-desire model of motivation and the utility-maximizing model of rationality. This conception has dominated Western thought in philosophy and the social sciences ever since Hobbes’ initial formulation in Leviathan and Hume’s elaboration in the Treatise of Human Nature. Bentham, Freud, Ramsey, Skinner, Allais, von Neumann and Morgenstern and others have added further refinements that have brought it to a high degree of formal sophistication. Late twentieth century moral philosophers such as Rawls, Brandt, Frankfurt, Nagel and Williams have taken it for granted, and have made use of it to supply metaethical foundations for a wide variety of normative moral theories. But the Humean conception of the self also leads to seemingly insoluble problems about moral motivation, rational final ends, and moral justification. Can it be made to work

Generality and singular terms in the proposition: a comparison between Bradley and various modern logicians

It is argued that propositions are general, which is taken to mean that there are no such things as 'singular terms' in the sense that certain parts of sentences are connected in a direct and simple one-to-one way with isolable bits of the world. Rather, it is suggested, the kinds of expressions usually called singular terms can be used to refer to individual things because of their respective meanings. An expression's possessing a meaning is understood univocally for both singular and general terms: it means that the expression implies certain characteristics which anything must have before the expression can properly be applied to it. The claim that the proposition is general is under¬ stood, therefore, as the claim that any part of a proposition which purports to pick out and individuate some item does so through devices common to the rest of the proposition, and thus cannot be thought of as non-general any more than the predicative component can be.Bradley first articulated this view, and that he did is the chief burden of Part I. In Part II this view is supported through an examination of the three kinds of singular terms: proper names, demonstratives, and definite descriptions. In each case it is argued that the expressions involved are general, as a consequence of their possessing moaning