Frege on Identity and Co-Reference

[EN] In "Uber Sinn und Bedeutung" (1892) Frege raises a problem concerning identity statements of the form a=b and he criticizes the view he holds in the Begriffsschrift (1879, & sect; 8). In building on a suggestion by Perry (2001/12, ch. 7) I will show how Frege's Begriffsschrift account can be rescued and how Frege's 1892 criticism of his Begriffsschrift's position somewhat miss the point. Furthermore, the Begriffsschrift's view can be developed to account in quite an elegant way to the so-called Frege's Puzzle without committing to the sense/reference (Sinn/Bedeutung) distinction Frege introduces in "Uber Sinn und Bedeutung". To do so we have, though, to give up the idea that all the relevant information conveyed by the utterance of a simple sentence is encapsulated into a single content. I will show of this can be done in adopting a Perry-style pluri-propositionalist model of communication.Research for this paper has been partly sponsored by the Spanish ministry of economyand competitivity (FFI2015-63719-P (MINECO/FEDER, UE) ) ; the Spanish ministry of science and innovation (PID2019-106078GB-I00 (MCI/AEI/FEDER, UE) ) and the Basque Government (IT1032-16

Sense and Insensibility: Or Where Minimalism Meets Contextualism

In this paper we present some benefits of semantic minimalism. In particular, we stress how minimalism allows us to avoid cognitive overloading, in that (i) it does not posit hidden indexicals or variables at the LF or representational level and (ii) it does not posit the operation of free enrichment processes when we produce or hear a sentence. We nonetheless argue that a fully adequate semantic minimalism should embrace a form of relativism—that is, the view that semantic content must be evaluated, pace Cappelen and Lepore, vis-à-vis a given situation, the latter being a fragment of a possible world or a partial world. In so doing we shall show how Cappelen and Lepore damage the insight of semantic minimalism insofar as they insist that the (minimal) semantic content should be evaluated with respect to a whole possible world. This move fails to capture the powerful contextualist intuition that it does not make much sense to evaluate the content of, say, Naomi is rich, or Jon is tall, with respect to, for instance, the actual world (ignoring standards of evaluation or situations)

On the Present and (Dark) Future of Academia and Humanities

I have a pessimistic view on the present and future of high education in general, and humanities in particular. As I see things, we face three main related problems. The first is what I would characterize as corporate control; the second, what I perceive as a class-divide enterprise; and the third as an attempt to limit the freedom of expression. I should add that my general impressions are mainly based on what I perceived within the North American higher educational system and in Europe, especially in England. Furthermore, I do not claim to be discovering something sociologically novel. What’s happening in higher education is a mere reflection of what’s going on in our neo-liberal capitalist society. My aim is modest. It mainly consists in highlighting how the neo-liberal and globalization (marketing) processes are affecting higher education and research. The conclusion doesn’t look rosy. Intellectuals, philosophers in particular, should take time to reflect on the current corruption of academia, and take a stance against the attack on the integrity of higher education

Philosophie du langage

Jérôme Dokic, directeur d’étudesEros Corazza, professeur à l’Université Carlton, Ottawa (Canada) Exploitations du contexte Au cours des quatre conférences que j’ai prononcées à l’EHESS, j’ai analysé plusieurs travaux dans le domaine de la linguistique philosophique qui traitent de la manière dont les personnes exploitent l’information contextuelle dans la communication et à travers d’autres formes de cognition sociale. Les buts visés étaient les suivants : Expliquer pourquoi les théories actu..

Contexts, non-specificity, and minimalism

Atlas (2007) argues that semantic minimalism (as defended by Cappelen & Lepore 2005) fails because it cannot deal with semantic non-specificity. I argue that thereis a plausible version of minimalism-viz., situated minimalism-which doesn't succumb to the non-specificity charge insofar as non-specificity can be dealt with at a postsemantic level. Thus, pragmatics plays no rolewhen it comes to determining the (minimal) proposition expressed. Instead, pragmatic and other extra-semantic considerations enter the scene in characterizing the situation vis-à-vis which the proposition is evaluated. For this reason a plausible form of minimalism must embrace a form of truth-relativism: a proposition is not universally true/false, but true/false only relative to a situation. I show how the position defended is not only (i) more cognitively plausible than either (semantic) minimalism as proposed by Cappelen & Lepore or the positions appealing to pragmaticintrusion into the proposition expressed, but is also (ii) in accordance with ordinary people's intuitions

Names, identity, and predication

It is commonly accepted, after Frege, that identity statements like “Tully is Cicero” differ from statements like “Tully is Tully”. For the former, unlike the latter, are informative. One way to deal with the information problem is to postulate that the terms ‘Tully’ and ‘Cicero’ come equipped with different informative (or cognitive) values. Another approach is to claim that statements like these are of the subject/predicate form. As such, they should be analyzed along the way we treat “Tully walks”. Since proper names can appear in predicative position we could go as far as to dismiss the sign of identity altogether, some told us. I will try to discuss the advantages and/or disadvantages of this approach and investigate whether Frege’s view that the ‘is’ of identity must be distinguished from the ‘is’ of predication (copula) can be reconciled with the fact that names can appear in predicative position

Identity, doxastic co-indexation, and Frege's puzzle

I will argue that Frege's puzzle arises only in taking into consideration the cognizer's viewpoint. Although this sounds trivial, it triggers some important consequences. In particular, Frege's puzzle has nothing to do with the notion of identity. For, the puzzle rests on whether the speaker/hearer (or writer/reader) conceives the names flanking the identity-sign to be co-referential or not (independently of whether they are de facto co-referential). I will show how Frege's attempted solution in the Begriffsschrift can be rescued and how this may not conflict with the solution Frege proposes in introducing the sense/reference distinction. To do so, though, we should recognize that Frege worked with different (and somewhat conflicting) notions of content and that he assumed that only a single content expressed by an utterance should encompass all the information conveyed by a statement. In questioning this assumption Frege's puzzle or a Frege-inspired puzzle can be addressed and understood from a different perspective