Abstract
Abstract. Following a suggestion by Allen Hazen, we provide an elementary proof of a theorem of Hodes’ to the effect that no sentence of ordinary modal predicate logic has a certain truth condition. We point out that this constitutes a predicament for the logical analysis of modal discourse insofar as there exist perfectly natural statements of English having just this standardly non-representable truth condition. There are at least two ways of amending modal predicate logic in such a way that these recalcitrant statements become representable. The resulting logical analyses differ in essential respects (e.g., rigidity of definite descriptions), so that the philosophical question arises which analysis provides the true picture of natural language.
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References
See, for instance, [CrooHumo77].
Cf. [Haz76]. Our proof follows a suggestion of Hazen’s (see his footnote 26).
Cf. [Hod84] .
Cf. [Za188].
Cf. [Humo82] .
These points are elaborated in my paper [Weh∞].
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© 2003 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Wehmeier, K.F. (2003). World Travelling and Mood Swings. In: Löwe, B., Malzkom, W., Räsch, T. (eds) Foundations of the Formal Sciences II. Trends in Logic, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0395-6_18
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0395-6_18
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-6233-8
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-0395-6
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