Sanford Shieh

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Full) at Wesleyan University

I argue that Charles Travis’s interpretation of Frege, in Frege: The Pure Business of Being True , as consistent with Travis’s conception of occasion-sensitivity does not in fact require any modal notions, and so is consistent with the amodalist interpretation of Frege I elaborate in Necessity Lost.

This chapter traces Wittgenstein’s philosophical development culminating in the conception, central to Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, of propositions as involving essentially a primitive notion of possibility. I spell out three stages of this philosophical development, starting from criticism of Russell’s multiple-relation theory of judgment, goin...

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus deploys modal vocabulary, especially “possibility.” Some readers take this to signal commitment to substantive modal theories. For others, it is metaphysical nonsense to be thrown away. We steer a middle path. We uncover the central role of possibility in Wittgenstein’s philosophical development from criticism of Russell’s...

Responding to Russell is a constant throughout Wittgenstein's philosophizing. This Element focuses on Wittgenstein's criticisms of Russell's theories of judgment in the summer of 1913. Wittgenstein's response to these criticisms is of first-rate importance for his early philosophical development, setting the path to the conceptions of proposition a...

This paper sketches the place of Arthur Pap’s work in the complex history of modality in the analytic tradition of philosophy, contrasting it with that of the early Wittgenstein. They represent two principal paths of the philosophical history of modality that converge in the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle. Clarifying these paths go some wa...

Do considerations in the theory of meaning pose a challenge to classical logic, and in particular to the law of excluded middle? Michael Dummett suggested an affirmative answer to this question, and advocated a form of logical revisionism. In his 1981 study “Anti-Realism and Revisionism,” Crispin Wright developed a critique of Dummett’s case for lo...

This chapter shows that Frege’s commitment to the absoluteness of truth rests on commitments central to his later philosophy, after he adopts the sense/reference distinction. For Frege, a thought represents something to be the case, and a judgment is fundamentally the recognition that what a thought represents obtains. Truth is that property of tho...

A long tradition, going back to Aristotle, conceives of logic in terms of necessity and possibility: a deductive argument is correct if the truth of its conclusion follows necessarily from the truth of its premises or, put differently, if it is not possible for the conclusion to be false when the premises are true. A relatively unknown feature of t...

This chapter presents three main aspects of Russell’s non-modal conception of logic. First, Russell characterizes the axioms of logic as rules of inference that incorporate the relation of implication. Second, Russell takes logic to be maximally general, in the sense that logic governs all valid deductive reasoning, no matter what about. Third, Rus...

This chapter examines how Russell came to reject modality on the basis of his rejection of idealism. Russell’s anti-modal views rest on the Moore-Russell theory of propositions, not on Russell’s attack on internal relations. This theory derives from Moore’s criticisms of Bradley’s theory of judgment. Unlike most readers of Moore, who find these cri...

This chapter provides the first part of a specification of Frege’s grounds for holding that modal distinctions are not features of logical structure. If necessity and possibility are genuine properties, then they are properties of judgeable contents or thoughts, and, the possession of any of these properties is determined by the truth and falsity o...

This chapter concerns three phases of Russell’s views of necessity and logic in his idealist period, influenced by F. H. Bradley’s theory of necessity. First, Russell defended a Kantian theory of geometry based on transcendental arguments justifying the apriority and necessity of geometry. Second, Russell begins to move away from this Kantian posit...

This chapter shows how Russell’s rejection of modality rounds out his criticism of Bradleyan idealism. Russell’s argument against internal relations by itself is not a fully satisfying criticism of Bradley’s idealism, because it doesn’t show what exactly is wrong with Bradley’s arguments against the reality of relations. I show that several of Brad...

How does Frege conceive of logic, if not in modal terms? For Frege, logic is a system of truths that divides into primitive truths, which are axioms or basic laws, and logical truths justified by primitive logical truths. Frege appears to hold that what makes a thought a primitive logical truth is that it provides its own justification. However, Fr...

This chapter concerns a development of Russell’s view of modality. It occurs in “Necessity and Possibility,” in which Russell formulates a new argument against modality. The argument begins with a survey of intuitions about modality. Russell proceeds to make these intuitions more precise, in terms of notions of logic. The resulting accounts, howeve...

This chapter takes up two further issues about Frege’s attitude towards modality. First, Frege doesn’t simply reject the relativization of truth. He gives amodalist explanations of linguistic phenomena that seem to show that truth is relative to time, and of talk of truth in various circumstances. Second, Frege’s truth-absolutism is not incompatibl...

This chapter is an exposition of Frege’s theory of modality before adopting the sense/reference distinction. The background for understanding this theory is Kant’s conception of judgment and of the classification of judgments in the Table of Judgments. Frege agrees with Kant that modality is not an aspect of content. However, Frege’s discovery of m...

This chapter provides a brief comparison of a prominent contemporary conception of the criticism and justification of modal concepts with the arguments of Frege and Russell. The contemporary conception pins criticism of modality on the logical positivists’ verificationist criterion of cognitive significance. It also rests on the assumption that the...

On the standard interpretation of Lewis’s criticism of Russell, Lewis takes his own account of strict implication to be more intuitive than the paradoxes to which Russell’s material implication leads. This chapter argues against the standard interpretation by showing that Russell’s views are not counterintuitive, but that appeals to “intuition” are...

One of the most important sources of the “resolute” approaches to interpreting Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is a view of nonsense originally developed by Cora Diamond as an interpretation of the views of Frege as well as of the early Wittgenstein. In the seminal papers in which Diamond’s interpretation was first set out, Michael Dummett’s reading of Fr...

In this paper I advance an account of the necessity of logic in Wittgenstein's Tractatus. I reject both the "metaphysical" reading of Peter Hacker, who takes Tractarian logical necessity to consist in the mode of truth of tautologies, and the "resolute" account of Cora Diamond, who argues that all Tractarian talk of necessity is to be thrown away....

This chapter treats C. I. Lewis' criticism of Bertrand Russell's material implication. This chapter gives an overview of the differences between Russell's conception of logic and contemporary ones. Lewis's criticism is often taken to rest on the divergence between material implication and our intuitive conception of logical consequence. The chapter...

In this paper I outline two styles of semantic anti-realism: the well-known epistemologically based one, and a less familiar conceptually based one. After a review of some of the standard epistemological conceptions of the manifestation constraint, I argue for a conceptual version of manifestation, and a corresponding manifestation constraint on me...

Author’s Introduction Three clusters of philosophically significant issues arise from Frege’s discussions of definitions. First, Frege criticizes the definitions of mathematicians of his day, especially those of Weierstrass and Hilbert. Second, central to Frege’s philosophical discussion and technical execution of logicism is the so‐called Hume’s P...

This article treats three aspects of Frege's discussions of definitions. First, I survey Frege's main criticisms of definitions in mathematics. Second, I consider Frege's apparent change of mind on the legitimacy of contextual definitions and its significance for recent neo-Fregean logicism. In the remainder of the article I discuss a critical ques...

BOOK REVIEWS 303 Michael Dummett. Frege and Other Philosophers. New York: Oxford University Press, x991. Pp. xii + 33o- Cloth, $69.oo. Michael Dummett. Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 199 I. Pp. xiii + 33 I. Cloth, $34.95. Dummett's writings on Frege have already set a standard of accomplishment to which...

There are, of course, many styles of philosophizing; but it is sometimes illuminating to think of philosophers as divided into two broad types: the Socratic and the Platonic. The former are the critics, the ones who never cease questioning the grounds of accepted opinions and turning over the details of arguments; the latter are the systematizers,...

One of the two major parts of Dummett’s defense of intuitionism is the rejection of classical in favor of intuitionistic reasoning in mathematics, given that mathematical discourse is anti-realist. While there have been illuminating discussions of what Dummett’s argument for this might be, no consensus seems to have emerged about its overall form....

In recent years, analytic philosophy has gained a new historical self‐consciousness. A considerable amount of work, both historically informed and philosophically subtle, is being done now on its origins and development. This is especially true for early analytic philosophy (roughly 1880–1930) and the corresponding works of Frege, Russell, Moore, a...

Among contemporary philosophers there is a growing interest in recounting the history of philosophy in the twentieth century. Those who discuss what is more or less loosely called “analytic philosophy”—among them some who reject the methods of analysis outright—are increasingly engaged in attempting to delineate the origins and significance of the...

Among contemporary philosophers there is a growing interest in recounting the history of philosophy in the twentieth century. Those who discuss what is more or less loosely called “analytic philosophy”—among them some who reject the methods of analysis outright—are increasingly engaged in attempting to delineate the origins and significance of the...

In this paper I attempt to clarify a relatively little-studied aspect of Michael Dummett's argument for intuitionism: its use of the notion of ‘undecidable’ sentence. I give a new analysis of this concept in epistemic terms, with which I resolve some puzzles and questions about how it works in the anti-realist critique of classical logic.

The central premise of Michael Dummett's global argument for anti-realism is the thesis that a speaker's grasp of the meaning of a declarative, indexical-free sentence must be manifested in her uses of that sentence. This enigmatic thesis has been the subject of a great deal of discussion, and something of a consensus has emerged about its content...

A distinguished international group of philosophers contribute new essays on central issues in philosophy of language and logic, in honour of Michael Dummett, one of the most influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. The essays are focused on areas particularly associated with Professor Dummett. Five are contributions to the philosoph...

In this paper I show that Michael Dummett’s anti-realist intuitionism requires a significant place for epistemic principles. Specifically, I argue that such principles must be tacitly adopted if we are to make sense of a relatively little-studied but central component of Dummett’s argument for intuitionism: its use of the notion of “undecidable” ma...

DummettMichael. The logical basis of metaphysics. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1991, xi + 355 pp. - Volume 58 Issue 3 - Sanford Shieh