Logic Café colloquium meetings, Summer term 2025

31.3.2025

Meetings in this semester will be held in person on Mondays, between 16:30 and 18:00. The meetings will be held in seminar room 3B (B0315), 3rd floor at the Department of Philosophy, NIG Building, Universitätsstrasse 7.


Please see our website for further information on the Logic Café colloquium, for past events, and regular updates: https://logik-cafe.univie.ac.at       

 

The first talk in this semester will be by  Michael Rieppel (Syracuse University): "In Search of Essentially Predicative Entities“ this Monday 10.03.2025.      

Abstract: According to a Fregean view recently revived in higher-order metaphysics, predicates do not denote objects, construed as any kind of thing a name could denote, but must denote things of a fundamentally different logical type. A common route to that conclusion is via Russell's Paradox, but this doesn't do much to illuminate what it is about names and predicates that prevents them from both denoting kinds of objects. This paper critically examines more linguistically oriented arguments that attempt to establish the negative Fregean conclusion by reflection on the nature of predication, or how names and predicates combine to form truth-apt sentences in the first place. I begin with two such arguments but conclude that, properly situated in a general syntactic and semantic framework, they remain unconvincing. I then reconstruct a third argument, inspired by Wittgenstein's picture theory of meaning, showing that something in a sentence must indeed have a semantic function other than that of denoting an object. However, the Fregean victory remains constrained, in that we have little reason to think English predicates must be what play that non-denoting role, especially if predicate position is to be open to quantification.

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