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The Logic of Fiction and the ‘Sayso’ Semantics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

Graeme Hunter
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Extract

It would no doubt conform to most people's unschooled intuition to call

1. Hamlet was a Danish prince.

true, and

2. Hamlet was a Spanish peasant.

false. Yet most philosophers who have considered the question have given us reason to believe that our intuitions could lead us in such cases into (at worst) contradiction or (at best) deviant logic.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , June 1978 , pp. 344 - 366
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1978

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References

Notes

1 For an account of this sense of ‘refer’ see Crittenden, Charles, “Fictional Existence” in American Philosophical Quarterly v. 3 (1966) pp. 317–321Google Scholar

2 cf. Crittenden, op. cit.

3 Woods, John, The Logic of Fiction (The Hague: Mouton, 1974) p. 24Google Scholar

4 Quine, W.V.O., Methods of Logic (3rd ed.) (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1972) p. 217Google Scholar

5 Ayer, A.J., Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Dover, 1952) p. 45Google Scholar

6 Reichenbach, Hans, Symbolic Logic (New York: The Free Press, 1966) p. 274 ff. (sect. 49)Google Scholar

7 Kripke, S.A., “Naming and Necessity” in Semantics of Natural Language ed. Davidson, Donald and Harman, Gilbert (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972) p. 269Google Scholar.