Monthly Archives: July 2007

Hellman’s second line of argument against absolutely general quantification rests — according to the title of Section 4 of his paper — on the multiplicity of ‘factually equivalent ontologies’. The claim is that ‘The same underlying factual situation [can be] … Continue reading →

In the next section of his paper, Hellman expounds a version of the Dummett indefinite extensibility argument. You know the sort of thing! ‘Take some ordinals; then, whatever we start with, there’s an operation which gives us a new ordinal … Continue reading →

In the last few days, I’ve got two newly published introductory logic books, both relatively short and aimed at similar audiences. One is Mathematical Logic by Ian Chiswell and Wilfrid Hodges (OUP). This is notionally targetted at third year maths … Continue reading →

I’ll return to the second paper in the Absolute Generality collection, Michael Glanzberg’s ‘Context and unrestricted quantification’, in due course: but as it happens I’ve just read Geoffrey Hellman’s ‘Against “Absolutely Everything”‘, so I’ll comment on that while it is … Continue reading →

I’ve just started (re)reading John Burgess’ Fixing Frege. It is really full of useful things, but I still think what I thought on a first reading — namely that this is a pretty annoying book, as it surely could have … Continue reading →

Well, I think I’m going to have to admit defeat. I’ve tried reading Fine’s paper for the third time and I’m still stumped by his positive claims about ‘postulational modality’. The defender of indefinite extensibility thinks that ‘whatever interpretation [of … Continue reading →