Truth, Syntax and Modality

This book includes some of the most original and influential contributions to logic and the philosophy of logic during the past twenty years. It contains thirty-five essays, many of which started new trends in logic. For example, some of the essays in Part One gave birth to what is now known as free logic, and some of the essays in Part Two were among the earliest contributions to what is now known as truth-value semantics. The essays in Part Three are contributions to and improvements of already extant logics, such as intuitionistic logic, natural deduction, and the logic of sequents. Introductions to the parts of the book cover the history of the contributions and their importance. The essays have been thoroughly revised since their publication in learned journals.

An innovative survey that covers the linguistic questions of modality and mood, offering a new model for the phenomenon.

What do we mean when we say things like 'If only we knew what he was up to!' Clearly this is more than just a message, or a question to our addressee. We are expressing simultaneously that we don't know, and also that we wish to know. Several modes of encoding contribute to such modalities of expression: word order, subordinating subjunctions, sentences that are subordinated but nevertheless occur autonomously, and attitudinal discourse adverbs which, far beyond lexical adverbials of modality, allow the speaker and the listener to presuppose full agreement, partial agreement under presupposed conditions, or negotiation of common ground. This state of the art survey proposes a new model of modality, drawing on data from a variety of Germanic and Slavic languages to find out what is cross-linguistically universal about modality, and to argue that it is a constitutive part of human cognition.

Despite the intensive research carried out in recent years, modality remains an intriguing and challenging issue in linguistics. This book investigates modality from a syntactic viewpoint and with a bottom-up approach. A strong focus of the book is the interaction between the different linguistic tools that build modality (moods, modal verbs, modal adverbs, etc.), taking both the role of syntactic structure and the compositionality of modal meanings into account. The volume comprises corpus-based studies devoted to several syntactic aspects of modality in Ancient Greek, within different theoretical frameworks. The chapters shed new light on different modal categories (e.g. epistemicity, possibility, counterfactuality, evidentiality, subjectivity) and show how these modal meanings arise from the combination of different linguistic devices in specific syntactic contexts (e.g. combinations of modal elements, types of main and dependent clauses, types of illocutionary acts, etc.). By approaching modality from a different perspective and providing an up-to-date discussion of several aspects of modality, the book makes a significant contribution to current debates.

First published in 1999, this volume re-examines Bertrand Russell’s views on modal logic and logical relevance, arguing that Russell does in fact accommodate modality and modal logic. The author, Jan Dejnožka, draws together Russell’s comments and perspectives from throughout his canon in order to demonstrate a coherent view on logical modality and logical relevance. To achieve this, Dejnožka explores questions including whether Russell has a possible worlds logic, Rescher’s case against Russell, Russell’s three levels of modality and the motives and origins of Russell’s theory of modality.

The essays in this collection are written by students, colleagues, and friends of Nuel Belnap to honor him on his sixtieth birthday. Our original plan was to include pieces from fonner students only, but we have deviated from this ever so slightly for a variety of personal and practical reasons. Belnap's research accomplishments are numerous and well known: He has founded (together with Alan Ross Anderson) a whole branch of logic known as "relevance logic." He has made contributions of fundamental importance to the logic of questions. His work in modal logic, fonnal pragmatics, and the theory of truth has been highly influential. And the list goes on. Belnap's accomplishments as a teacher are also distinguished and well known but, by virtue of the essential privacy of the teaching relationship, not so well understood. We would like to reflect a little on what makes him such an outstanding teacher.

In this rigorous investigation into the logic of truth Anil Gupta and Nuel Belnap explain how the concept of truth works in both ordinary and pathological contexts. The latter include, for instance, contexts that generate Liar Paradox. Their central claim is that truth is a circular concept. In support of this claim they provide a widely applicable theory (the "revision theory") of circular concepts. Under the revision theory, when truth is seen as circular both its ordinary features and its pathological features fall into a simple understandable pattern. The Revision Theory of Truth is unique in placing truth in the context of a general theory of definitions. This theory makes sense of arbitrary systems of mutually interdependent concepts, of which circular concepts, such as truth, are but a special case.

This book shows that the semantic analysis of modal notions of possibility and necessity can be used to enhance our understanding of the interpretation of reports of belief or emotional state. It introduces intuitive notation and terminology to express ideas in modern theories of modal interpretation that are normally represented in complex logical formulas, effectively updates the 1960s-era link between possible worlds and the semantics of propositional attitude ascriptions, and reconciles two disparate views of the role of events in semantic interpretation, that of Donald Davidson and that of David Lewis. It reduces a host of variable behaviors of propositional attitude ascription to an intuitive and precise distinction between ascriptions that merely express a commitment to propositional content versus ones that attribute a mental state to the holder of the propositional attitude. This leads to an explanation of the nature and effects of the language disorder of fluent aphasia.

Timothy Williamson gives an original and provocative treatment of deep metaphysical questions about existence, contingency, and change, using the latest resources of quantified modal logic. Contrary to the widespread assumption that logic and metaphysics are disjoint, he argues that modal logic provides a structural core for metaphysics.