Brian Rabern (Edinburgh) will give a talk on “Against Fregean Quantification”.

Abstract: It is commonly held that the correct analysis of quantification was discovered only in the late nineteenth century by Gottlob Frege. Yet contemporary logical and philosophical research usually proceeds with a treatment of quantification descending from Alfred Tarski’s 1935 “The concept of truth in formalized languages”, which is incompatible with basic features of Frege’s original account. While the Tarskian approach is standard and familiar, deep conceptual objections have been pressed against its employment of variables as genuine syntactic and semantic units. Because they do not explicitly rely on variables, Fregean approaches are held to avoid these worries. The apparent result is that the Fregean can deliver something that the Tarskian is unable to, namely a compositional semantic treatment of quantification centered on truth and reference. Our contention is that on closer inspection the Fregean approaches all end up having the same alleged vices as the Tarskian account. That is, they either end up violating the compositionality principle, or they end up being fundamentally anti-Fregean, insofar as they demote truth and reference from their central role in the semantic theory. The result, however, is not merely of historical importance. Our argument brings greater clarity to the unique role of variables in the theory of quantification, and locates more precisely the contrast between standard and broadly variabilist approaches to natural language proper names, indexicals, and demonstratives in contemporary semantics.

The seminar will happen in Zoom. If you want to join the talk, please e-mail si24@.