What is involved in the meaning of our expressions? Frege suggested that there is an aspect of an expression.

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra has presented an objection to the co-intension problem. According to this objection, the examples of properties often cited to motivate the co-intension problem are actually relational properties, and so turn out not to be co-intensional. In this essay, I want to revisit Rodriguez-Pereyra’s objection and explain why I find it defective.

The metaphysics underlying differences in degree of qualitative intensity was widely debated in the medieval period. Medieval Aristotelians agreed that subjects possess qualities in virtue of inherent accidental forms. Yet, there was considerable disagreement about what happens at the level of form when a quality increases or decreases in its intensity. For instance, what happens when a pot of water on the stove gets hotter? Is the water’s previous form of heat replaced by a new one, or does the same (...) form of heat persist? Does the form of heat itself undergo a change, or does only the water undergo a change? While there have been several important studies on the medieval debate about the “intension and remission of forms,” little attention has been paid to Thomas Aquinas’s intriguing theory. Aquinas claims that a subject’s quality increases in intensity in virtue of the subject “participating” more perfectly in an invariable form. This paper examines Aquinas’s conception of the participation relationship between a substance and its accidental forms; and his metaphysical analysis of changes of intensification. (shrink)

The metaphysics underlying differences in degree of qualitative intensity was widely debated in the medieval period. Medieval Aristotelians agreed that subjects possess qualities in virtue of inherent accidental forms. Yet, there was considerable disagreement about what happens at the level of form when a quality increases or decreases in its intensity. For instance, what happens when a pot of water on the stove gets hotter? Is the water’s previous form of heat replaced by a new one, or does the same (...) form of heat persist? Does the form of heat itself undergo a change, or does only the water undergo a change? While there have been several important studies on the medieval debate about the “intension and remission of forms,” little attention has been paid to Thomas Aquinas’s intriguing theory. Aquinas claims that a subject’s quality increases in intensity in virtue of the subject “participating” more perfectly in an invariable form. This paper examines Aquinas’s conception of the participation relationship between a substance and its accidental forms; and his metaphysical analysis of changes of intensification. (shrink)

The article introduces the author’s model of contextual constraints on the generation of musical meaning in an effort to suggest how the approach may be of interest to philosophers pursuing the problem of representation. Since the model is based on insights of linguistic semantics, representation is defined as an amodal functionalist construct relating music perception to an extramusical experience, which assumes varying degrees of imagistic and/or referential specificity. The theory proposes six such degrees, or “grounding boxes”: perceptual, cross-modal, affective, conceptual, (...) culturally rich, and personal. In doing so, it turns classical dichotomies in musical semantics into continua, which lead the cognizer from more general to more concrete, more intrato more extramusical, more formal to more referential, more perceptual to more conceptual, and finally more ineffable to more representational sets of connotations. The system is illustrated with the analysis of the Ming the Merciless leit-motif from the 1980 science-fiction film Flash Gordon, composed by Freddie Mercury and performed by Queen. (shrink)

New light is shed on Leibniz’s commitment to the metaphysical priority of the intensional interpretation of logic by considering the arithmetical and graphical representations of syllogistic inference that Leibniz studied. Crucial to understanding this connection is the idea that concepts can be intensionally represented in terms of properties of geometric extension, though significantly not the simple geometric property of part-whole inclusion. I go on to provide an explanation for how Leibniz could maintain the metaphysical priority of the intensional interpretation while (...) holding that logically the intensional and the extensional stand in strictly inverse relation to each other. (shrink)

Ce sont, on le sait, globalement les mêmes questions philosophiques qui sont à l?origine, d?une part, de la thèse de l?intentionalité des phénomènes psychiques formulée dans l?école de Franz Brentano et, d?autre part, de la thèse de l?inten s ionalité de certaines expressions linguistiques développée dans l?école de Gottlob Frege. Dans les deux cas, il s?agit de rendre compte de la capacité qu?ont les actes mentaux et les signes linguistiques de « se rapporter à » ou de « viser » (...) ( meinen ) des contenus sémantiques, lesquels doivent par ailleurs être distingués des objets réels qui peuvent éventuelle­ment les exemplifier. C?est notamment contre le psychologisme des théories modernes ? singulièrement empiristes ? de la représentation et de la signification que s?est manifesté de manière très nette au xix e siècle le souci de démêler, dans le phénomène de la représentation comme dans celui de la signification, ce qui relève du vécu ou de l?acte psychique subjectif et ce qui relève de son contenu « objectif » ou du moins intersubjectif, partageable. Là où les empi­ristes britanniques concevaient l?idée de Socrate, l?idée de Dieu, l?idée du triangle ou l?idée de la causalité comme autant d?objets mentaux régulière­ment présents dans l?esprit humain et soumis à ses mécanismes naturels, il s?agit désormais de distinguer les éventuels véhicules psychique s de ces idées de. (shrink)

two-dimensional modal framework introduced by Evans [2] and developed by Davies and Humberstone. [3] This framework provides Chalmers with a powerful tool for handling the most serious objection to conceivability arguments for dualism: the problem of..

According to two-dimensional semantics, primary intension and secondary intension can play the role of reflecting the cognitive aspect of an expression like Fregean sense does. The aim of this paper is to argue that this role is likely a myth. To argue for this, I attempt to show that cognitive aspects of fictional names cannot be explained within the framework of two-dimensional semantics. To be more specific, I consider four ontological theories about fictional characters that two-dimensional semanticists might (...) be tempted to choose. And then, I argue that none of them can be combined with two-dimensional semantics in a satisfactory way. (shrink)

In The Continuum, Hermann Weyl gives new bases to the notions of set and function. With them, he constructs mathematics close to physics and solves the continuum problem. Those new notions are so unusual with respect to Set Theory that they are often misunderstood.We propose to explain the meaning of Weyl’s reform of those notions. We first make a synthesis of his main epistemological thesis, and then propose a comparative approach to stress the distance between the mathematical and logical principles (...) of The Continuum and those of Set Theory. Our discussion will be centred on the distinction between intension and extension, and on the place Weyl gives to natural numbers for the foundations of analysis. (shrink)

Cet article, qui fait suite à une publication précédente (« Les apories du concept de redondance logique chez Bolzano »), poursuit un double objectif : (I) démontrer que les apories que nous avions relevées peuvent être surmontées par l’analyse des rapports extensionnels entre représentations ; (II) évaluer la contribution de Bolzano à la question classique des rapports intension/extension telle qu’elle a été posée par Port-Royal. La logique des classes, dont Bolzano pose les fondements ( Théorie de la science, 2 (...) e partie, 3 e section), permet en effet de dégager les lois de la redondance logique — auxquelles Bolzano ne cesse de faire implicitement référence sans en donner la formule — et de délimiter le champ d’application du principe classique de proportionnalité inverse entre intension et extension auquel déroge précisé­ment la redondance. La critique bolzanienne de la logique de Port-Royal prend alors tout son sens. (shrink)

The paper analyses Frege's approach to the identity conditions for the entity labelled by him as Sinn. It starts with a brief characterization of the main principles of Frege's semantics and lists his remarks on the identity conditions for Sinn. They are subject to a detailed scrutiny, and it is shown that, with the exception of the criterion of intersubstitutability in oratio obliqua, all other criteria have to be discarded. Finally, by comparing Frege's views on Sinn with Carnap's method of (...) extension and intension and the method of intensional isomorphism, it is proved that these methods do not provide a criterion for the identity of Frege's Sinn, even for extensional contexts, that the concept of intension does not coincide, as stated by Carnap, in these contexts, with Frege's concept of Sinn, and that Carnap's claim that in oratio obliqua Frege's semantics leads to an infinite hierarchy of Sinn entities can be questioned at least hypothetically in the light of certain new historical facts. (shrink)

The semantic method of extension and intension presented by Rudolf Carnap may have some problems from the current perspective in cognitive science. For example, that method is strongly linked to logic, and it is hard to determine where its state-descriptions come from, how many they are, and what the relation of accessibility between them is. This paper tries to solve difficulties such as those by updating the method resorting to the theses and results of a contemporary reasoning theory: the (...) theory of mental models. Basically, the update consists of replacing the state-descriptions of the original method with the possibilities of the theory of mental models. That allows reformulating several relevant concepts in Carnap’s method in order to better adjust them to the real characteristics of human language. (shrink)

En este artículo se analiza el debate sobre la forma adecuada de entender el condicional producido en el siglo IV a. C. El análisis se lleva a cabo mediante el método proporcionado por Rudolf Carnap para estudiar el significado de las expresiones, es decir, mediante el método de extensión e intensión. Los resultados de ese análisis parecen mostrar que, aunque, según Sexto Empirico, el debate fue sobre cuatro criterios diferentes para comprender el condicional, en realidad tres de esos criterios parecen (...) ser iguales y tienen una forma lógica común muy clara en el marco de Carnap. (shrink)

A competent systematic exposition, following the accounts of Couturat and Lewis.--R. W.

Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy cuts to the heart of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and of today's science wars.At the start of the 21st Century,...

It is demonstrated how to incorporate the traditional notion of a proposition as eternal and unvarying in truth value into a semantic theory like that of David Kaplan, by distinguishing among not three (as in Kaplan’s work), but four levels of semantic value: extension, content, _content base_, and meaning. Unlike the semantic content, the content base of a sentence may be temporally neutral, and may thus vary in truth-value with time. This semantic theory supports that generally unrecognized fact that the (...) semantic content of a predicate, like ‘is reading’, is a temporally indexed attribute (_reading at t_, _t_ a time), and hence changes as the predicate is evaluated with respect to different times. (shrink)