Philosophy of Logic

Abstract

Logic may be characterized as the science aiming at revealing the deep logical structure of statements and, correlatively, at evaluating the arguments involving such statements. This chapter focuses on the content of different categories of expression of ordinary language, a question that arises typically in the analysis of singular terms and propositional attitudes. It starts from the paradoxes of the “indiscernibility of identicals” and goes through two main solutions to these paradoxes: a “logic of sense and denotation” (à la Frege) and a “logic of meaning” (à la Russell). A logic halfway between the two is also discussed. In the closing section, a comparative appraisal of these solutions is proposed.