First-order modal logic /
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| Author / Creator: | Fitting, Melvin, 1942- |
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| Imprint: | Dordrecht ; Boston, Mass. : Kluwer Academic, c1998. |
| Description: | xii 287 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. |
| Language: | English |
| Series: | Synthese library v. 277 |
| Subject: | |
| Format: | Print Book |
| URL for this record: | http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/3534874 |
| Summary: | Fitting and Mendelsohn present a thorough treatment of first-order modal logic, together with some propositional background. They adopt throughout a threefold approach. Semantically, they use possible world models; the formal proof machinery is tableaus; and full philosophical discussions are provided of the way that technical developments bear on well-known philosophical problems.<br> The book covers quantification itself, including the difference between actualist and possibilist quantifiers; equality, leading to a treatment of Frege's morning star/evening star puzzle; the notion of existence and the logical problems surrounding it; non-rigid constants and function symbols; predicate abstraction, which abstracts a predicate from a formula, in effect providing a scoping function for constants and function symbols, leading to a clarification of ambiguous readings at the heart of several philosophical problems; the distinction between nonexistence and nondesignation; and definite descriptions, borrowing from both Fregean and Russellian paradigms. |
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| Physical Description: | xii 287 p. : ill. ; 25 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (p. 277-281) and index. |
| ISBN: | 079235334X 0792353358 |