Proper names

By Forbes, Graeme

The Roman general Julius Caesar was assassinated on 14 March 44 bc by conspirators led by Brutus and Cassius. It is a remarkable fact that, in so ...

Language, medieval theories of

By Ebbesen, Sten

A great deal of theorizing about language took place in western Europe between 1100 and 1400. The usual social context of this theorizing was the teaching of grammar, ...

Proper class

Kripke, Saul Aaron (1940–)

By Jubien, Michael

Saul Kripke is one of the most important and influential philosophers of the late twentieth century. He is also one of the leading mathematical logicians, having done seminal ...

Church, Alonzo (1903–95)

By Dolnik, Peter

Alonzo Church was one of the twentieth century’s leading logicians. His work covers an extensive range of topics in logic and in other areas of mathematics. His most ...

Singular proposition

Kripke, Saul Aaron (1940–)

Saul Kripke is one of the most influential philosophers to have written on logic, metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind in the twentieth century. ...

Evans, Gareth (1946–80)

By McDowell, John

Frege’s notion of sense is a conception of content whose application is controlled by the idea of rationality. A Fregean outlook is often taken to imply that singular ...

Sense and reference

By Marti, Genoveva

The ‘reference’ of an expression is the entity the expression designates or applies to. The ‘sense’ of an expression is the way in which the expression presents that ...

Reference

By Devitt, Michael

It is usual to think that referential relations hold between language and thoughts on one hand, and the world on the other. The most striking example of such ...

Logical atomism

By Oliver, Alex

The name ‘logical atomism’ refers to a network of theses about the parts and structure of the world and the means by which language represents the world. Wittgenstein, ...

Existence

By Mackie, Penelope

Philosophical problems concerning existence fall under two main headings: ‘What is existence?’ and ‘What things exist?’. Although these questions cannot be entirely separated, this entry will concentrate on ...

Burge, Tyler (1946–)

By Gerken, Mikkel; Dunlop, Katherine

Tyler Burge is an American philosopher whose body of work spans several areas of theoretical philosophy in the analytic tradition. While Burge has made important contributions to the ...

Mill, John Stuart (1806–73)

By Skorupski, John

John Stuart Mill, Britain’s major philosopher of the nineteenth century, gave formulations of his country’s empiricist and liberal traditions of comparable importance to those of John Locke. He ...

Mill, John Stuart (1806–73)

John Stuart Mill, Britain’s major philosopher of the nineteenth century, gave formulations of his country’s empiricist and liberal traditions of comparable importance to those of John Locke. His ...

Mill, John Stuart (1806–73)

John Stuart Mill, Britain’s major philosopher of the nineteenth century, gave formulations of his country’s empiricist and liberal traditions of comparable importance to those of John Locke. He ...

Propositional attitude statements

By Taylor, Kenneth A.

Propositional attitude statements – statements about our beliefs, desires, hopes and fears – exhibit certain logical peculiarities. For example, in apparent violation of Leibniz’s law of the indiscernibility ...

Putnam, Hilary (1926–2016)

By Ben-Menahem, Yemima

Putnam’s work spans a broad spectrum of philosophical interests, yet nonetheless reflects thematic unity in its concern over the question of realism. A critic of logical positivism, Putnam ...

Putnam, Hilary (1926–2016)

Putnam’s work spans a broad spectrum of philosophical interests, yet nonetheless reflects thematic unity in its concern over the question of realism. The dynamic nature of Putnam's thought ...

Property

By Munzer, Stephen R.

Most of the great philosophers have expressed views on property, its justification and limits, and especially on the justification of having private property; generally, one must understand these ...

Predication

By Mulligan, Kevin

Some sentences have a very simple structure, consisting only of a part which serves to pick out a particular object and a part which says something about the ...

Particulars

By Bigelow, John C.

Particulars are to be understood by contrasting them with universals, that term being used to comprise both properties and relations. Often the term ‘individuals’ is used interchangeably with ...

Semantics

By Crimmins, Mark

Semantics is the systematic study of meaning. Current work in this field builds on the work of logicians and linguists as well as of philosophers. Philosophers are interested ...

Metacognition

By Proust, Joëlle

It has often been claimed that metacognition should be defined as “cognition about one’s own cognition,” “knowledge about one’s own knowledge,” or “thinking about one’s own thinking” (Carruthers ...

Knowing how to

By Craig, Edward

It is sometimes said that when philosophers have thought about knowledge they have attended exclusively to knowing that p (or ‘propositional knowledge’, since p stands here for a ...