Qualifying quantifying-in - a podcast by MCMP Team

Bjørn Jespersen (TU Ostrava) gives a talk at the MCMP Colloquium (24 October, 2013) titled "Qualifying quantifying-in". Abstract: If you know that Munich is a city, does it follow that there is an individual x and a property f such that you know that x is an f? Similarly, if you find the millionth digit of the decimal expansion of ?, does it follow that there is a number y such that you find y? It does, provided the rule of existential generalization extends to so-called non-extensional contexts like those involving attitudes and modalities. I argue that EG must apply to all contexts, since the rule essentially serves to make explicit ontological commitments already implicit in the premise. Nor do non-extensional contexts cripple the rule of substitution of identicals. The law is universally valid, but its substituends must be chosen more carefully. This talk presents an extensional logic of hyperintensions that validates quantifying into hyperintensional contexts and quantifying over hyperintensions and intensions (functions from possible worlds), though not always also over extensions, due to non-factive attitudes. The talk also explains how to obtain universal transparency, i.e. a context-invariant theory of meaning and reference, by universalizing Frege’s semantics for oblique contexts. The background theory is Transparent Intensional Logic, formally a hyperintensional, partial, typed ?-calculus. TIL conceptualizes hyperintensions as structured procedures detailing how to produce an extension or intension, or even another hyperintension. My focus will be on hyperintensional attitudes, i.e. those whose complements are individuated finer than up to logical equivalence. The talk summarizes the latest results on the details of the logic of quantifying-in.

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