The goal of this paper is to demonstrate that procedurally structured concepts are central to human communication in all cultures and throughout history. This thesis is supported by an analytical survey of three very different means of communication, namely Egyptian hieroglyphs, pictures, and Inca knot writing known as khipu. The author ś thesis is that we learn, communicate and think by means of concepts; and regardless of the way in which the meaning of an expression is encoded, the meaning is a concept. Yet we do not define concepts within the classical set-theoretical framework. Instead, within the logical framework of Transparent Intensional Logic, we explicate concepts as logical procedures that can be assigned to expressions as their context-invariant meaning. In particular, complex meanings, which structurally match complex expressions, are complex procedures whose parts are sub-procedures. The moral suggested by the paper is this. Concepts are not flat sets; rather, they are algorithmically structured abstract procedures. Unlike sets, concepts have constituent sub-procedures that can be executed in order to arrive at the product of the procedure (if any). Not only particular parts matter, but also the way of combining these parts into one whole ‘instruction’ that can be followed, understood, executed, learnt, etc., matters.
Pavel Tichý originally published his interesting conception of possible worlds in 1968. Even though he modified it over the following twenty five years, its core remained unchanged. None of his thirty journal papers or books containing the notion of possible worlds was a study in metaphysics. Tichý (and most of his followers) always introduced the notion in the context of other investigations where he applied his Transparent Intensional Logic either to the semantic analysis of natural language or to the explications of other notions. Tichý presented his conceptions using rather short descriptions occurring on a number of places; his proposal appears not only fragmentary but also somehow incoherent. The main contribution of this paper is thus not only a complete survey of Tichý’s development of his conception but also a certain completion of the very proposal.
The paper focuses on the relation of the so-called 'Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL)' and 'Aristotelian Essentialism'. TIL is presented here as an antiessentialist system. The author analyses the reasons of TIL's anti-essentialism, and he sees the main reasons in the very conception of the possible worlds, which is preferred by TIL, as well as in the ontological status of the properties and secondarily in the relation between the individuals and properties, as TIL conceives it. He asserts that even within the frame of TIL it is possible to formulate a certain version of the Aristotelian Essentialism and he points out the intuitions that are connected with the concept of essence and preserved by the formulated conception, contrary to TIL and other systems of modern logic.
In this paper, the authors deal with sentences containing time references like ‘five years ago’, ‘three years older’, ‘in five seconds’. It turns out that such sentences are pragmatically incomplete, because there is an elliptic reference to a calendar that makes it possible to determine the length of the time interval associated with time duration like a year, month, day, or to compute the time interval denoted by terms like ‘February 29, 2016’. Since Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL) takes into account two modal parameters, namely possible worlds of type ω and times of type τ, and this system is particularly apt for the analysis of natural language expressions, our background theory is TIL. Within this system, the authors define time intervals, calendar time durations, and last but not least a method for adding and multiplying time durations in a way that takes into account the leap days and leap seconds. As sample applications, they analyse two sentences, to wit, “A year has 365 days” and “Adam is 5 years older than Bill”.
This paper deals with the problem of semantic analysis of contexts involving so-called anaphoric chain. The notion of anaphoric chain is explained by way of an example. Afterwards, a semantic analysis of sentences containing anaphora established in Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL) is examined. It is demonstrated that it is not adequate for texts including anaphoric chains. An alternative method using TIL that is capable to deal with all kinds of anaphora is proposed. Anyway, one may raise doubts as to whether both approaches are really analyses of anaphoric used expressions.
The paper examines two possible analyses of fictional names within Pavel Tichý’s Transparent Intensional Logic. The first of them is the analysis actually proposed by Tichý in his (1988) book The Foundations of Frege’s Logic. He analysed fictional names in terms of free variables. The author will introduce, explain, and assess this analysis. Subsequently, he will explain Tichý’s notion of individual role (office, thing-to-be). On the basis of this notion, he will outline and defend the second analysis of fictional names. This analysis is close to the approach known in the literature as role realism (the most prominent advocates of this position are Nicholas Wolterstorff, Gregory Currie, and Peter Lamarque).
The paper deals with the usefulness of Pavel Tichý’s concept of match between two (or more) constructions for the deduction and inference considerations. Tichý’s preference of the two-dimensional view on inference instead of the one-dimensional view is criticized. The reasons for the implementation of the match concept are elucidated. The logical expressiveness of the match concept is demonstrated through its implementation to the Natural Deduction System explicated in the hyper-intensional framework of Transparent Intensional Logic.
The aim of this paper is to outline a suitable analysis of certain deontic modalities. To avoid confusion as much as possible, the author specifies the subject-matter of her analysis explicitly. Subsequently, the paper argues that Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL) is an appropriate framework for developing deontic logic. The main contribution of the paper consists in a proposal concerning the analysis of deontic modalities in TIL as well as in offering a semantically based distinction between implicit and explicit deontic modalities. Finally, the author introduces some definitions along with some inferential rules and show (using Ross’ paradox) how it is possible to deal with the paradoxes of deontic logic in terms of my analysis.
The paper focuses on the problem of identification of laws of nature and their demarcation from other kinds of regularities. The problem is approached from the viewpoint of several metaphysical, epistemological, logical and methodological criteria. Firstly, several dominant approaches to the problem are introduced. Secondly, the logical and semantic explicatory framework - Transparent Intensional Logic - is presented for the sake of clarification of logical forms of sentences that are supposed to express the laws of nature. Finally, a complementary strategy to the demarcation problem is proposed, including reconsideration of relevant metaphysical, epistemological, logical and methodological requirements and principles behind the former conceptions.
The paper deals with semantic content of elliptic sentences and its relation to semantic content of the corresponding non-elliptical sentences. On the basis of certain kinds of examples it is shown that syntactic theories of ellipsis have serious limits. It is also demonstrated that the so-called Property Theory, which is an example of a semantic theory of ellipsis, bears serious limitations. Thereafter, another semantic theory, namely Minimal Indexicalism, is analysed. Theoretical tools of the theory – in particular, its criteria of linguistic expressions identity and three layers of content – that are vital to its handling of ellipsis are discussed in some detail. Finally, a new theory of ellipsis based on Transparent Intensional Logic is proposed and argued for.
Logical analysis of natural language (LANL) based on TIL defines meaning (Frege’s sense) in a procedural way, resulting in the following thesis: The meaning of an expression is independent of context. The meaning (in the case of non-indexical expressions concept) is thus an abstract procedure, which is explicated in TIL as (well-defined) construction. What does depend on context is the way in which the meaning has to be handled. From this viewpoint we can distinguish three kinds of contexts: (i) hyper-intensional context; (ii) intensional context; (iii) extensional context.
Tichý’s Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL) is an overarching logical framework apt for the analysis of all sorts of discourse, whether colloquial, scientific, mathematical or logical. The theory is a procedural (as opposed to denotational) one, according to which the meaning of an expression is an abstract, extra-linguistic procedure detailing what operations to apply to what procedural constituents to arrive at the product (if any) of the procedure that is the object denoted by the expression. Such procedures are rigorously defined as TIL constructions. Though TIL analytical potential is very large, deduction in TIL has been rather neglected. Tichý defined a sequent calculus for pre-1988 TIL, that is TIL based on the simple theory of types. Since then no other attempt to define a proof calculus for TIL has been presented. The goal of this paper is to propose a generalization and adjustment of Tichý’s calculus to TIL 2010. First the author briefly recapitulates the rules of simple-typed calculus as presented by Tichý. Then she proposes the adjustments of the calculus so that it will be applicable to hyperintensions within the ramified hierarchy of types. TIL operates with a single procedural semantics for all kinds of logical-semantic context, be it extensional, intensional or hyperintensional. She shows that operating in a hyperintensional context is far from being technically trivial. Yet it is feasible. To this end we introduce a substitution method that operates on hyperintensions. It makes use of a four-place substitution function (called Sub) defined over hyperintensions.
The paper deals with Newton’s eight definitions from his Principia making them a subject of logical-semantic and epistemological analyses. First, it lists these definitions and then presents two views on the nature of definition, as given in recent scholarly works. These views are applied to Newton’s definitions. Resulting from this application is the conclusion that Transparent Intensional Logic’s approach to definitions, once the latter contain magnitudes, is unable to reconstruct the fact that the magnitude (or magnitudes) in the defining is (are) different from the magnitude in the definiendum. Another result is the recognition that Newton’s eight definitions, regardless of their a priori nature, still yield an increase of knowledge about the world. This conclusion is justified by Newton’s computation of the mass of planets and his reflection on the possibility of space flight.
In 1905 Bertrand Russell took on the problem of definite descriptions, and his analysis became the standard until 1950 when Peter Strawson criticised Russell's solution as inadequate. Since then many opponents as well as proponents of the Russellian solution have been involved in a long-term debate on definite descriptions. In this paper the authoress shows that both sides of the contention are partly right and partly wrong, because sentences of the form 'The F is a G' are ambiguous. However, the ambiguity does not concern reference shift of the description 'the F'. Rather, the ambiguity consists in different topic-focus articulations of a given sentence involving occurrences of 'the F'. The authoress demonstrates that when 'the F' is used as a part of the topic of such a sentence the existence of the object denoted by 'the F' is not only entailed by but also presupposed by the sentence. On the other hand 'the F' used in the focus of a sentence triggers merely existential entailment. Thus sentences differing only in their topic-focus articulation should have assigned different logical forms. In order to make such hidden features explicit, she applies the procedural semantics of Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL), furnishing sentences with hyper-propositions that are precisely defined in terms of TIL constructions. These are procedures assigned to sentences as their context-invariant structured meanings. Moreover, the authoress generalises the phenomenon of the topic-focus distinction to sentences of any form, proposing an adequate analytic schema of sentences that come with a presupposition.
According to a widespread view, deontic modalities are relative to normative systems. Four arguments in favour of this suggestion will be presented in this paper. Nevertheless, the author has proposed and defended an analysis of deontic modalities in terms of Transparent Intensional Logic (TIL) that is non-relativistic (with respect to normative systems) and accommodates minimal semantics of TIL. This leads to a question whether one can do justice to arguments for deontic relativism and put forward a relativistic analysis of deontic modalities in TIL. The main aim of this paper is to amend the former analysis of deontic modalities in terms of TIL to incorporate both the standard (relativistic) view and the minimal semantics of TIL.
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