First-Order Modal Logic

By Richard L. Mendelsohn and Melvin Fitting

Book Overview

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.
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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 079235334X
• ISBN13: 9780792353348
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: Springer
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 1.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.1" x 9.2"