Book contents
7 - Multiple indexing
from PART II - PREDICATE LOGIC: TENSE AND MODAL
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
Summary
In Chapter 5 we showed how to provide a semantics in terms of times and worlds for a tense and modal predicate language. The metalanguage involves quantification over both these kinds of entities. But there have been philosophers, A. N. Prior for one, who seem to have thought that the use of tense operators obviates the need for quantification over times, and there are philosophers, such as Graeme Forbes, who seem to think that taking modality as primitive doesn't commit you to possible worlds. While it is true that the expressive capacity of the tense and modal languages described in Chapter 5 is less than full quantification over worlds, it is equally so that there are sentences of natural language which require more complex temporal and modal resources – resources whose increased expressive capacity amounts to such quantification. The purpose of this chapter is to describe these resources. In Chapter 8 we shall make the link with quantification over times and worlds. The resources we have described have been around for some time, although they have not usually been studied in a language which has both tense and modal operators. We will begin by considering tense, and will try to isolate what we regard as some important semantical features of tensed language. We will then go on to show that modal sentences share these same features.
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- The World-Time ParallelTense and Modality in Logic and Metaphysics, pp. 75 - 84Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012