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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

David Lewis
Affiliation:
Princeton University, New Jersey
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Summary

This collection reprints almost all my previously published papers in philosophical logic, except for those that were previously reprinted in another collection, Philosophical Papers. Still omitted are (1) two papers in deontic logic; (2) a paper on counterfactual logic, which is superseded by proofs later published in my book Counterfactuals; and (3) two papers on immodest inductive methods, the first of them completely mistaken and the second one concerned with loose ends left over when the first was rebutted. I have taken the opportunity to correct typographical and editorial errors. But I have left the philosophical content as it originally was, rather than trying to rewrite the papers as I would write them today. A very few afterthoughts have been noted in new footnotes.

The first four papers have to do with the project of transplanting the methods of formal semantics from artificial formalized languages to natural languages, or to formalized approximations thereof. ‘Index, Context, and Content’ is a meta-theoretical paper, arguing that some supposedly competing formulations are no more than notational variants. The other three study particular constructions. ‘Adverbs of Quantification’ examines a neglected part of the quantificational apparatus of ordinary English: sentential adverbs like ‘always’, sometimes, ‘often’, et al. (I first became interested in these adverbs as a means to making my own technical writing more concise. Only afterward did it occur to me that they afforded a treatment of a class of problematic sentences in which it seemed that there was no satisfactory way to assign relative scopes to quantifier phrases.)

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

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  • Introduction
  • David Lewis, Princeton University, New Jersey
  • Book: Papers in Philosophical Logic
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511625237.002
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  • Introduction
  • David Lewis, Princeton University, New Jersey
  • Book: Papers in Philosophical Logic
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511625237.002
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • David Lewis, Princeton University, New Jersey
  • Book: Papers in Philosophical Logic
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511625237.002
Available formats
×