Models for Modalities: Selected Essays

Description

The papers collected in this volume were written over a period of some eight or nine years, with some still earlier material incorporated in one of them. Publishing them under the same cover does not make a con­ tinuous book of them. The papers are thematically connected with each other, however, in a way which has led me to think that they can naturally be grouped together. In any list of philosophically important concepts, those falling within the range of application of modal logic will rank high in interest. They include necessity, possibility, obligation, permission, knowledge, belief, perception, memory, hoping, and striving, to mention just a few of the more obvious ones. When a satisfactory semantics (in the sense of Tarski and Carnap) was first developed for modal logic, a fascinating new set of methods and ideas was thus made available for philosophical studies. The pioneers of this model theory of modality include prominently Stig Kanger and Saul Kripke. Several others were working in the same area independently and more or less concurrently. Some of the older papers in this collection, especially 'Quantification and Modality' and 'Modes of Modality', serve to clarify some of the main possibilities in the semantics of modal logics in general. Front Matter....Pages I-IX Front Matter....Pages 1-1 Epistemic Logic and the Methods of Philosophical Analysis....Pages 3-19 Front Matter....Pages 21-21 Existential Presuppositions and their Elimination....Pages 23-44 On the Logic of the Ontological Argument....Pages 45-54 Front Matter....Pages 55-55 Modality and Quantification....Pages 57-70 The Modes of Modality....Pages 71-86 Semantics for Propositional Attitudes....Pages 87-111 Existential Presuppositions and Uniqueness Presuppositions....Pages 112-147 Front Matter....Pages 149-149 On the Logic of Perception....Pages 151-183 Deontic Logic and its Philosophical Morals....Pages 184-214 Back Matter....Pages 215-222