We are happy to announce a talk by Maciej Kłeczek (GU Frankfurt) at the Semantics Colloquium.
Please register beforehand (s.walter@em.uni-frankfurt.de) to receive the access data to zoom on Thursday shortly before the talk starts.
Title: Quine on variables
Date: July 15
Time: 4 pm – 6 pm ct
Abstract:
In this exegetical talk we reconstruct and critically discuss the Quine view on variable like symbols and first-order variables. This is a quintessential Quinean theme found in a series of papers [On the Logic of Quantification, Variables Explained Away, The Variable, Algebraic Logic and Predicate Functor Logic], and Quine’s seminal monograph Word Object. Quine has presented a rather coherent picture of variable like symbols and first-order variables. As a consequence, this picture generates a coherent interpretation of first-order languages conforming to an important Quine’s background philosophical assumption which is nominalism (or rather a propensity to nominalism).
We start our talk with Quine’s account of schematicity and contrast it with alternative more recent approaches. Next, we proceed to Quine’s explication of a first-order variable as a...