Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Frege famously gets himself into a contradiction regarding the question whether the referent of ‘is a horse’ is a function. One of the aims of this paper is to see whether any of the assumptions that lead to this contradiction can be dropped without risking the integrity the Fregean program in natural language semantics. I will argue that the answer is negative: to avoid the problem we must embark on a radical revision. I think we should abandon the singularist conception of semantics, which demands that we interpret linguistic expressions via assignment of a unique semantic value. There is an alternative, going back to medieval logicians of nominalist leaning, according to which predicates signify multiple particulars rather than a single universal and syncategoremata signify nothing at all. I will make the case that natural language semantics could and perhaps should return to this tradition.