In standard model-theoretic semantics, the meaning of logical terms is said to be fixed in the system while that of nonlogical terms remains variable. Much effort has been devoted to characterizing logical terms, those terms that should be fixed, but little has been said on their role in logical systems: on what fixing their meaning precisely amounts to. My proposal is that when a term is considered logical in model theory, what gets fixed is its intension rather than its extension. I provide a rigorous way of spelling out this idea, and show that it leads to a graded account of logicality: the less structure a term requires in order for its intension to be fixed, the more logical it is. Finally, I focus on the class of terms that are invariant under isomorphisms, as they render themselves more easily to mathematical treatment. I propose a mathematical measure for the logicality of such terms based on their associated Löwenheim numbers.

I offer an analysis of the sentence ‘the concept horse is a concept’. It will be argued that the grammatical subject of this sentence, ‘the concept horse’, indeed refers to a concept, and not to an object, as Frege once held. The argument is based on a criterion of proper-namehood according to which an expression is a proper name if it is so rendered in Frege’s ideography. The predicate ‘is a concept’, on the other hand, should not be thought of as referring to a function. It will be argued that the analysis of sentences of the form ‘C is a concept’ requires the introduction of a new form of statement. Such statements are not to be thought of as having function–argument form, but rather the structure subject–copula–predicate.

Abstract algebraic logic is a theory that provides general tools for the algebraic study of arbitrary propositional logics. According to this theory, every logic ${\cal L}$ is associated with a matrix semantics $Mo{d^{\rm{*}}}{\cal L}$. This article is a contribution to the systematic study of the so-called truth sets of the matrices in $Mo{d^{\rm{*}}}{\cal L}$. In particular, we show that the fact that the truth sets of $Mo{d^{\rm{*}}}{\cal L}$ can be defined by means of equations with universally quantified parameters is captured by an order-theoretic property of the Leibniz operator restricted to deductive filters of ${\cal L}$. This result was previously known for equational definability without parameters. Similarly, it was known that the truth sets of $Mo{d^{\rm{*}}}{\cal L}$ are implicitly definable if and only if the Leibniz operator is injective on deductive filters of ${\cal L}$ over every algebra. However, it was an open problem whether the injectivity of the Leibniz operator transfers from the theories of ${\cal L}$ to its deductive filters over arbitrary algebras. We show that this is the case for logics expressed in a countable language, and that it need not be true in general. Finally we consider an intermediate condition on the truth sets in $Mo{d^{\rm{*}}}{\cal L}$ that corresponds to the order-reflection of the Leibniz operator.

We introduce the logic LRC, designed to describe and reason about agents’ abilities and capabilities in using resources. The proposed framework bridges two—up to now—mutually independent strands of literature: the one on logics of abilities and capabilities, developed within the theory of agency, and the one on logics of resources, motivated by program semantics. The logic LRC is suitable to describe and reason about key aspects of social behaviour in organizations. We prove a number of properties enjoyed by LRC (soundness, completeness, canonicity, and disjunction property) and its associated analytic calculus (conservativity, cut elimination, and subformula property). These results lay at the intersection of the algebraic theory of unified correspondence and the theory of multitype calculi in structural proof theory. Case studies are discussed which showcase several ways in which this framework can be extended and enriched while retaining its basic properties, so as to model an array of issues, both practically and theoretically relevant, spanning from planning problems to the logical foundations of the theory of organizations.

In two recent articles, Norihiro Kamide introduces unusual variants of Nelson’s paraconsistent logic and its classical extension. Kamide’s systems, IP and CP, are unusual insofar as double negations in these logics behave as intuitionistic and classical negations, respectively. In this article we present Hilbert-style axiomatizations of both IP and CP. The axiom system for IP is shown to be sound and complete with respect to a four-valued Kripke semantics, and the axiom system for CP is characterized by four-valued truth tables. Moreover, we note some properties of IP and CP, and emphasize that these logics are unusual also because they are contra-classical and inconsistent but nontrivial. We point out that Kamide’s approach exemplifies a general method for obtaining contra-classical logics, and we briefly speculate about a linguistic application of Kamide’s logics.

Self-reference has played a prominent role in the development of metamathematics in the past century, starting with Gödel’s first incompleteness theorem. Given the nature of this and other results in the area, the informal understanding of self-reference in arithmetic has sufficed so far. Recently, however, it has been argued that for other related issues in metamathematics and philosophical logic a precise notion of self-reference and, more generally, reference is actually required. These notions have been so far elusive and are surrounded by an aura of scepticism that has kept most philosophers away. In this paper I suggest we shouldn’t give up all hope. First, I introduce the reader to these issues. Second, I discuss the conditions a good notion of reference in arithmetic must satisfy. Accordingly, I then introduce adequate notions of reference for the language of first-order arithmetic, which I show to be fruitful for addressing the aforementioned issues in metamathematics.

In this paper we provide a mathematical model of Kant’s temporal continuum that yields formal correlates for Kant’s informal treatment of this concept in the Critique of Pure Reason and in other works of his critical period. We show that the formal model satisfies Kant’s synthetic a priori principles for time (whose consistence is not obvious) and that it even illuminates what “faculties and functions” must be in place, as “conditions for the possibility of experience”, for time to satisfy such principles. We then present a mathematically precise account of Kant’s transcendental theory of time—the most precise account to date.

Moreover, we show that the Kantian continuum which we obtain has some affinities with the Brouwerian continuum but that it also has “infinitesimal intervals” consisting of nilpotent infinitesimals; these allow us to capture Kant’s theory of rest and motion in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science.

While our focus is on Kant’s theory of time the material in this paper is more generally relevant for the problem of developing a rigorous theory of the phenomenological continuum, in the tradition of Whitehead, Russell, and Weyl among others.

This article presents an axiom system for an arithmetic of the even and the odd, one that is stronger than those discussed in Pambuccian (2016) and Menn & Pambuccian (2016). It consists of universal sentences in a language extending the usual one with 0, 1, +, ·, <, – with the integer part of the half function $[{ \cdot \over 2}]$, and two unary operation symbols.