Theories of Intensionality : A Critical Survey

This book offers a comprehensive primer for the study of intensionality. It explores and assesses those key theories of intensionality which have been developed in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Each of the examined theories is tested as to whether it can account for the problems associated with (A) the intersubstitution salva veritate of co-extensional expressions, and (B) existential generalisation. All of these theories are subsequently compared so as to determine which of them comes closest to successfully solving these problems. The book examines four kinds of intensionalist approaches: the Fregean approach (including Church's formalisation of Frege's theory); the possible-worlds approaches of Carnap, Montague and Cresswell; the theory of properties relations and propositions devised by Bealer; and the Meinongian approaches put forward by Zalta and Priest. The book also proposes an alternative to intensionalism: sententialism. Sententialists argue that the problems of intensionality could be solved by appealing to linguistic items (usually sentences) rather than intensional entities. Drawing on the works of Quine, Davidson, Scheffler and R. M. Martin, it explores the viability and value of sententialism as an alternative to intensionalism. Front Matter....Pages i-xi Introduction....Pages 1-11 Frege’s Theory of Sinn and Bedeutung ....Pages 13-27 Church’s Logic of Sense and Denotation....Pages 29-48 Carnap’s Method of Extension and Intension....Pages 49-64 Montague’s Possible-Worlds Approach....Pages 65-81 Cresswell’s Theory of Structured Meanings....Pages 83-93 Bealer’s Theory of Properties, Relations and Propositions....Pages 95-112 Zalta’s Meinongian Approach....Pages 113-128 Priest’s Noneist Approach....Pages 129-142 Quine’s Sententialism....Pages 143-152 Davidson’s Paratactic Approach....Pages 153-162 Scheffler’s Inscriptionalism....Pages 163-183 An Inscriptional Meta-Language....Pages 185-208 Back Matter....Pages 209-215