A Manual of Intensional Logic

by Johan van Benthem

An examination of the role of partial information--with illustrations drawn from different branches of Intensional Logic--and various influences stemming from current theories of the semantics of natural language, involving generalized quantifiers and theories of types.

Genres: Logic

160 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1986

About the author

This author also uses these pen names:

J. Van Benthem
J.F.A.K. van Benthem

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wonder if David Foster Wallace read this when it came out in 1988, three years after he wrote his paper on the logical philosophy of fatalism? Unfortunately, I seem to recall that van Bentham disposes of the whole "sea battle" argument in about a page and half - with modern tools available, he argues, pretty convincingly, that it's no more than a confusion between predicate logic and modal logic. But I haven't finished reading Wallace's thesis yet, so maybe I'm being too harsh on him. I can see he's using Kripke structures, so perhaps he just reaches the same conclusion in a more long-winded way. I will post an update when I've finished.

Also, to be fair, Wallace was writing an undergraduate thesis, while this is now the standard reference, written by the world's acknowledged leading expert on the subject.