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Davidson proposed that we should see a sentence such as “Shem kicked Shaun on the shin with a hobnail boot” as having a logico-grammatical form tantamount to this: (17A) “there was an event e that consisted of Shem kicking Shaun e and e was with a hobnail boot and e was on the shin”. But how can an event be with a hobnail boot or on the shin? I argue for a less problematic alternative: namely, with Jennifer Hornsby, to see action-sentences as referring to acts—the act of kicking, say, or kicking with a hobnail boot. On these terms, actions are the doings of acts, doings that may be qualified adverbially. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the claim that “surface structure” can easily mislead us. So often what philosophers want to call “surface structure” represents nothing more than a mistaken reading of the sentence in front of us.

Timothy Williamson has offered a proof that any object that exists exists necessarily. Williamson’s conclusion depended crucially—as the Ontological Argument also depended—on the supposition that “exists” stands for a property of objects. According to Frege and Russell, ordinary grammar misleads us here. What we need in order to understand existence is not a first-level notion such as eat or growl but the second-level notion of the instantiation of first-level concepts. Among first-level concepts are individual concepts. Deploying these, the chapter shows how proper names can be fitted within the Russell/Frege account. It also offers a treatment of the problems presented by true sentences such as “Vulcan does not exist” or “Nausicaa does not exist”. These problems are best solved by deploying Frege’s idea that empty names depend for their sense upon the as if, and by reformulating in an entirely natural way the logical principles of existential generalization and universal instantiation.

The first moment discussed in this chapter is marked by Frege’s (1894) review of Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic (vol. 1), discussions of the paradox of analysis, and Frege’s division—reaching beyond his distinction of Sinn /sense from Bedeutung /reference—between two conceptions of definition. Six familiar and different ideas of definition are then set out. The second moment is Leibniz’s still serviceable demarcation between the clarity (practical effectiveness) of ideas, and their distinctness, our explicit understanding of the various marks (components) of the concept that the idea relates to. Within Leibniz’s scheme, the pursuit of distinctness leads to a third moment: his demand for adequacy (the enumeration of the marks of a concept, and the marks of these marks … ) and Leibniz’s speculations concerning the limit or terminus of analysis, beyond which there can be no greater or more complete distinctness. These problematic speculations are not entirely alien to the Zeitgeist of our own epoch. But so often our understanding of a concept depends not so much upon the unearthing of constituents as upon grasping the concept’s overall shape, the shape that organizes its constituents.

This chapter begins from Peirce’s essay ‘On the fixation of belief’ and shows how it leads outwards into a large body of Peircean claims concerning inquiry, the ‛secondness’ of experience, abduction, hypothesis, perception, and truth. It stresses the importance of Peirce’s insistence that, when any belief of ours is found to be determined by a circumstance extraneous to the facts, that belief is weakened or abandoned. Only abduction, as Peirce characterized it, can expand our understanding from the known to the unknown. In conclusion the chapter offers a Peircean critique of Hume’s understanding of “the problem of induction”. Another conclusion is that Peircean pragmatism, properly construed, is consistent with a full-blooded realism. That which is distinctive in Peircean pragmatism is rather Peirce’s insistence that truth and inquiry are correlative notions, intelligible only as correlative with experience.

This volume draws together work by David Wiggins on topics to do with language, meaning, truth, and the limit of semantic analysis, from 1980 to 2020. Each chapter draws upon previously published material, but that material has been revised, sometimes significantly, for republication here. The book opens with a summary but selective account of a century’s work in the philosophy of meaning, from Frege and Wittgenstein to the late twentieth century. Against that background, the book engages first with the nuts and bolts of sentence-construction: predicates and the copula, quantifiers, names, existence treated as a second-level predicate, and adverbial modification. The last five chapters then treat of definition and (as dreamt of by Leibniz and others) the terminus of semantic analysis; the idea of natural languages as real things with a history; the idea of truth conceived as correlative with inquiry (C. S. Peirce) and, finally, the properties we look for in truth itself—the marks, as Frege or Leibniz might have said, of the concept true.

This chapter is a selective history of the philosophy of language onwards from Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (1892), and a defence of the idea propounded there at I.32 and in Wittgenstein’s Tracatus Logico-Philosophicus that to understand a sentence is to know the conditions under which it is true. This claim is distinguished from others which succeeded it—that to understand a statement is to know the method for its verification (Vienna Circle), to know its use (Wittgenstein in the Blue and Brown Books), or to know what belief it is intended to induce in a hearer (H. P. Grice). Not just any true equivalence in the form “s is true if and only if p” will suffice for s’s meaning that p. We need an equivalence that is properly founded in the semantic powers of the components of the sentence s. Such can be given either in Frege’s way or else in Davidson’s way, in reliance upon Davidson’s post-Quinean idea of ‛radical interpretation’. That later approach was refined by John McDowell and Richard Grandy, and several others.

This chapter begins from the diagram that Frege drew for Husserl to show his (Frege’s) doctrines of sense and reference. The chapter explains and further develops the doctrines that the diagram illustrates, demonstrating their continuing usefulness and applicability, and suggests how a fair number of contemporary doctrines can be accommodated within Frege’s picture. Then the chapter seeks to show how the doubts and difficulties that Frege himself expressed concerning concept and object can be answered by a reading of the copula which assimilates it to what Alonzo Church calls an “improper symbol”. The chapter ends with a suggestion, following on from Frege’s idea of a concept, about the best way of understanding the idea of a property, not least its use in evolutionary theory as Elliott Sober among others construes that.

Philosophers and logicians have expended enormous effort upon the determination of the extension of the concept of truth. Remarkable discoveries have resulted. A different and no less important question is this: what are the marks of that concept? “Deflationists” and their various allies will regard any such approach to truth as sadly mistaken—and Tarski’s famous paper itself (they may say) illustrates this. Here, however, they misread Tarski, who saw himself as adding to the non-deflationary account of truth offered by his own teacher, Kotarbinski. The chapter seeks then to enumerate the marks of truth. Truth is the first and foremost dimension of assessment for beliefs, statements or utterances. Secondly, if s is true then s will under favourable circumstances command convergence. Thirdly, if s is true then s has a content which can be accepted or contested. Fourth (a mark which is wide open to misunderstanding) every truth is true in virtue of something. Finally, from Frege, “truth is the goal”—a claim pregnant surely with practical-cum-political import, or so history suggests. Think of the disasters which history reminds us have been attendant upon its neglect.

This chapter concerns the logic and truth-conditional semantics of the quantifier “most”. The chapter demonstrates the necessity to depart in this case from the standard way of treating generality within predicate logic. But an alternative way is provided by Frege. This can embrace both “most” and “all”. Questions are then raised about the connection between logical validity, so-called ‛structural validity’, and certain related Davidsonian claims. Finally the chapter touches upon the history of the logic of generality and the resemblance between the proposal advanced here and one of the several proposals made by Leibniz.

John Locke claimed that to abuse language is comparable to breaking or stopping the pipes whereby clean water is distributed to the public. Cultural conservatives will applaud Locke’s comparison. But linguists, regarding themselves as empirical scientists, may prefer to ridicule the snobbish prescriptions and proscriptions by which reactionaries seek to “fossilize” the parlance of yesteryear. How well do the parties to this contest understand one another? Conservatives despise or ignore the linguist’s interest in the sprawling actualities of everyday usage and speech-patterns. More reasonably, though, conservatives will also criticize the linguists’ particular brand of empiricism for refusing to recognize speaking and writing as an art—the art in which any language user can find a role for themself.

Chomsky has said that the notions of a public language is unknown to empirical inquiry and “raises what seem to be irresolvable problems”. This chapter takes an opposing view – namely the common sense view which sees a language as something with a history, and the common possession as often as not of far-flung communities. In following this line of argument the author takes John Foster’s side in his well-known exchange with Crispin Wright, where Foster claimed that semantic theorists of English should concern themselves with the way in which English itself functions, rather than the way in which its speakers function.

In this design challenge by the Texas Space Grant Consortium, the researchers design a cooling system for a lithium-ion battery. Lithium-ion batteries are an effective and reliable source of energy for small, portable devices. However, similar to other existing sources of energy, there is always a problem with overheating. The objective is to design a cooling system for lithium-ion batteries that will work in a zero gravity environment for orbital and interplanetary space systems. The system is to serve as a backup battery and a signal booster that can be incorporated into a spacesuit. The design must be able to effectively cool the batteries without the use of an atmosphere to carry away heat but also be a lightweight and reliable design. The design incorporates carbon nanotubes suspended in distilled water creating a nano-fluid environment. This design must include a failsafe in the event of thermal runaway, a problem common to lithium-ion batteries. This failsafe will completely shut off the system if the batteries reach a certain temperature. A cooling system that incorporates nano-fluids will achieve a lightweight and efficient way of cooling batteries.

This paper is a response to the suggestion that processes provide a better framework for interpreting science, biological science especially, than do substances. The philosopher of substance is ill-prepared, it has been suggested, for the question ‘how a combination of processes can maintain the appearance of stability and persistence in an entity that is fundamentally only a temporary eddy in a flux of change’. In response, I defend a plural ontology of process, activity, event and continuant, and show how a sortalist philosophy of substance that makes Hilary Putnam's distinction of ‘realism’ from ‘metaphysical realism’ can treat disputed questions concerning the identity and individuation of colonial siphonophores, slime moulds and plant-colonies.

In recent years, the advent of agile RF transceivers, software defined radios, and large Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices has both decreased the timescale for development and deployment of communications systems and increased the rate of emergence of threats resulting in the need to rapidly adapt. To shorten the timescales of inserting new technology into tactical communications systems, the Common-modem Hardware Integrated Library (CHIL) was developed. CHIL is a library of configurable digital signal processing blocks grouped together in a framework that enables waveform developers to dynamically “string” processing blocks together to form new waveforms. While CHIL has the potential to offer significant benefits to waveform development, it suffers from several limitations including: 1) tight coupling of the framework with library algorithms, 2) slow operation and large FPGA utilization, and 3) lack of documentation. In this paper, we present enhancements to CHIL to address some of these limitations and demonstrate increased reusability, reduction in FPGA utilization, and increase in operating speed.

In recent years, there has been a large push in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to more rapidly respond and adapt to changing technology advancements and emerging communications systems threats. One issue has been that traditional DoD waveform development has been stove-piped in that processing blocks are implemented to serve a single function instead of made generic and configurable to support multiple waveforms. Developing new waveforms typically requires starting from scratch almost everytime. In this paper, we present Common Hardware-modem Integrated Library (CHIL). CHIL is both a library of configurable processing blocks as well as a framework that ties these blocks together to rapidly instantiate new DoD and non-DoD waveforms. We present an overview of the CHIL framework and various components as well as provide a test-case where CHIL was leveraged to instantiate a DoD waveform.

The following paper deals with acoustic flame suppression mechanics in a microgravity environment with measurements taken from an Arduino-based sensor system and validation of the technique. A Zippo lighter is ignited in microgravity and then displaced from the base of the flame and suppressed using surface interactions with single tone acoustic waves to extinguished the flame. The analysis of data collected shows that the acoustic flame suppression measurementtechniques are effective to finding qualitative differences in extinguishing in microgravity and normal gravity. Further, the results suggest that the suppression may be more effective in a microgravity environment than in a normal (1g) environment and may be a viable method of extinguishing fires during space flight.

1. Hilary Putnam's conception of ethics is not best understood as a form of ‘moral realism’, but as a position consequent upon the pragmatist understanding of the relation between truth and rational acceptability – ideas that Putnam argues are not confined to laboratory science. Just as our conception of the visible world is founded in reason as informed by sense perception, why cannot our moral notions appear to reason itself as that is shaped or informed by our situation and our nature, our vital needs and our capacity to respond to those needs through the invention and refinement of ethical notions? In following out this proposal, I try to show how well Putnam's conception of rational acceptability can consist and cohere with the constraint upon enquiry that C. S. Peirce calls ‘secondness’. 2. Putnam writes ‘we invent moral words for morally relevant features of situations, which lead to further refinements of our moral notions’. Enlarging on this claim, the paper reconstructs some of the ways in which human beings can arrive through a practical reason of the unforsakeable at an ethos – a shared way of living – and at what Putnam calls ‘a moral image of the world’. 3. The paper then sets out some of Putnam's conclusions concerning agreement and disagreement, the supposed dichotomy of fact and value, the supposed problem of the perception of value, and the implausibility of Lionel Robbins's claim that economics and ethics can have no closer relation than mere juxtaposition. 4. In conclusion, the paper touches upon the merits or demerits of the very idea of a ‘moral reality’.