| Popis: |
I attempt to get further insights from Cocchiarella’s history and philosophy of logic in understanding the contrast of Aristotelian and Fregean logic. Recently Cocchiarella proposed a conceptual theory of the referential and predicable concepts used in basic speech and mental acts (Cocchiarella in Synthese 114:169–202, 1998). This theory is interesting in itself in that singular and general, complex and simple, and pronominal and nonpronominal, referential concepts are claimed to be given a uniform account. Further, as a fundamental goal of this theory is to generate logical forms that represent the cognitive structure of our speech and mental acts, as well as logical forms that represent only the truth conditions of those acts, it is an indispensable part of Cocchiarella’s conceptual realism as a formal ontology for general framework of knowledge representation. In view of the recent surge of interest in his formal ontology by cognitive scientists and AI people, at least, Cocchiarella’s theory of reference deserves careful examination. Above all, however, the utmost value of Cocchiarella’s theory of reference must be found in its challenge against what he calls “the paradigm of reducing general reference to singular reference of logically proper names” that pervades the 20th century (Cocchiarella in Synthese 114:169–202, 1998, 170). The aim of the present chapter is to provide an impressionistic sketch of Cocchiarella’s challenge. |
