The Ontological--Cognitive Representation Calculus: Ockham, Frege, and the Place of Assertion – E-bok

Ockham distinguished a thing from the concept under which many things fall. Frege distinguished an object from the way it is given to us. They are taught apart, six centuries apart, and to different purposes. The claim made here is that they are one failure seen from two sides. Think of representation as a relation running from what there is to how it is grasped. Such a relation can fail to be a one-to-one correspondence in exactly two directions, and the two directions have names: take the first and you have a universal, take the second and you have a sense. This book sets out a notation built to keep both coordinates on the page at once instead of collapsing them into one, and puts assertion in its place as a third thing, neither truth nor content. The framework will not derive anything for you. It has no proof system and no transformation rules. What it does is make certain ordinary difficulties statable that are otherwise merely reportable~--- the man who takes the morning star for one body and the evening star for another, the reader gripped by a novel, the science that has been superseded. In each case the usual apparatus obliges us either to convict somebody of inconsistency or to let the object take the damage. A notation that separates the two places lets one say so.