Gilead Bar-Elli

A Fregean Look at Kripke’s Modal Notion of Meaning

In Naming and Necessity (NN) Kripke criticizes Frege for conflating two notions of meaning (or sense),1 one is meaning proper, the other is the way reference is determined (p. 59). More precisely, he argues that Frege conflated the question of how the meaning of a word is given or determined with the question of how its reference is determined. The criterial mark of meaning-determination, according to Kripke, is a statement of synonymy: if we give the sense of ‘a’ by means of ‘b’, then the two expressions must be synonymous. The criterial mark of reference-determination is knowledge, typically a priori, of the truth of their identity: if the reference of ‘a’ is given by ‘b’, then we know a priori that a is b. Kripke then argues that Frege’s conceptions both of meaning-determination and of reference-determination were wrong, and proposes an alternative picture of reference-determination.

Evaluating a Performance-Ideal vs. Great Performance.

Music, as everybody knows, is a performing art. Not only are musical works performed, but they are also designed, by their very nature, to be performed. The notion of a performance of a musical composition is therefore part and parcel of our conception of music. And yet the relationships between a composition and its performances give rise to many difficult problems, some of which will be touched on later. For the present I want to stress two more specific issues in which the significance of the notion of performance for music lies. The first is that a musical composition is constituted by concepts and properties intrinsically connected to performance. In fact, I believe that the very meaning of these concepts and properties is rooted in the ways they are manifested in performance. Hence, even if a certain composition has never and will never be performed, it is still constituted by concepts and properties whose meaning lies in the ways they should be manifested in performance. The second point is that since music is in fact a performing art, since we perform music, and listen to various performances of the same compositions, and conceive of them and evaluate them as music, notions of performance are an integral part of the conceptual repertoire in which we conceive of music. Hence questions pertaining to the nature of performance, and to the relationship between a composition and its performances are inescapable in any philosophical investigation of music. And around these general questions a host of others suggest themselves: What makes a particular performance (even if faulty) a performance of a particular work? Can there be different equally good performances of the same work? In what terms should performances be evaluated (and graded) and how? Can a composition be individuated apart from its performances and how? On many of these problems and the issues surrounding them, a distinction between two conceptions of performance seems helpful, and sometimes

Can a Naturalist Believe in Universals

A distinctive feature of Professor Armstrong’s approach to the topic of universals is that it combines different philosophical trends that have often been regarded as mutually opposed. His conception is basically Lockean, in founding universals on the causal efficacy of particulars, conceived of as entities with powers. Unlike Locke, however, he does not regard particulars (or thin particulars, in the terminology of the latter part of his paper) as the basic ontological category, but takes a sort of Wittgensteinian turn in regarding states of affairs as the fundamental ontological category, and construing particulars (as well as universals) as abstractions from states of affairs. But, unlike Wittgenstein, he regards states of affairs as consisting of universals — properties and relations — as well as particulars, and he presents a fully realistic view of universals. But, again, unlike many other realists considering universals, he does not regard them as abstract entities but fully “concrete” (he does not use the word this way) and real parts of the space-time continuum. As such, the existence and nature of universals are determined a posteriori by empirical, scientific investigation, and not by a priori reasoning about the meaning of terms.