Statement and Referent: An Inquiry into the Foundations of our Conceptual Order

Statement and Referent is a continuation of “First Philosophy” as initiated in Plato's Parmenides and Aristotle's Metaphysics. Shwayder ultimately argues that the “category” of bodies is fundamental within the human scheme of conceptualization in that, without a capacity to refer to bodies, a human subject would be unable to conceptualize referents pertaining to such other “categories” as surfaces, visibilia and natural numbers.

David Shwayder retired in the late 1980s after teaching philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Michigan, as well as other universities.

I Statements are Products of Assertion Introduction 2

1 Behavioral and Linguistic Preliminaries 6
2 Assertion 53
Appendix A Four Other Theories of Judgement: Russell, Aristotle, Wittgenstein and Frege 82
Appendix B Constatives, Propositions and Explanation 98
Appendix C Knowledge, Information, Access, Certainty and Inquiry: Preliminaries to a Rational Epistemology 134
3 Statements and Their Criteria 164
Appendix D Intensional Logic: A Fragment 279

II Syncategoremata, Predicables and Statement-Form 298

4 Background and Program 298
Appendix E Quantifiers and Terms in Relation to the Representation of Statement-Form 323
5 Proto-Criteria, Basic and Defined 333
6 Existence 359
7 Individuality, Individuation and Reference 375
8 Inherence and Predication 397
9 Impressions of Distinctness and Identity 422
10 Separation and Distinctness 440
11 Continuation and Identity 447
12 Bunching, Delimitation, and Generality 490
13 On the Characterization of Predicables 514
14 Statement Form 588
Appendix F Logical Equivalence of Formas and the Validation of Logic 643

III Categories, Referents and Constructions With Special Attention To Things Met With In Space and Time 653

15 Metaphysical Categories and Departments of Language 653
16 Constructions 690
17 Bodies 717
18 Surfaces and Boundaries 749
19 Visibilia and Other Luminous Phenomena 759
20 Introduction to a Philosophy of Space and Time 769
21 Pre-Euclidean Geometry and Hypothetical Determinations of Space 780
22 The Order of Local Time 807
Appendix G Of Time and Tense: Extensions and Applications 831
23 Further Constructions, Spatial and Temporal 844
24 Bodies are Basic Referents 858

Citation Index 872

November 2008

ISBN (Paperback): 1575865408 (9781575865409)
ISBN (Electronic): 1575869233 (9781575869230)

Statement and Referent

Contents