The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 6, 2000

Analytic Philosophy and Logic

Logical Forms

The standard view of logical form is that logical forms are synthetic structures which are the forms of sentences and of other linguistic entities. This is often associated with a more general linguistic view of logic which is articulated in different ways by various authors. This paper contains a critical discussion of such linguistic approaches to logical form, with special emphasis on Quine’s formulation of a logical grammar in Philosophy of Logic. An account of logical forms as higher-order properties, which essentially builds on Frege’s analysis of quantification as higher-order predication, is suggested at the end.