Prior, translational semantics, and the barcan formula

Jack Copeland

pp. 3507-3519

in: Jørgen Albretsen, Per V. Hasle, Peter Øhrstrøm (eds), The logic and philosophy of A. N. Prior, Synthese 193 (11), 2016.

Abstract

The revolution in semantics in the late 1960s and 1970s overturned an earlier competing paradigm, ‘translational’ semantics. I revive and defend Prior’s translational semantics for modals and tense-modals. I also show how to extend Prior’s propositional modal semantics to quantificational modal logic, and use the resulting semantics to formalize Prior’s own counterexample to the Barcan Formula.

Cited authors

Prior Arthur N