On a Pinpoint

Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic, by Rudolf Carnap. 258 pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. $5.00

We are accustomed to smile, a little unjustly, at the arguments of the Medieval Scholastics, such as the famous and partly apocryphal debate concerning the number of angels who could stand on the point of a pin. Such controversies were essentially means of refining the methods of logical analysis, and it is no exaggeration to say that they have been revived in the current study of semantics.

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Philosophy

Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic, by Rudolf Carnap. 258 pp. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. $5.00

We are accustomed to smile, a little unjustly, at the arguments of the Medieval Scholastics, such as the famous and partly apocryphal debate concerning the number of angels who could stand on the point of a pin. Such controversies were essentially means of refining the methods of logical analysis, and it is no exaggeration to say that they have been revived in the current study of semantics.