Pickel and Rabern, in their 2023 paper “Against Fregean Quantification,” argue that Fregean quantification theory, much like Tarskian quantification theory, faces a dilemma: it must abandon either Compositionality or Truth and Reference Centrality...
Pickel and Rabern, in their 2023 paper “Against Fregean Quantification,” argue that Fregean quantification theory, much like Tarskian quantification theory, faces a dilemma: it must abandon either Compositionality or Truth and Reference Centrality. They further argue that any fully compositional treatment of quantificational semantics within the Fregean tradition leads to variabilism, the view that names function like variables. This thesis criticizes these claims by verifying that Pickel and Rabern’s arguments do not constitute a decisive refutation of Fregean quantification. To this end, I first reconstruct and assess their argument that both Tarskian and Fregean theories face the dilemma. I argue that the dilemma depends on (i) a specific formalization of compositionality—namely, standard compositionality—and (ii) specific assumptions about the inputs to the semantic operations associated with quantification and abstraction. In response, Chapter 5 introduces syntax-reflective compositionality, based on the recursive semantics of Pagin and Westerståhl (2010). This compositionality allows semantic operations, when needed, to take the syntactic forms of expressions as inputs in addition to the semantic values of their constituents. I show that Pickel and Rabern’s reductio does not go through under this alternative notion of compositionality. Chapter 6 develops what I call global semantics: a reformulation within standard model-theoretic semantics that makes explicit the idea that the semantic operations for quantification and abstraction require global information rather than mere local values at a single assignment. Based on this, I show that the crucial inferential step in Pickel and Rabern’s reductio cannot be justified. In conclusion, I argue that Pickel and Rabern’s argument do not hold in general, and so Fregean quantification theory can be defended.