Generality and existence: Quantificational logic in historical perspective

Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 20 (4):417-448 (2014)
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Abstract

Frege explained the notion of generality by stating that each its instance is a fact, and added only later the crucial observation that a generality can be inferred from an arbitrary instance. The reception of Frege’s quantifiers was a fifty-year struggle over a conceptual priority: truth or provability. With the former as the basic notion, generality had to be faced as an infinite collection of facts, whereas with the latter, generality was based on a uniformity with a finitary sense: the provability of an arbitrary instance.

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