Associative substitutional semantics and quantified modal logic (Q965898)

For the semantical approach to quantified modal logic several philosophical problems have been discussed so far, particularly on the interpretation of objectual domains concerning, for instance, possibilia, trans-world identity, and so on. By surveying these problems, the author emphasizes that modal sentences are not to be understood referentially as is inherent in the usual denotational semantics, but to be interpreted substitutionally so as to avoid such problems. The main purpose of this paper is to present an alternative substitutional semantics for first-order modal logic which, in contrast to the traditional substitutional (or truth-value) semantics, allows for a fine-grained explanation of the semantical behaviour of terms composing atomic formulas. From this point of view the author proposes also the notion of modality ``de nomine'' as an alternative to the denotational notion of modality ``de re''.