Background
Kaplan, David was born on September 17, 1933 in Los AngelesCalifornia.
logician analytic philosopher of language
Kaplan, David was born on September 17, 1933 in Los AngelesCalifornia.
From 1961, successively Lecturer, Assistant, Associate and full Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Kaplan’s work concerns intensional logics. In hts most influential work ( 1989) he develops Russell s idea of the singular proposition, that is a proposition which contains an extralinguistic object as part of its structure. The impetus comes front an approach to modal logic, according to which th<j assessment of, say, ‘Something is necessarily •" involves enquiring, of a certain given objetlwhether it is F in other possible worlds. Kaplan argues that sentences of ordinary language containing words like ‘this’ and ‘that’, as used to pic out individual objects, express singular propos1 tlon&- All of this involves some departure from a claim made by Frege, the founder of modern logic, although the extent of the departure is controversial. Frege claimed that a proposition about an °bject contains a mode of presentation of the °bject, rather than the object itself, and in his earlier ‘Quantifying in' (1968) Kaplan had fol- °wed this line. His later change to a view which recognizes singular propositions opens up problems about the relationships between language, •bought and the world formerly thought to have een solved by the Fregean approach. Kaplan’s ater views are part of a general supposedly antiregean movement, whose other chief represen- ’atives are Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam and whose implications are the subject of strenuous contemporary debate.