Abstract:
The rejection of certain philosophical theses as nonsense has been a standard ploy in twentieth century philosophy - witness the rejection of metaphysics by logical positivism's identification of significance with verifiability. The ploy has been applied to non-philosophical (but no less bothersome) sentences as well - witness Russell's resolution of the paradoxes in terms of the significance criteria of the ramified theory of types. What is needed in all these cases, according to the authors of this text, is "a general formal theory of significance in terms of which significance claims, and arguments by means of which they are made, can be assessed" (pp. 5-6).
