Modal property comprehension

Ulrich Meyer

pp. 693-707

in: Johan van Benthem, Vincent F. Hendricks, John Symons (eds), Between logic and intuition, Synthese 190 (4), 2013.

Abstract

To define new property terms, we combine already familiar predicates by means of certain logical operations. Given suitable constraints, these operations may presumably include truth-functional sentence connectives and quantification over objects. What is less clear is whether we can also use modal operators for this purpose. The aim of this paper is to clarify what is involved in this question, and to argue in favor of modal property definitions.