The Ontological--Cognitive Representation Calculus

Ockham distinguished a thing from the concept under which many
things fall. Frege distinguished an object from the way it is given to us.
They are taught apart, six centuries apart, and to different purposes. The
claim made here is that they are one failure seen from two sides.

Think of representation as a relation running from what there is to how it
is grasped. Such a relation can fail to be a one-to-one correspondence in
exactly two directions, and the two directions have names: take the first
and you have a universal, take the second and you have a sense. This book
sets out a notation built to keep both coordinates on the page at once
instead of collapsing them into one, and puts assertion in its place as a
third thing, neither truth nor content.

The framework will not derive anything for you. It has no proof system and
no transformation rules. What it does is make certain ordinary difficulties
statable that are otherwise merely reportable~--- the man who takes the
morning star for one body and the evening star for another, the reader
gripped by a novel, the science that has been superseded. In each case the
usual apparatus obliges us either to convict somebody of inconsistency or
to let the object take the damage. A notation that separates the two places
lets one say so.