I’m teaching an advanced philosophy of language course next semester, and I’ve decided to focus on issues in the philosophy of language where it helps to have some technical background. The idea of the course will be to alternate between time spent doing techie stuff – which will be assessed by way of problem sets – and time spent doing philosophy that relates to the techie stuff, which will be assessed by way of papers.

We’re going to start out with some modal logic, and I’m wondering about textbooks. I’ve actually already put my request in to the bookstore to get some copies of the latest Hughes and Cresswell, but since then my collegue José has suggested that I switch to this book by Fitting and Mendelsohn instead. And at a first glance, it does look pretty promising, and it contains exercises and – this is important, I think – among the proof systems it employs are axiomatic systems. I remark on this because in the last couple of years there have been several logic textbooks – by authors who I otherwise love and respect – which use tableaux as the main proof method. And that isn’t what I want.

But it’s hard to know whether a logic textbook is good from a cursory glance. (They’re kind of like universal statements; you can know that one is bad from a single data point, but knowing that one is good is very difficult.) So I was wondering, have any of you used the Fitting and Mendelsohn book? Do you have any thoughts about it, or other similar books?