In 1906, after giving up hope of vindicating logicism, Frege lists the results of his life's work that survive Russell's paradox. He begins:

Twenty-two years earlier, in happier times, Frege took for his third guiding principle in Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik the admonition, 'never to lose sight of the distinction between concept and object'. We cannot understand Frege's view of his epochal achievements in logic - let alone mark the distance that separates his understanding of quantificational logic from contemporary views - without an appreciation of the concept-object distinction, the centrality Frege assigns to it and its connections to his other views. The distinction embodies the quantificational understanding of generality that Frege sets against older conceptions of logic. This quantificational understanding of generality gives Frege the principle for determining the logical segmentation of sentences and the contents or thoughts expressed by sentences. I hold that Frege’s Context Principle sets forth this connection between logical segmentation and quantificational generality.

Sections 1–3 lay out Frege’s concept–object distinction and its place in his philosophy of logic. Section 4 describes Frege’s introduction of higher-level concepts and his assimilation of sentences to proper names. Sections 5 and 6 explore the charge that the concept–object distinction incoherently undermines itself in the so-called Kerry paradox. Sections 7 and 8 discuss the bearing of the Context Principle and the concept–object distinction on Frege’s logicism.

The logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle presented itself as the reconciliation of a thoroughgoing empiricism as regards substantive knowledge with the certainty and necessity of mathematics. According to empiricism, sense experience is the only source of substantive knowledge of facts, but sense experience might always have been different from what it actually was. Moreover, anything we extrapolate from what we experience may be falsified by further experiences. Knowledge grounded in sense experience is thus knowledge of contingencies, and except perhaps for knowledge of what is immediately experienced (“Red here now”), it is revisable on the basis of further experiences. In contrast, knowledge of mathematics appears to be unrevisably certain substantive knowledge of necessary truths. The contingencies of our sense experience thus seem to afford no basis for knowledge of mathematics. In a word, empiricism must be false, because mathematics is substantive a priori knowledge.

The logical empiricist approach to this dilemma is to deny that knowledge of mathematics is substantive knowledge. The apriority and necessity of mathematics is the apriority and necessity of logic. Logic is in its turn grounded in tacit conventions for the use of certain symbols, symbols that do not themselves stand for anything, like the signs for negation and conjunction. As Hans Hahn put it:

Introduction

Consumer protection law in the age of globalisation poses new challenges for policy-makers. The legislative and regulatory framework developed to undergird consumer protection law in the 1960s and 1970s has come under pressure, ‘spurred’, as Michael Trebilcock suggests in his essay in this volume, ‘both by the changes in the nature of modern industrial economies and the evolution of economic theories’. Trebilcock argues that consumer protection law at the beginning of the new millennium ‘is a much messier and more complex affair’ than it was some thirty or forty years ago. The changes he describes include ‘rapidity of technological change, deregulation of hitherto monopolised industries, globalisation of markets’ and the ‘increasing sophistication in economic theories that evaluate market structure, conduct and performance’.

Governments can no longer develop domestic consumer protection law in isolation from international developments. Iain Ramsay argues herein that globalisation has ‘increased the international dimensions of access to justice and consumer protection as developments in communication technology facilitate the possibility of cross-border frauds’. Consumer law in the twenty-first century must become what he calls ‘applied comparative law’.

The growth of international consumer transactions and the emergence of a new conception of the role of the state have led to a proliferation of consumer protection models all designed with the idea of improving access to justice. As Ramsay demonstrates in his essay, consumer protection and access to justice have traditionally been linked.

The Eighth International Consumer Law Conference was held in Auckland, New Zealand, from 9–11 April 2001. John Skinnon of the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand was instrumental in ensuring that the Conference came to New Zealand on behalf of the International Association for Consumer Law, where it was jointly hosted by the Open Polytechnic and the Research Centre for Business Law at The University of Auckland. It was in large part made possible because of the generous sponsorship of the New Zealand Ministry of Consumer Affairs, the Emily Carpenter Consumer Charitable Trust, Butterworths (NZ), CCH (NZ) and the Open Polytechnic. Over 120 delegates attended from numerous countries, including Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, Germany, India, Indonesia, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Macau, Malta, New Zealand, Portugal, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey and the United States.

The theme was ‘Consumers' Access to Justice'. The essays collected in this volume were chosen from among the sixty papers presented. We thank the authors for their willingness to have their contributions included, and for the enormous patience they have shown during a lengthy editing and pre-publication period. We hope the quality of the final product convinces them that the wait was worthwhile!

Words of appreciation only inadequately compensate other people who worked with us on this project. First, Thierry Bourgoignie, President of the International Association for Consumer Law, was most gracious in all his contacts with those who organised and hosted the Conference, and was very helpful throughout.