-
30993.907801
Alonzo Church proposed a theory of sequences of functions and their arguments as surrogates for Russellian singular propositions and singular concepts. Church’s proposed theory accords with his Alternative (0), the strictest of his three competing criteria for strict synonymy. The currently popular objection to strict criteria like (0) on the basis of the Russell-Myhill antinomy is rebutted. Russell-Myhill is not a problem specifically for 1 ACKOWLEDGMENTS: This essay is dedicated to the memory of the great philosopher and logician, Alonzo Church. I had the good fortune to study under Prof. Church (among others) through the 1970s. Years later he read my Frege’s Puzzle (1986), in which I defend what is now called a Millian theory of semantic content. In May 1989, Prof. Church sent me a pair of manuscripts, then not yet published, in which he independently proposed similar ways of developing a theory of n–tuple surrogates for singular propositions. Church’s cover letter began “Just to prove that great minds run in the same channel.” Although his throwaway remark did not reflect a genuine assessment—of me or of himself—it was exceedingly generous, and the memory of it can still cause me to blush. The present essay is in part a much delayed result of careful study of Church’s excellent papers. I am profoundly in his debt.
-
31018.908035
I propose an approach to liar and Curry paradoxes inspired by the work of Roger Swyneshed in his treatise on insolubles (1330-1335). The keystone of the account is the idea that liar sentences and their ilk are false (and only false) and that the so-called “capture” direction of the T-schema should be restricted. The proposed account retains what I take to be the attractive features of Swyneshed’s approach without leading to some worrying consequences Swyneshed accepts. The approach and the resulting logic (called “Swynish Logic”) are non-classical, but are consistent and compatible with many elements of the classical picture including modus ponens, modus tollens, and double-negation elimination and introduction. It is also compatible with bivalence and contravalence. My approach to these paradoxes is also immune to an important kind of revenge challenge that plagues some of its rivals.
-
140847.908054
‘Gender identity’ was clearly defined sixty years ago, but the dominant conceptions of gender identity today are deeply obscure. Florence Ashley’s 2023 theory of gender identity is one of the latest attempts at demystification. Although Ashley’s paper is not fully coherent, a coherent theory of gender identity can be extracted from it. That theory, we argue, is clearly false. It is psychologically very implausible, and does not support ‘firstperson authority over gender’, as Ashley claims. We also discuss other errors and confusions in Ashley’s paper.
-
146557.90807
An act type is something that an agent can do: walk to the store, climb Mount Everest, trip over a wire. Act types are ‘repeatables’: many have climbed Mount Everest. Act types are not events. If you climb Everest, an event occurs—your cold, brutal climb—but this event is not what you do. What you do is climb Everest.
-
146660.908088
Special quantifiers are quantifiers like something, everything, and several things. They are special both semantically and syntactically and play quite an important role in philosophy, in discussions of ontological commitment to abstract objects, of higher-order metaphysics, and of the apparent need for propositions. This paper will review and discuss in detail the syntactic and semantic peculiarities of special quantifiers and show that they are incompatible with substitutional and higher-order analyses that have recently been proposed. It instead defends and develops in formal detail a semantic analysis of special quantifiers as nominalizing quantifiers. On this analysis, special quantifiers involve both singular objectual quantification and implicit on non-singular (higher-order, plural, or mass) quantification. The analysis rests on a range of recent insights and proposals in generative syntactic theory, in particular the recognition of –thing as a light noun and a potential classifier as well as recent views of the decomposition of attitudinal and locutionary verbs in syntax.
-
146743.908103
What does ‘Smith knows that it might be raining’ mean? Expressivism here faces a challenge, as its basic forms entail a pernicious type of transparency, according to which ‘Smith knows that it might be raining’ is equivalent to ‘it is consistent with everything that Smith knows that it is raining’ or ‘Smith doesn’t know that it isn’t raining’. Pernicious transparency has direct counterexamples and undermines vanilla principles of epistemic logic, such as that knowledge entails true belief and that something can be true without one knowing it might be. I re-frame the challenge in precise terms and propose a novel expressivist formal semantics that meets it by exploiting (i) the topic-sensitivity and fragmentation of knowledge and belief states and (ii) the apparent context-sensitivity of epistemic modality. The resulting form of assertibility semantics advances the state of the art for state-based bilateral semantics by combining attitude reports with context-sensitive modal claims, while evading various objectionable features. In appendices, I compare the proposed system to Beddor and Goldstein’s ‘safety semantics’ and discuss its analysis of a modal Gettier case due to Moss.
-
218915.908117
The question when something is has unity and counts as one or a single thing is as much a metaphysical question as a linguistic one: whether something has unity or is a single thing should be the basis for the applicability of predicates of number and of counting. The aim of the paper is to take a closer look at how natural language contributes to the question of unity or countability. A well known fact is that many languages display a mass-count distinction among nouns, and that that distinction goes along with the (in)applicability of number predicates and count quantifiers. Other languages may fail to display a mass-count distinction and often mark countability through the use of classifiers (Chinese).
-
335590.908133
We present the reply Leibniz gave to Stahl’s Theoria medica vera (1707), and the controversy between the authors that those remarks stimulated. After having described the main points of Stahl’s dualism between life and death, correlated to his dualism mechanism/organism, we unravel the main epistemological and scientific points of debate. We propose several distinctions in order to make sense of the various uses of mechanism in this period, and suggest that what essentially motivated Leibniz was both Stahl’s implicit denial of uniform laws of nature, and Stahl’s misunderstanding of the metaphysics of substance and causality that Leibniz was in general elaborating in his own conceptions. We finally suggest how both authors were misunderstanding each other because of different scientific agendas and metaphysical commitments.
-
426768.908166
Davide Grossi Artificial Intelligence, Bernoulli Institute, University of Groningen ILLC/ACLE, University of Amsterdam The Netherlands d.grossi@rug.nl its application varies in complexity and depends, in particular, on whether relevant past decisions agree, or exist at all. The contribution of this paper is a formal treatment of types of the hardness of case-based decisions. The typology of hardness is defined in terms of the arguments for and against the issue to be decided, and their kind of validity (conclusive, presumptive, coherent, incoherent). We apply the typology of hardness to Berman and Hafner’s research on the dynamics of case-based reasoning and show formally how the hardness of decisions varies with time.
-
440406.908185
One feature of language is that we are able to make mistakes in our use of language. Amongst other sorts of mistakes, we can misspeak, misspell, missign, or misunderstand. Given this, it seems that our metaphysics of words should be flexible enough to accommodate such mistakes. It has been argued that a nominalist account of words cannot accommodate the phenomenon of misspelling. I sketch a nominalist trope-bundle view of words that can.
-
493139.908199
Transitivity, Simplification, and Contraposition are intuitively compelling. Although Antecedent Strengthening may seem less attractive at first, close attention to the full range of data reveals that it too has considerable appeal. An adequate theory of conditionals should account for these facts. The strict theory of conditionals does so by validating the four inferences. It says that natural language conditionals are necessitated material conditionals: A B is true if and only if A B is true throughout a set of accessible worlds. As a result, it validates many classical inferences, including Transitivity, Simplification, Contraposition, and Antecedent Strengthening. In what follows I will refer to these as the strict inferences.
-
493237.908213
Let serious propositional contingentism (SPC) be the package of views which consists in (i) the thesis that propositions expressed by sentences featuring terms depend, for their existence, on the existence of the referents of those terms, (ii) serious actualism— the view that it is impossible for an object to exemplify a property and not exist—and (iii) contingentism—the view that it is at least possible that some thing might not have been something. SPC is popular and compelling. But what should we say about possible worlds, if we accept SPC? Here, I first show that a natural view of possible worlds, well-represented in the literature, in conjunction with SPC is inadequate. Though I note various alternative ways of thinking about possible worlds in response to the first problem, I then outline a second more general problem—a master argument— which generally shows that any account of possible worlds meeting very minimal requirements will be inconsistent with compelling claims about mere possibilia which the serious propositional contingentist should accept.
-
770801.908228
It is widely held that if you do wrong in culpable ignorance (ignorance that you are blameworthy for), you are culpable for the wrong you do. I have long though think this is mistaken—instead we should frontload the guilt onto the acts and omissions that made one culpable for the ignorance. …
-
889155.908244
Metric poetry is rhythmic language laid above, and to some degree matching, an underlying pulse. If you do not know where in that pulse you are, you may mangle the verse. In iambic pentameter the pulse is easy: five strong beats, separated by weaker off-beats. …
-
926753.908258
While effective altruists (EAs) spend a lot of time researching which ways to do good are the most effective, historically many have assumed, with relatively little argument, that the benchmark for membership in the movement is a commitment to donate 10% of your earnings. This points to an asymmetry between the two halves of effective altruism: EAs tend to have relatively restricted standards for effectiveness (where to give), but they have much looser standards for altruism (how much to give). I investigate explanations for this asymmetry. While some possible justifications may work (pending empirical support), others look flimsier. I conclude that this means EA likely is, or anyway ought to be, more demanding than some of its proponents currently claim.
-
966984.908279
Legend has it that Damion Searls learnt Norwegian in order to translate Jon Fosse, whom he had read in German and identified as a genius. Searls’ translations of Fosse are, by all accounts, superb. So it is intriguing to learn that he has now translated Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, joining other post-centenary interpreters, Michael Beaney, a historian of early analytic philosophy, and Alexander Booth, a poet. …
-
1070773.908297
The current literature on norms of inquiry features two families of norms: norms that focus on an inquirer’s ignorance and norms that focus on the question’s soundness. I argue that, given a factive conception of ignorance, it’s possible to derive a soundness-style norm from a version of the ignorance norm. A crucial lemma in the argument is that just as one can only be ignorant of a proposition if the proposition is true, so one can only be ignorant with respect to a question if the question is sound.
-
1128655.908314
In this paper, I aim to discuss what puns, metaphysically, are. I argue that the type-token view of words leads to an indeterminacy problem when we consider puns. I then outline an alternative account of puns, based on recent nominalist views of words, that does not suffer from this indeterminacy.
-
1247593.908332
GeneBcally complete yet authorless artworks seem possible, yet it’s hard to understand how they might really be possible. A natural way to try to resolve this puzzle is by construcBng an account of artwork compleBon on the model of accounts of artwork meaning that are compaBble with meaningful yet authorless artworks. I argue, however, that such an account of artwork compleBon is implausible. So, I leave the puzzle unresolved.
-
1426754.908349
This paper examines different kinds of definite descriptions denoting purely contingent, necessary or impossible objects. The discourse about contingent/impossible/necessary objects can be organised in terms of rational questions to ask and answer relative to the modal profile of the entity in question. There are also limits on what it is rational to know about entities with this or that modal profile. We will also examine epistemic modalities; they are the kind of necessity and possibility that is determined by epistemic constraints related to knowledge or rationality. Definite descriptions denote so-called offices, roles, or things to be. We explicate these -offices as partial functions from possible worlds to chronologies of objects of type , where is mostly the type of individuals. Our starting point is Prior’s distinction between a ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ definite article ‘the’. In both cases, the definite description refers to at most one object; yet, in the case of the weak ‘the’, the referred object can change over time, while in the case of the strong ‘the’, the object referred to by the definite description is the same forever, once the office has been occupied. The main result we present is the way how to obtain a Wh-knowledge about who or what plays a given role presented by a hyper-office, i.e. procedure producing an office. Another no less important result concerns the epistemic necessity of the impossibility of knowing who or what occupies the impossible office presented by a hyper-office.
-
2110155.908364
In this paper, I examine Max Deutsch’s dilemma for the implementation of newly engineered concepts. In the debate over this dilemma, the goal of conceptual engineering tends to be set either too high or too low. As a result, implementation tends to be seen as either very unlikely to succeed or too easily achievable. This paper aims to offer a way out of this dilemma. I argue that the success conditions for implementation can be better understood if we distinguish between different stages in the implementation process. Implementation is a complex process involving several stages, each of which can be evaluated as a success or a failure. I argue that even if an implementation does not reach the final stage in which a new concept is widely used in the society at large, it may not be a complete failure: conceptual engineers may not even aim for a new concept to be widely used in the society at large; or even if they do and a new concept only circulates in a smaller subgroup, this can still be a significant achievement. The upshot is that we should take more seriously the possibility that conceptual engineering can be implemented locally at the subgroup level.
-
2153200.908378
Kripke's thesis that meaning is normative is typically interpreted, following Boghossian, as the thesis that meaningful expressions allow of true or warranted use. I argue for an alternative interpretation centered on Wittgenstein's conception of the normativity involved in “knowing how to go on” in one's use of an expression. Meaning is normative for Kripke because it justifies claims, not to be saying something true, but to be going on as one ought from previous uses of the expression. I argue that this represents a distortion of Wittgenstein's conception of the normativity of meaning, and that Wittgenstein's conception is preferable.
-
2178388.908402
According to stereotype, analytic philosophers love nothing more than analyzing concepts, filling the ellipsis in
x is F if and only if …
with conditions held to be implicit in the meaning of a word. It’s an anachronistic vision, both because “analytic truth” plays a minimal role in contemporary philosophy—there’s more interest in “real definition,” the metaphysical project of explaining what it is to be F—and because philosophers are willing to treat concepts as primitive: undefined but well-understood. …
-
2225620.908416
In stark contrast with the prominent role both traditional and contemporary commentators typically think Mengzi’s doctrine of human nature plays in his overall philosophy, the term human nature doesn’t explicitly appear often in Mengzi. (I’ll use italic for the book Mengzi to set it apart from Mengzi the philosopher.) The discussion of human nature is largely implicit. The word “nature” (xing 性) appears in just 16 passages in the book and only 2 of them contain the word explicitly in the form of the term “human nature”(ren xing 人性); and in those 2 passages 6A1 and 6A2, “human nature” is used only 3 times, only 1 of which is from Mengzi’s mouth (the other two are uttered by his philosophical rival Gaozi). Part of the difficulty in interpreting Mengzi’s doctrine of human nature lies in the fact that no explicit statement was offered regarding what is meant by terms like “nature” and “human nature” even in the rare occasions where he used them.
-
2225651.90843
How is it that a speaker S can at once make it obvious to an audience A that she intends to communicate some proposition p, and yet at the same time retain plausible deniability with respect to this intention? The answer is that S can bring it about that A has a high justified credence that ‘S intended p’ without putting A in a position to know that ‘S intended p’. In order to achieve this S has to exploit a sense in which communication can be lottery-like. After defending this view of deniability I argue that it compares favorably to a rival account recently developed by Dinges and Zakkou (2023).
-
2232541.908444
In Moral Misdirection, I argued that honest communication aims to increase the importance-weighted accuracy of your audience’s beliefs. Discourse that predictably does the opposite on a morally important matter—even if the explicit assertions are technically true—constitutes moral misdirection. …
-
2558225.908459
This paper investigates the conditions under which diagonal sentences can be taken to constitute paradigmatic cases of self-reference. We put forward well-motivated constraints on the diagonal operator and the coding apparatus which separate paradigmatic self-referential sentences, for instance obtained via Gödel’s diagonalization method, from accidental diagonal sentences. In particular, we show that these constraints successfully exclude refutable Henkin sentences, as constructed by Kreisel.
-
2558293.908474
We introduce and analyze a new axiomatic theory CD of truth. The primitive truth predicate can be applied to sentences containing the truth predicate. The theory is thoroughly classical in the sense that CD is not only formulated in classical logic, but that the axiomatized notion of truth itself is classical: The truth predicate commutes with all quantifiers and connectives, and thus the theory proves that there are no truth value gaps or gluts. To avoid inconsistency, the instances of the T-schema are restricted to determinate sentences. Determinateness is introduced as a further primitive predicate and axiomatized. The semantics and proof theory of CD are analyzed.
-
2669590.908495
The notion of a single object or of being one is an important notion in metaphysics, and it is presupposed by any account of the notion of number in the philosophy of mathematics. The notion of being a single object contrasts with that of being a mere plurality, a plurality ‘as many’, as well as with the notion of mere ‘stuff’ or, as it is somewhat misleadingly called, a ‘portion’ or a ‘quantity’.
-
2750566.908518
Recent studies claim to show that language delayed deaf subjects typically display long-lingering deficits in Theory of Mind (ToM) development, despite suffering no known deficits in other cognitive domains. These claims are supported by experimental evidence indicating that such subjects fare poorly on False Belief (FB) tasks. This paper turns a critical eye on these claims. In particular, I argue that the reported results raise important questions about the status of FB tasks as evidence, and about how such evidence should be weighted against naturalistic observations of subjects engaged in everyday activities requiring complex social coordination. I conclude that these studies give us no decisive reason to believe that language delayed deaf subjects suffer distinctively and symptomatically in the domain of social cognition. To the contrary, the attribution of significant socio-cognitive impairment is potentially stigmatizing and may not help us understand the unique challenges these subjects face or suggest remedial strategies to aid them in overcoming these challenges.