The Semantic Foundations of Philosophical Analysis

I provide an analysis of sentences of the form ‘To be F is to be G’ in terms of exact truth-maker semantics—an approach that identifies the meanings of sentences with the states of the world directly responsible for their truth-values. Roughly, I argue that these sentences hold just in case that which makes something F is that which makes it G. This approach is hyperintensional, and possesses desirable logical and modal features. These sentences are reflexive, transitive and symmetric, and, if they are true, then they are necessarily true, and it is necessary that all and only Fs are Gs. I close by defining an asymmetric and irreflexive notion of analysis in terms of the reflexive and symmetric one

Rigid and flexible quantification in plural predicate logic

Noun phrases with overt determiners, such as \u3ci\u3esome apples\u3c/i\u3e or \u3ci\u3ea quantity of milk\u3c/i\u3e, differ from bare noun phrases like \u3ci\u3eapples\u3c/i\u3e or \u3ci\u3emilk\u3c/i\u3e in their contribution to aspectual composition. While this has been attributed to syntactic or algebraic properties of these noun phrases, such accounts have explanatory shortcomings. We suggest instead that the relevant property that distinguishes between the two classes of noun phrases derives from two modes of existential quantification, one of which holds the values of a variable fixed throughout a quantificational context while the other allows them to vary. Inspired by Dynamic Plural Logic and Dependence Logic, we propose Plural Predicate Logic as an extension of Predicate Logic to formalize this difference. We suggest that temporal \u3ci\u3efor\u3c/i\u3e-adverbials are sensitive to aspect because of the way they manipulate quantificational contexts, and that analogous manipulations occur with spatial \u3ci\u3efor\u3c/i\u3e-adverbials, habituals, and the quantifier \u3ci\u3eall\u3c/i\u3e

Macroscopic ontology in Everettian quantum mechanics

Simon Saunders and David Wallace have proposed an appealing candidate semantics for interpreting linguistic communities embedded in an Everettian multiverse. It provides a charitable interpretation of our ordinary talk about the future, and allows us to retain a principle of bivalence for propositions and to retain the Law of Excluded Middle in the logic of propositions about the future. But difficulties arise when it comes to providing an appropriate account of the metaphysics of macroscopic objects and events. In this paper, I evaluate various metaphysical frameworks which might be combined with the Saunders-Wallace semantics. I conclude that the most appropriate metaphysics to underwrite the semantics renders Everettian quantum mechanics a theory of non-overlapping worlds

The Use of Sets (and Other Extensional Entities) in the Analysis of Hylomorphically Complex Objects

Hylomorphically complex objects are things that change their parts or matter or that might have, or have had, different parts or matter. Often ontologists analyze such objects in terms of sets (or functions, understood set-theoretically) or other extensional entities such as mereological fusions or quantities of matter. I urge two reasons for being wary of any such analyses. First, being extensional, such things as sets are ill-suited to capture the characteristic modal and temporal flexibility of hylomorphically complex objects. Secondly, sets are often appealed to because they seem to contain their members. But the idea that sets do contain their members, in the ordinary sense of containment, is a substantive metaphysical position that makes analyses that rely on that idea for their plausibility much more metaphysically committing than is generally thought

Parts of Ockham’s razor and their counterparts

William of Ockham seems to have endorsed the view (i) that a whole is its parts, (ii) that some things are such that whether they together compose a whole is contingent, and (iii) that parts are ontologically prior to the whole they compose. Ockhamist Composition as Identity is the conjunction of these three claims. It seems doubly absurd since Leibniz’s Law arguments can be run against both the conjunction of (i) and (ii) and that of (i) and (iii). In this article, I appeal to recent developments in counterpart theory to block these arguments and adequately interpret the Ockhamist version of the view that composition is identity

Aboutness in Imagination

I present a formal theory of the logic and aboutness of imagination. Aboutness is understood as the relation between meaningful items and what they concern, as per Yablo and Fine’s works on the notion. Imagination is understood as per Chalmers’ positive conceivability: the intentional state of a subject who conceives that p by imagining a situation—a configuration of objects and properties—verifying p. So far aboutness theory has been developed mainly for linguistic representation, but it is natural to extend it to intentional states. The proposed framework combines a modal semantics with a mereology of contents: imagination operators are understood as variably strict quantifiers over worlds with a content-preservation constraint