252 research outputs found
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The Naming of Facts
"The naming of facts is a difficult matter / it isnāt just one of your holiday games / You may think at first Iām as mad as a hatter / When I tell you, a fact may have TWO DIFFERENT NAMES." A versification of a disturbing philosophical tribulation, after T. S. Eliotās āThe Naming of Cats
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The Vagueness of āVagueā: Rejoinder to Hull
Is āvagueā vague? Why so much fuss about a single word? One reason, I think, is that a lot depends on how we settle the question. For example, Frege famously remarked that logic must be restricted to non-vague predicates. But if āvagueā is vague, then so is ānon-vagueā, hence the restriction is itself vague and, therefore, helpless. For another example, incoherence theorists such as Unger have claimed that vague terms have no clear instances, blocking the sorites paradox at the base step. If āvagueā is vague, however, then either it is a clear instance of itself, in which case the incoherentist claim is plainly false, or it has an empty extension, in which case the claim is vacuously true (there are no vague predicates) and the paradox strikes back. Finally, if āvagueā is vague, thenāas Hyde has arguedāvague predicates must suffer from the phenomenon of higher-order vagueness (at least some must, if Tye is right). So I agree with Hull: this is no small issue and we need to look at it closel
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What is to be Done?
If the question is: what is to be done for philosophy?, then it calls for a political answer and I have little to say besides the obvious. If the question is: what is to be done in philosophy?, then Iām stuck. Drawing up a list of to-doās and not-to-doās would not, I think, be a good way to honor the general conception of philosophy that inspired Topoi throughout these years, and that I deeply share
Mereological Commitments
We tend to talk about (refer to, quantify over) parts in the same way in which we talk about whole objects. Yet a part is not something to be included in an inventory of the world over and above the whole to which it belongs, and a whole is not something to be included in an inventory over and above its own parts. This paper is an attempt to clarify a way of dealing with this tension which may be labeled the Minimalist View: an element in the field of a part-whole relation is to be included in an inventory of the world if, and only if, it does not overlap any other element that is itself included in the inventory. As it turns out, a clarification of this view involves both a defense of mereological extensionality and an account of the topological distinction between detached and undetached parts (and the parallel opposition between scattered and connected wholes)
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Beth Too, but Only If
Todayās test will be on the conditional connective. As always, I will just give you a sentence in English and you will have to symbolize it in the language of sentential logic. Remember that symbolization is a procedure whereby you extract the logical form of a sentence. This is not just a translation procedure and there is no straightforward algorithm for it; it sometimes involves a difficult process of interpretation. But it is crucially important for logic, for the logical techniques that we are going to develop will apply to well-formed formulas of the language of sentential logic and only indirectly to the sentences of English. It will apply, that is, to the logical forms of the sentences of English
Reasoning about space: The hole story
Much of our naive reasoning about space involves reasoning about holes and holed objects. We put things in holes, through holes, around them; we jump out of a hole or fall into one; we compare holes, measure them, enlarge them, fill them up
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Ontological Commitment and Reconstructivism
Some forms of analytic reconstructivism take natural language (and common sense at large) to be ontologically opaque: ordinary sentences must be suitably rewritten or paraphrased before questions of ontological commitment may be raised. Other forms of reconstructivism take the commitment of ordinary language at face value, but regard it as metaphysically misleading: common-sense objects exist, but they are not what we normally think they are. This paper is an attempt to clarify and critically assess some common limits of these two reconstructivist strategies
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Cover To Cover
A dialogue on the ethics of musical covers and pop songwriting inspired by classical music
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Naming the Stages
Standard lore has it that a proper name, or a definite description on its "de re" reading, is a temporally rigid designator. It picks out the same entity at every time at which it picks out an entity at all. If the entity in question is an enduring continuant (a 3D object that persists through time by being fully present at different times) then we know what this means, though we are also stuck with a host of metaphysical puzzles concerning endurance itself. If the entity in question is a perdurant (a 4D worm that persists through time by having different parts at different times) then the rigidity claim is trivial, though one is left wondering how it is that different speakers ever manage to pick out one and the same entity when a host of suitable, overlapping candidates are available. But what if the entity in question is neither a continuant nor a perdurant? What if the things we talk about in ordinary language are time-bound entities that cannot truly be said to persist through time, or stage sequences whose unity resides exclusively in our mindsālike the āwaveā at the stadium or the characters of a cartoon? In such cases the rigidity claim canāt be right and a counterpart-theoretic semantics seems required. Is that bad? I say it isnāt
Promiscuous Endurantism and Diachronic Vagueness
According to a popular line of reasoning, vagueness creates a problem for the endurantist conception of persistence. Assuming that ordinary material objects can undergo some mereological change without thereby ceasing to exist, just how much change they can tolerate appears to be a vague matter. Surely a catāTibblesācan lose a few body cells, but surely it cannot lose too many of them, so it seems that we are bound to be faced with āborderline casesā in which we are unsure what to say. For a perdurantist, such considerations pose no serious threat. If ordinary objects are things that persist through time by having a different temporal part at each moment at which they exist, just as they extend over space by having a different spatial part at each place at which they are found, then the borderline cases can be explained in familiar semantic terms: our linguistic practices are not precise enough to determine the exact temporal extent of the referent of such expressions as āTibblesā or āthat catā, just as they are not precise enough to determine the exact spatial extent of the referent of expressions such as āEverestā or āthat mountainā
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