The Naming of Facts

"The naming of facts is a difficult matter / it isn’t just one of your holiday games / You may think at first I’m 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. Eliot’s ‘The Naming of Cats

The Vagueness of ‘Vague’: Rejoinder to Hull

Is ‘vague’ 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 ‘vague’ is vague, then so is ‘non-vague’, 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 ‘vague’ 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 ‘vague’ is vague, then—as Hyde has argued—vague 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

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 I’m stuck. Drawing up a list of to-do’s and not-to-do’s 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)

Beth Too, but Only If

Today’s 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

That Useless Time Machine

It is not our practice to raise complaints against a negative review report. We believe in peer refereeing and we respect it, whatever its content and consequences. However, in the case of our latest grant application (project named ‘The Time Machine’) we find it necessary to express our astonishment at the motivations with which our request for funding was turned down. Your main objection appears to be that our project is ‘philosophically interesting’ but ‘practically useless’, by which you mean that the project ‘has no potential for applications.’ We do not quite think that the main criterion for judging the scientific value of a project should be its practical usefulness, but never mind that. Let us agree that usefulness is a relevant criterion, especially when large amounts of money are involved. Why should that be a reason to turn down our project? Quite frankly, we cannot think of a project with better application potential than ours. Certainly you have noticed that our suggestions for practical applications of the time machine did not include any uses that could result in an alteration of the natural course of history. As a matter of fact, we believe that no such alteration is logically possible. According to our project, it is logically possible to visit the past but not to modify the past. No time traveler can undo what has been done or do what has not been done. So the logic is safe

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

Cover To Cover

A dialogue on the ethics of musical covers and pop songwriting inspired by classical music

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 minds—like the “wave” at the stadium or the characters of a cartoon? In such cases the rigidity claim can’t be right and a counterpart-theoretic semantics seems required. Is that bad? I say it isn’t