Substitution in a sense

The Reference Principle (RP) states that co-referring expressions are everywhere intersubstitutable salva congruitate. On first glance, (RP) looks like a truism, but a truism with some bite: (RP) transforms difficult philosophical questions about co-reference into easy grammatical questions about substitutability. This has led a number of philosophers to think that we can use (RP) to make short work of certain longstanding metaphysical debates. For example, it has been suggested that all we need to do to show that the predicate ‘( ) is a horse’ does not refer to a property is point out that ‘( ) is a horse’ and ‘the property of being a horse’ are not everywhere intersubstitutable salva congruitate. However, when we understand ‘substitution’ in the simplest and most straightforward way, (RP) is no truism; in fact, natural languages are full of counterexamples to the principle. In this paper, I introduce a new notion of substitution, and then develop and argue for a version of (RP) that is immune to these counterexamples. Along the way I touch on the following topics: the relation between argument forms and their natural language instances; the reification of sense; the difference between terms and predicates; and the relation between reference and disquotation. I end by arguing that my new version of (RP) cannot be used to settle metaphysical debates quite as easily as some philosophers would like

Category mistakes are meaningful

Category mistakes are sentences such as 'Colourless green ideas sleep furiously' or 'The theory of relativity is eating breakfast'. Such sentences are highly anomalous, and this has led a large number of linguists and philosophers to conclude that they are meaningless (call this 'the meaninglessness view'). In this paper I argue that the meaninglessness view is incorrect and category mistakes are meaningful. I provide four arguments against the meaninglessness view: in Sect. 2, an argument concerning compositionality with respect to category mistakes; in Sect. 3 an argument concerning synonymy facts of category mistakes; in Sect. 4 concerning embeddings of category mistakes in propositional attitude ascriptions; and in Sect. 5 concerning the uses of category mistakes in metaphors. Having presented these arguments, in Sect. 6 I briefly discuss some of the positive motivations for accepting the meaninglessness view and argue that they are unconvincing. I conclude that the meaninglessness view ought to be rejected. © 2010 Springer Science+Business Media B.V

Strict finitism refuted?

In his paper 'Wang's Paradox', Michael Dummett provides an argument for why strict finitism in mathematics is internally inconsistent and therefore an untenable position. Dummett's argument proceeds by making two claims: (1) Strict finitism is committed to the claim that there are sets of natural numbers which are closed under the successor operation but nonetheless have an upper bound; (2) Such a commitment is inconsistent, even by finitistic standards. In this paper I claim that Dummett's argument fails. I question both parts of Dummett's argument, but most importantly I claim that Dummett's argument in favour of the second claim crucially relies on an implicit assumption that Dummett does not acknowledge and that the strict finitist need not accept. ©2007 The Aristotelian Society

Endurantism vs. perdurantism?: a debate reconsidered

One of the central debates in contemporary metaphysics has been the debate between endurantism and perdurantism about persistence. In this paper I argue that much of this debate has been misconstrued: most (if not all) of the arguments in the debate crucially rely on theses which are strictly orthogonal to the endurantism/perdurantism debate. To show this, I note that the arguments in the endurantism/perdurantism debate typically take the following form: one presents a challenge that endurantists (/perdurantists) allegedly have some trouble addressing, and to which perdurantism (/endurantism) apparently has a straightforward response. I argue, however, that in each case, there are versions of endurantism (/perdurantism) that can offer precisely the same (or at least a highly analogous) response to the challenge, and thus the ability to provide this particular solution does not directly tell in favour of one the two views. In §1, I elaborate two views which will be particularly prominent in the discussion: liberal endurantism and restrictive perdurantism. In §2-6 I discuss in turn the central pro-perdurantism arguments: the argument from anthropocentricism, the argument from vagueness, the argument from recombination, the argument from temporary intrinsics, and the argument from coincidence. In §7-8, I discuss the main pro-endurantism arguments: the arguments from motion, and the argument from permanent coincidence. Finally, in §9, I discuss what conclusion can be drawn from this discussion

Why neither diachronic universalism nor the Argument from Vagueness establishes perdurantism

One of the most influential arguments in favour of perdurantism is the Argument from Vagueness. The argument proceeds in three stages: The first aims to establish atemporal universalism. The second presents a parallel argument in favour of universalism in the context of temporalized parthood (diachronic universalism). The third argues that diachronic universalism entails perdurantism. I offer a novel objection to the argument. I show that on the correct way of formulating diachronic universalism the principle does not entail perdurantism. On the other hand, if diachronic universalism is formulated as Sider (incorrectly) proposes, the argument fails to establish his principle, and thus perdurantism

II - The last dogma of type confusions

In this paper I discuss a certain kind of 'type confusion' which involves use of expressions of the wrong grammatical category, as in the string 'runs eats'. It is (nearly) universally accepted that such strings are meaningless. My purpose in this paper is to question this widespread assumption (or as I call it, 'the last dogma'). I discuss a range of putative reasons for accepting the last dogma: in §II, semantic and metaphysical reasons; in §III, logical reasons; and in §IV, syntactic reasons. I argue that none of these reasons is conclusive, and that consequently we should be willing to question this last dogma of type confusions. © 2009 The Aristotelian Society

Response to Abrusan, Shaw, and Elbourne

Márta Abrusán’s paper consists of a comparison between my own book and Nicholas Asher’s Lexical Meaning in Context (Asher (2011)), which discusses a wide range of linguistic phenomena, including category mistakes. Abrusán’s main focus isn’t Asher’s theory of category mistakes, but rather his treatment of two different phenomena: so-called cases of‘co-predication’ and ‘coercion’. The suggestion, I take it, is that if (only) Asher’s account of category mistakes figures as part of a unified explanation of a wide range of phenomena then it has a significant advantage over my own account. Abrusán thus raises the question whether my own theory can be extended to provide parallel explanations of these additional phenomena. In §1.1 I briefly compare Asher’s account of category mistakes to my own, and argue that Asher’s account is vulnerable to many of the objections that I raise in my book against competing theories. In §1.2-1.3 I offer some remarks about coercion and co-predication. While I do not claim to have anything like a worked out positive account of these phenomena (this has not been a focus of my work), I do wish to cast doubts about Asher’s (and Abrusán’s) assumption that these issues are closely connected to that of category mistakes. Thus rather than directly respond to Abrusán’s challenge as to whether my own theory of category mistakes can be extended to provide parallel accounts to those of Asher’s, I reject the assumption that such an extension is desirable. James Shaw’s paper focuses on my rejection of the ‘MBT view’: the claim that category mistakes are meaningful but truth-valueless. He raises concerns about two of my arguments: a general argument I present against the MBT’s view’s commitment to truth-value gaps, and an objection I raise against the claim that the infelicity of category mistakes provides a good motivation for adopting the MBT view. I discuss each of these in turn in §2.1 and §2.2 below. Paul Elbourne’s paper offers an interesting novel argument in favour of my account of category mistakes. While I obviously welcome this proposal (and find this sort of constructive contribution to be a refreshing addition to the standard critical modes of philosophical engagement), I think it is somewhat less straightforward than he suggests for my view to account for the cases he discusses. Nevertheless, as I explain below, I do agree that his argument ultimately renders support for my account.</p