Comparativism maintains that physical quantities are ultimately relational in character. For example, an object’s having 1 kg rest mass depends on the relations it stands in to other objects in the universe. Comparativism, its advocates allege, reveals that quantities are not metaphysically mysterious: Quantities are reducible to familiar relations holding among physical objects. Modal accounts of intrinsicality—such as Lewis’s duplication account or Langton and Lewis’s combinatorial account—are popular accounts preserving many of our core intuitions regarding which properties are intrinsic. I (...) argue that to endorse both comparativism and a modal account of intrinsicality, we must reject the plausible thesis that determinable properties are instantiated solely in virtue of their determinates. I call this ‘the determinacy tension’ and I suggest approaches for dissolving it. (shrink)

It would seem that some statements like ‘There are exactly four moons of Jupiter’ and ‘The number of moons of Jupiter is four’ have the same truth-conditions and yet differ in ontological commitment. One strategy to resolve this paradoxical phenomenon is to insist that the statements have not only the same truth-conditions but also the same ontological commitments; the other strategy is to reject the presumption that they have the same truth-conditions. This paper critically examines some popular versions of these (...) two strategies, and defends a new solution according to which the statements have the same ontological commitments and yet differ in truth-conditions. (shrink)

In a forthcoming paper in this journal, entitled “Bad company objection to Joongol Kim’s adverbial theory of numbers”, Namjoong Kim presents an ingenious Russell-style paradox based on an analogue of Kim’s definition of the number 1, and argues that Kim’s theory needs to provide a criterion of demarcation between acceptable and unacceptable definitions of adverbial entities. This paper addresses this ‘bad company’ objection and some other related issues concerning Kim’s adverbial theory by clarifying the purposes and uses of the formal (...) framework of the theory. (shrink)

Kim :1099–1112, 2013) defends a logicist theory of numbers. According to him, numbers are adverbial entities, similar to those denoted by “frequently” and “at 100 mph”. He even introduces new adverbs for numbers: “1-wise”, “2-wise”, and so on. For example, “Fs exist 2-wise” means that there are two Fs. Kim claims that, because we can derive Dedekind–Peano axioms from his definition of numbers as adverbial entities, it is a new form of logicism. In this paper, I will, however, argue that (...) his theory is vulnerable to an analogue of the so-called Bad Company objection to neo-Fregeanism. This means that we cannot be sure that numbers are actually given to us by Kim’s definition; for, we don’t know whether it is indeed a good definition. So, unless Kim, or somebody else, provides a demarcation criterion between good and bad adverbial definitions, Kim’s theory will remain incomplete. (shrink)

Recently, there has been a revival in taking empirical magnitudes seriously. Weights, heights, velocities and the like have been accepted as abstract entities in their own right rather than just equivalence classes of objects. The aim of my paper is to show that this revival should include value magnitudes. If we posit such magnitudes, important value comparisons can be easily explained; it becomes easier to satisfy the axioms for measurement of value; goodness, badness, and neutrality can be given univocal definitions; (...) value aggregation can be given a non-mathematical understanding which allows for Moorean organic unities. Of course, this does not come for free. One has to accept a rich ontology of abstract value magnitudes, but, to quote David Lewis, ‘The price is right; the benefits in theoretical unity and economy are well worth the entities.’. (shrink)