I provide a case-by-case definition of essential truths based on the notions of metaphysical necessity and ontological dependence. Relying on suggestions in the literature, I adopt a definition of the latter notion in terms of the notion of ground. The resulting account is adequate in the sense that it is not subject to Kit Fine’s famous counterexamples to the purely modal account of essence. In addition, it provides us with a novel conception of truths pertaining to the essence of objects, (...) which might help to dispel doubts on the legitimacy of the notion of essence itself. (shrink)

Singular terms without referents are called empty or vacuous terms. But not all of them are equally empty. In particular, not all proper names that fail to name an existing object fail in the same way: although they are all empty, they are not all equally vacuous. “Vulcan,” “Jacob Horn,” “Odysseus,” and “Sherlock Holmes,” for instance, are all empty. They have no referents. But they are not entirely vacuous or useless. Sometimes they are used in statements that are true or (...) false. We are basically referentialists about proper names. The ordinary semantic function of a proper name is to refer to an object, and to do it directly, that is, without semantically providing any identifying condition that the object should meet to be the referent. To put it differently, we agree that statements containing proper names express singular propositions, i.e., that their truth-conditions involve the referent of the proper name, if it exists, and not any identifying condition of it. Now, since empty names lack a referent, and therefore would not express such a singular proposition, how do we explain that many, if not all, statements containing them have a truth-value? Answering this question for the case of fictional names, in particular, is the aim of this paper. (shrink)

An intuitive objection to modal realism is that merely possible worlds and their inhabitants seem to be irrelevant to an analysis of modality. Kripke originally phrased the objection in terms of being concerned about one’s modal properties without being concerned about the properties one’s other-worldly counterparts have. The author assesses this objection in a variety of forms, and then provides his own formulation that does not beg the question against the modal realist. Finally, the author considers two potential answers to (...) the objection so understood and concludes that only one of them has a chance of succeeding. (shrink)

Many metaphysical controversies can be understood as debates over whether some alleged entities are metaphysically possible. No doubt, with regard to these matters, we may have opinions or theories, commonsensical or sophisticated. But do we have knowledge of them? Can we really know that something is metaphysically possible, and if so, how? Several different answers have been offered in the literature, intending to illustrate how we may have knowledge of metaphysical modality. In this paper, I concentrate on a proposal by (...) Timothy Williamson. On this account, our alleged knowledge of metaphysical modality is justified by and grounded in our capacity to handle ordinary mundane counterfactual conditionals. However, I argue that Williamson’s account fails, mainly because the modality involved in ordinary mundane counterfactuals is causal, and thus our capacity to handle them still falls short of giving us any knowledge of metaphysical modality. In the end of the paper, I also provide my own answer to the question. My answer is a sceptical one: we do not really have knowledge of metaphysical modality. But such ignorance is harmless, or so I argue. (shrink)

This is a comment on Gómez-Torrente’s approach to natural kinds and natural kind terms. Here I will focus on his concerns related to the arbitrariness argument and his attempt to formulate a reply to it that maintains most of the “Kripke-Putnam orthodoxy” when it comes to the reference-fixing of such terms. Gómez-Torrente concludes that ordinary kind terms have distinct referents from scientific terms. I will challenge one of the premises that he employs in reaching this conclusion: namely, that the difference (...) in determinacy profiles between ordinary natural kinds and scientific kinds is enough to assume that the terms referring to them do not share their referents. I also suggest that some kind of contextual interpretation of natural kind terms might provide a nice explanation of those determinacy variations. (shrink)

I defend and revise the systematic account of normative functions (teleofunctions), as recently developed by Gerhard Schlosser and by W. D. Christensen and M. H. Bickhard. This account proposes that teleofunctions are had by structures that play certain kinds of roles in complex systems. This theory is an alternative to the historical etiological account of teleofunctions, developed by Ruth Millikan and others. The historical etiological account is susceptible to a general ontological problem that has been under-appreciated, and that offers important (...) reasons to adopt the systematic account. However, the systematic account must be revised to allow for two distinct kinds of teleofunctions in order to avoid another ontological problem. (shrink)

Proper names interpreted as rigid designators do not allow us to formulate metalinguistic statements of the form ‘NN might not have been named “NN”’. All we can do is to show what we are trying to say. But we cannot properly formulate such a metalinguistic statement about a rigid name. The rigidity of the name establishes a relationship with its bearer that is much stronger than the contingent relationship that is supposed to exist in the natural languages between the name (...) and its bearer. The sentence is intuitively true as expressed in natural languages, but once we translate it, if possible, into Kripkean formal semantics it is false because once the individual is rigidly named, she cannot have been named otherwise; or even worse, as I suspect, the whole sentence is untranslatable, because in Kripkean formal semantics there is no possible world in which she would not have had the name she rigidly has. This problem in Kripkean semantics could well be termed, as Wittgenstein would say, an ineffability. Kripkean semantics makes the actual contingent property anyone has of bearing a proper name ineffable, notwithstanding it is effable in natural languages. Keywords: rigid names, metalinguistic statements, rigid quoted names, ineffability. (shrink)

Two convictions underlie the following article. The first is that Hilary Putnam has been one of the greatest thinkers of our time, a philosopher who was able to propose groundbreaking ideas in virtually every area of philosophy. As the reader will see, the topics he tackled in his writings included questions of philosophy of science, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics and logic, philosophy of mind, metaethics, the fact-value dichotomy, the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later thought, the question of relativism, the (...) analysis of rationality, the analysis of religious experience, the character of Jewish philosophy, the interpretation of pragmatism, the elucidation of the concept of truth, the question of realism, the relationship between mind and the world. The second is that the changes some of his positions underwent, far from being a point of weakness—as some critics have sometimes felt compelled to claim—reveal the freshness and genuineness of Putnam’s way of philosophising and at the same time the essence of philosophical discussion itself. (shrink)

The superfunctionality claim is that phenomenal experiences are more than functional (objective, causal) relations. This is one of the most widely used but least attacked claims in the anti-physicalist literature on consciousness. Coupled with one form of structuralism, the view that science only explains functional relations, the superfunctionality claim entails that science will not explain phenomenal experience. The claim is therefore essential to many anti-physicalist arguments. I identify an open question argument for the superfunctionality claim that expresses an intuition deserving (...) of explanation. Using the experience of fear as an example, I show that this intuition cannot distinguish between whether conscious experiences are more than functional relations, or whether instead they are just very complex (including, constituted by very complex functional relations). I give reasons to suspect that the latter is more likely the case. This renders physicalism safe from the superfunctionality claim. This also provides a challenge to the proponents of the superfunctionality claim: they should explain why paradigmatically mysterious phenomenal experiences are correlated with extensive and complex physical correlates. (shrink)

Do we have free will? Understanding free will as the ability to act freely, and free actions as exercises of this ability, I maintain that the default answer to this question is “yes.” I maintain that free actions are a natural kind, by relying on the influential idea that kinds are homeostatic property clusters. The resulting position builds on the view that agents are a natural kind and yields an attractive alternative to recent revisionist accounts of free action. My view (...) also overcomes difficulties confronted by previous views according to which free actions might be a natural kind. On my view, free actions exist and we often act freely, as long as we possess various features that are related in the right sorts of ways to each other and to the world. In turn, we acquire and retain the concept as long as most of us possess enough of those features. (shrink)

We argue for an intimate relation between semantic externalism and semantic deference and propose a typology of speakers’ metasemantic views as revealed by their deferential attitudes. Building on this typology, we then offer a classification of metasemantic disagreements understood as verbal disputes between speakers who (consciously or unconsciously) hold divergent metasemantic views about the same word. In particular, we distinguish lower-order metasemantic disagreements between speakers who disagree on the exact source of meaning determination for a word yet agree on the (...) kind of deferential attitude this word is liable to, from higher-order metasemantic disagreements between speakers who do not even agree on the suitable kind of deferential attitude. We demonstrate the fruitfulness of our classification through the concrete implications it has for conceptual engineering. (shrink)

According to the A-theory of time some instant of time is absolutely present. Many reject the A-theory on the grounds that it is inconsistent with current spacetime physics, which appears to leave no room for absolute presentness. However, some reject the A-theory on purely philosophical grounds. In this article I describe three purely philosophical arguments against the A-theory and show that there are plausible A-theoretic responses to each of them. I conclude that, whatever else is wrong with the A-theory, it (...) is not obviously a philosophically suspect theory. (shrink)

‘Free action’ is subject to the causal theory of reference and thus that The essential nature of free actions can be discovered only by empirical investigation, not by conceptual analysis. Heller ’s proposal, if true, would have significant philosophical implications. Consider the enduring issue we will call the Compatibility Issue : whether the thesis of determinism is logically compatible with the claim that.

Although the doctrine of divine simplicity has faced substantial criticism in recent years, Jeffrey Brower has recently offered a novel defense of the view by appealing to contemporary truthmaker theory. In this paper, I will argue that Brower’s defense of divine simplicity requires an implausible account of how truthmaking works for essential intrinsic predications. I will first argue that, unless Brower is willing to make an ad hoc exception for how truthmaking works in God’s case, he is committed to saying (...) that essential intrinsic predications about any object are made true by that object alone, not by its having essential properties. I will then argue that reflecting on cases where distinct essential intrinsic predications about an object have different causal explanations behind them shows that this general view of truthmaking is implausible. (shrink)

I review and reconsider some of the themes of ‘Two notions of necessity’ (Davies and Humberstone, 1980) and attempt to reach a deeper understanding and appreciation of Gareth Evans’s reflections (in ‘Reference and contingency’, 1979) on both modality and reference. My aim is to plot the relationships between the notions of necessity that Humberstone and I characterised in terms of operators in two-dimensional modal logic, the notions of superficial and deep necessity that Evans himself described, and the epistemic notion of (...) a priority. (shrink)

George Wilson has defended the thesis that even impersonal third-person fictional narratives should be taken to contain fictional narrations and have fictional narrators. This, he argues, is necessary if we are to explain how readers can take themselves, in their imaginative engagement with fictions, to have knowledge of the things they are imagining. I argue that there is at least one class of impersonal third-person fictional narratives—thought experiments—to which Wilson’s model fails to apply, and that this reveals more general problems (...) with his argument. I further argue that there is no good reason to think that Wilson’s account applies more restrictedly to those impersonal third-person fictional narratives that feature in standard works of literary fiction. (shrink)

George Wilson has defended the thesis that even impersonal third-person fictional narratives should be taken to contain fictional narrations and have fictional narrators. This, he argues, is necessary if we are to explain how readers can take themselves, in their imaginative engagement with fictions, to have knowledge of the things they are imagining. I argue that there is at least one class of impersonal third-person fictional narratives—thought experiments—to which Wilson’s model fails to apply, and that this reveals more general problems (...) with his argument. I further argue that there is no good reason to think that Wilson’s account applies more restrictedly to those impersonal third-person fictional narratives that feature in standard works of literary fiction. (shrink)

Religious exclusivism, or the idea that only one religion can be true, fuels hatred and conflict in the modern world. Certain objections to religious pluralism, together with associated defences of exclusivism are flawed. I defend a moderate religious pluralism, according to which the truth of one religion does not automatically imply the falsity of others. The thought that we can respect persons even when holding them mistaken strains credulity when we are dealing with religious convictions. Moreover, exclusivism is informed by (...) inadequate approaches to discourse about transcendence. The intentional-descriptivist approach to reference is not comprehensively adequate, and yet is assumed by some objections to pluralism. The irreducibly metaphorical character of much religious language means that differences between world religions can be more apparent than real. Approaches to religious education should embrace a moderate religious pluralism. (shrink)

Berg seeks to defend the theory that the meaning of a proper name in a belief report is its reference against Frege’s puzzle by hypothesizing that when substituting coreferential names in belief reports results in reports that seem to have different truth values, the appearance is due to the fact that the reports have different metalinguistic implicatures. I review evidence that implicatures cannot be calculated in the way Grice or Berg imagine, and give reasons to believe that belief reports do (...) not have the implicatures Berg attributes to them. I also argue that even if belief reports did have such implicatures, they would not explain why the belief reports in Frege’s puzzle seem to have different truth values. I point out that Berg has no reason to believe that Lois Lane believes Clark Kent is a reporter and Lois Lane believes Superman is a reporter are both true rather than both false, and that Leibniz’s Law cannot be used to defend substitutivity in belief reports because belief reports are not relational in the requisite way. Finally, I observe that some of the linguistic data Berg uses to argue for substitutivity in belief reports concerns the transparent interpretation of belief reports, whereas Frege’s puzzle concerns the opaque interpretation. (shrink)

Nowadays, essentialism has obtained various senses and its extension reaches out over many branches of study who have some immediate connection with it. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam and David Wiggins are the notable upholders of essentialism. The Essentialist movement which stemmed from the view that philosophy is a speculative study of Reality was temporarily suspended or stagnated by the spirited movement of the logical positivists like Moritz Schlick, Hans Reichenbach, Rudolf Carnap and A. J. Ayer. According to (...) these philosophers, philosophy is simply an activity of analysis of the fundamental concepts of ordinary language or of science or of any other discipline. Such concept—analysis—philosophers are called anti-essentialist. Here, I shall concentrate on the views of Aristotle. I shall discuss the doctrine of essence, natural kinds, real essence in favour of essentialism and also discuss W. V. O. Quine’s view as an anti-essentialist trend. At last I shall try to examine whether and to what extent an attack of essences reflects back certain essentialist commitments, which is to see what reasonable theory of essences can be eked out from the entire exercise. (shrink)

The causal and simulation theories are often presented as very distinct views about declarative memory, their major difference lying on the causal condition. The causal theory states that remembering involves an accurate representation causally connected to an earlier experience. In the simulation theory, remembering involves an accurate representation generated by a reliable memory process. I investigate how to construe detailed versions of these theories that correctly classify memory errors as misremembering or confabulation. Neither causalists nor simulationists have paid attention to (...) memory-conjunction errors, which is unfortunate because both theories have problems with these cases. The source of the difficulty is the background assumption that an act of remembering has one target. I fix these theories for those cases. The resulting versions are closely related when implemented using tools of information theory, differing only on how memory transmits information about the past. The implementation provides us with insights about the distinction between confabulatory and non-confabulatory memory, where memory-conjunction errors have a privileged position. (shrink)

This paper develops the first parts of a logical framework for the empirical sciences, by means of a redefinition of theory structuralism as originally developed by Joseph Sneed, Wolfgang Stegmüller, and others, in the context of a ‘rigid’ logic as based on a fixed (therefore rigid) ontology. The paper defends a formal conception of the empirical sciences that has an irreducible ontological basis and is unable, in general, to provide purely structural characterizations of the domain of a theory. The extreme (...) rationalist utopia of a characterization of the real world ‘up to isomorphism’, therefore, is rejected. (shrink)

In several publications Graeme Forbes has developed and defended one of the strongest arguments for essentialism about biological origins. I attempt to show that there are deep, as yet unrecognized, problems with this argument. The problems with Forbes’s argument suggest that a range of other arguments for various forms of origin essentialism are also likely to be flawed, and that we should abandon the seemingly plausible general metaphysical thesis that concrete entities that share all intrinsic properties are identical.

In the last 30 years repeated attempts have been made to develop a proof-sketch Kripke gave for essentialism about material origins into a cogent argument. I argue that there are general reasons that all such attempts have failed, and so we should likewise expect future attempts to fail.

The key idea behind reduction is a simple and familiar one: it’s that there’s more to things than meets the eye. Surprisingly, this simple idea provides the resources to block a number of notable anti-reductionist arguments: Mackie’s argument from queerness against objective moral values, Kripke’s Humphrey objection and its recent variants, and Jubien’s objection from irrelevance against Lewisian modal realism. What is wrong with each of these arguments is that they suppose that what is to be reduced must not be (...) dissimilar to what it is to be reduced to. This supposition is shown to be misguided and that the success or otherwise of a reduction turns on quite different considerations. (shrink)

In her engaging book, The referential mechanism of proper names, Li presents empirical studies involving American and Chinese laypeople. Li interprets her results as supporting an epistemic‐perspective reading of the variability in referential intuitions on proper names. Building upon this thesis, Li defends the ambiguity view, claiming that names are ambiguous between a descriptivist and a causal‐historical meaning. I argue that either Li's data do not enable a comparison of the two theories of reference, or support for the ambiguity view (...) is limited to the Chinese sample at most and does not rely upon the inference that Li employs. (shrink)

The modal argument against materialism, in its most standard form, relies on a compatibility thesis to the effect that the physical truths are compatible with the absence of consciousness. I propose an alternative modal argument that relies on an incompatibility thesis: The existence of consciousness is incompatible with the proposition that the physical truths provide a complete description of reality. I show that everyone who accepts the premises of the standard modal argument must accept the premises of the revised modal (...) argument, but not vice versa. (shrink)

Some truths about color are knowable a priori. For example, it is knowable a priori that redness is not identical to the property of being square. This extremely modest and plausible claim has significant philosophical implications, or so I shall argue. First, I show that this claim entails the falsity of standard forms of color functionalism, the view that our color concepts are functional concepts that pick out their referents by way of functional descriptions that make reference to the subjective (...) responses of perceivers. I then argue that, while some sophisticated forms of color functionalism can accommodate the a priori knowability of a truth like “redness is not identical to squareness,” they can only do so by abandoning color realism, the thesis that colors are instantiated by external material objects. In practice, color functionalists are almost invariably color realists. Thus, given extremely modest assumptions concerning what can be known a priori about color, we should conclude that color functionalism, at least in its typical realist form, is false. (shrink)

Imagine your mirror‐inverted counterpart on Mirror Earth, a perfect mirror image of Earth. Would her experiences be the same as yours, or would they be phenomenally mirror‐inverted? I argue, first, that her experiences would be phenomenally the same as yours. I then show that this conclusion gives rise to a puzzle, one that I believe pushes us toward some surprising and philosophically significant conclusions about the nature of perception. When you have a typical visual experience as of something to your (...) left, the following three claims seem very plausible: (1) No one could have an experience phenomenally just like yours without thereby having an experience as of something to her left. (2) Your experience is veridical. (3) Your experience doesn't differ from that of your mirror‐inverted counterpart with respect to veridicality. But (1)‐(3) jointly contradict the claim that you and your mirror‐inverted counterpart would have the same experiences. I argue that any viable response to this puzzle will embrace the following disjunction: either there is a degree of independence between perceptual phenomenology and representational content, contrary to popular intentionalist views of perception, or spatial subjectivism is true, where spatial subjectivism is the view that the spatial properties presented in perception are either mind‐dependent or illusory. (shrink)

Following up on its predecessor in this Journal, the article defends philosophy as a guide to making and analyzing art; identifies Cubist solutions to the Prometheus Challenge, including a novel analysis of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon; defines a new concept of aesthetic attitude; proves the compatibility of Prometheus Challenge artworks with logic; and explains why Plato would have welcomed such artworks in his ideal state.

Variabilism is the view that proper names (like pronouns) are semantically represented as variables. Referential names, like referential pronouns, are assigned their referents by a contextual variable assignment (Kaplan 1989). The reference parameter (like the world of evaluation) may also be shifted by operators in the representation language. Indeed verbs that create hyperintensional contexts, like ‘think’, are treated as operators that simultaneously shift the world and assignment parameters. By contrast, metaphysical modal operators shift the world of assessment only. Names, being (...) variables, refer rigidly in the latter merely intensional contexts, but may vary their reference in hyperintensional contexts. This conforms to the intuition that the content of attitude ascriptions encapsulates referential uncertainty. Furthermore, names in hyperintensional contexts are ambiguous between de re* and de dicto* interpretations. This fact is used to account for asymmetric mistaken identity attributions (for example, Biron thinks Katherine is Rosaline, but he doesn’t think Rosaline is Katherine). -/- The variable theory compares favourably with its alternatives, including Millianism and descriptivism. Millians cannot account for the behaviour of names in hyperintensional contexts, while descriptivists cannot generate a necessary contrast between intensional and hyperintensional contexts. No other theory can capture the facts pertaining to the existentially bound use of names. (shrink)

This paper investigates the truth conditions of sentences containing indefinite noun phrases, focusing on occurrences in attitude reports, and, in particular, a puzzle case due to Walter Edelberg. It is argued that indefinites semantically contribute the (thought-)object they denote, in a manner analogous to attributive definite descriptions. While there is an existential reading of attitude reports containing indefinites, it is argued that the existential quantifier is contributed by the de re interpretation of the indefinite (as the de re reading adds (...) existential quantification to the interpretation of definites on Kaplan’s analysis). (shrink)

In this paper, I present and defend an explication of content in terms of the mathematical notion of information. In its most general formulation, the theory says that two states have the same content just in case they carry the same information, relative to a communication network. My account reifies content (it is the discrete counterpart to continuous information) and supports the idea that agents have internal means of comparing the contents of two thoughts. Further, it makes sense to say (...) that agents have communicated successfully when they coordinate on content in this sense; they have transmitted information without loss. (shrink)

It is often thought that questions of reference are crucial in assessing scientific realism, construed as the view that successful theories are at least approximately true descriptions of the unobservable; realism is justified only if terms in empirically successful theories generally refer to genuinely existing entities or properties. In this paper this view is questioned. First, it is argued that there are good reasons to think that questions of realism are largely decided by convention and carry no epistemic significance. An (...) alternative conception of realism is then proposed, which focuses on the Ramsey sentences of scientific theories, constructed in the manner of David Lewis's 'How to define theoretical terms'. It is argued that because the Ramsey sentence of a theory preserves the epistemically significant part of the theory's content without generating commitments to any particular conclusions about reference, the realism issue is better addressed by asking whether Ramsey sentences of theories, rather than the theories themselves, are approximately true. (shrink)

This paper argues that transcendental phenomenology (here represented by Edmund Husserl) can accommodate the main thesis of semantic externalism, namely, that intentional content is not simply a matter of what is ‘in the head,’ but depends on how the world is. I first introduce the semantic problem as an issue of how linguistic tokens or mental states can have ‘content’—that is, how they can set up conditions of satisfaction or be responsive to norms such that they can succeed or fail (...) at referring. The standard representationalist view—which thinks of the problem in first-person terms—is contrasted with Brandom’s pragmatic inferentialist approach, which adopts a third-person stance. The rest of the paper defends a phenomenological version of the representationalist position (seeking to preserve its first-person stance) but offers a conception of representation that does not identify it with an entity ‘in the head.’ The standard view of Husserl as a Cartesian internalist is undermined by rejecting its fundamental assumption—that Husserl’s concept of the ‘noema’ is a mental entity—and by defending a concept of ‘phenomenological immanence’ that has a normative, rather than a psychological, structure. Finally, it is argued that phenomenological immanence cannot be identified with ‘consciousness’ in Husserl’s sense, though consciousness is a necessary condition for it. (shrink)

In this paper I will analyze some philosophically relevant aspects involved in the dissolution of Benacerraf’s problem of fixing the identity of natural numbers by Shapiro’s structuralism. My fundamental aim is to present three criticisms to Shapiro’s position –to his conception of language, to his characterization of structures as ante rem, and to his dramatic conception of ontology. Some of these criticisms will also be directed to Benacerraf’s identification problem.

In this paper I argue for the idea that, throughout the history of science, there are some cases of theory change that would show how science develops with no referential continuity. For this purpose, I analyze Psillos’ proposal of a theory of reference used to account for referential continuity in conceptual transitions. This kind of continuity is requested by Psillos —as by other philosophers— in his defense of scientific realism. By means of a historical case, the theory of germplasm of (...) August Weismann, I intend to demonstrate that Psillos’ demand for reference continuity can be found to be inadequate. DOI:10.5007/1808-1711.2010v14n3p335. (shrink)

Philosophical treatments of natural kinds are embedded in two distinct projects. I call these the philosophy of science approach and the philosophy of language approach. Each is characterized by its own set of philosophical questions, concerns, and assumptions. The kinds studied in the philosophy of science approach are projectible categories that can ground inductive inferences and scientific explanation. The kinds studied in the philosophy of language approach are the referential objects of a special linguistic category—natural kind terms—thought to refer directly. (...) Philosophers may hope for a unified account addresses both sets of concerns. This paper argues that this cannot be done successfully. No single account can satisfy both the semantic objectives of the philosophy of language approach and the explanatory projects of the philosophy of science approach. After analyzing where the tensions arise, I make recommendations about assumptions and projects that are best abandoned, those that should be retained, and those that should go their separate ways. I also recommend adopting the disambiguating terminology of “scientific kinds” and “natural kinds” for the different notions of kinds developed in these different approaches. (shrink)

According to the modal view, essence admits of reductive analysis in exclusively modal terms. Fine (1994) argues that modal view delivers an inadequate analysis of essence. This paper defends the modal view from Fine's challenge. This defense proceeds by examining the disagreement between Finean primitivists and Quinean eliminativists about essence. In order to model this disagreement, a distinction between essence and a separable concept, nature, is required. This distinction is then used to show that Fine's challenge is misdirected and therefore (...) unsuccessful. (shrink)

The distinction between qualitative properties like mass and shape and non-qualitative properties like being Napoleon and being next to Obama is important, but remains largely unexamined. After discussing its theoretical significance and cataloguing various kinds of non-qualitative properties, I survey several views about the nature of this distinction and argue that all proposed reductive analyses of this distinction are unsatisfactory. I then defend primitivism, according to which the distinction resists reductive analysis.

In this paper, I examine the putative incompatibility of three theses: (1) Haecceitism, according to which some maximal possibilities differ solely in terms of the non-qualitative or de re possibilities they include; (2) Modal correspondence, according to which each maximal possibility is identical with a unique possible world; (3) Counterpart theory, according to which de re modality is analyzed in terms of counterpart relations between individuals. After showing how the modal realism defended by David Lewis resolves this incompatibility by rejecting (...) modal correspondence, I defend modal correspondence and develop an alternative strategy for reconciling these theses. Specifically, I examine Lewis’s arguments against non-qualitative counterpart theory and undermine them by developing a novel version of non-qualitative counterpart theory that appeals to a metaphysics of bare particulars. I then indicate how this version of non-qualitative counterpart theory accommodates both haecceitism and modal correspondence. (shrink)

According to haecceitism, some maximal possibilities differ even while they are qualitatively indiscernible. Since haecceitism is a modal thesis, it is typically defended by appeal to conceivability arguments. These arguments require us to conceive of qualitatively indiscernible possibilities that differ only with respect to the identity of the individuals involved. This paper examines a series of conceivability arguments for haecceitism and a variety of anti-haecceitist responses. It concludes that there is no irresistible conceivability argument for haecceitism even while anti-haecceitist responses (...) do come with certain notable commitments. (shrink)

In the last decade a new debate concerning the foundations of reference and semantics emerged, which mainly focuses on how to interpret Donnellan’s seminal works and, in particular, on _how_ it differs from Kripke’s influential contributions to so-called “direct reference”. In this paper, I focus on this “new” reading/understanding of Donnellan and how, as it is nowadays presented, differs from Kripke’s picture. I will discuss a Kripke-inspired picture and the way it differs from a Donnellan-inspired one and show that there (...) is a tension between the views that: (i) the token of a name refers to the object conventionally (causally) linked with the tokened name _and_ (ii) the token of a name refers to the object the speaker has in mind. I will end up suggesting that Korta and Perry’s (Critical pragmatics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011 ) critical referentialism/pragmatics and their name-notion network conception help to clarify this tension (and possibly evade it). (shrink)

Though pain scientists now understand pain to be a complex experience typically composed of sensation, emotion, cognition, and motivational responses, many philosophers maintain that pain is adequately characterized by one privileged aspect of this complexity. Philosophically dominant unitary accounts of pain as a sensation or perception are here evaluated by their ability to explain actual cases—and found wanting. Further, it is argued that no forthcoming unitary characterization of pain is likely to succeed. Instead, I contend that both the motivating intuitions (...) behind unitary accounts and the wide range of pain phenomena are best accommodated by a componential view of pain that does not privilege any single component as necessary or sufficient. (shrink)

In addition to conceiving of such imaginary scenarios as those involving philosophical zombies, we may conceive of such things being conceived. Call these higher order conceptions ‘meta-conceptions’. Sorensen (2006) holds that one can entertain a meta-conception without thereby conceiving of the embedded lower-order conception. So it seems that I can meta-conceive possibilities which I cannot conceive. If this is correct, then meta-conceptions provide a counter-example to the claim that possibility entails conceivability. Moreover, some of Sorensen’s discussion suggests the following argument: (...) if the conceivability of some proposition entails its possibility, then the meta-conceivability of some proposition entails its possibility; but we can meta-conceive impossibilities; so conceivability doesn’t entail possibility. In this paper, I’ll argue that one cannot entertain a meta-conception without thereby conceiving of the embedded lower-order conception. And so we can neither meta-conceive impossibilities nor meta-conceive possibilities of which we cannot thereby conceive. (shrink)

It is argued that, contrary to appearances, description-names (e.g.: "The Roman Empire", "The Beatles", "The Holy Virgin",...) do conform to Millianism, i.e. the view that proper names are directly referential expressions, referring regardless of whether the relevant individual satisfies some associated description or not. However, description-names name and describe. Some arguments supporting this peculiarity and a logic to handle description-names are proposed. It will be shown that the best framework with which to accommodate description-names is a multiple-proposition theory, according to (...) which a given utterance may express several propositions. (shrink)