Kant’s treatments of incongruent counterparts have been criticized in the recent literature. His 1768 essay has been charged with an ambiguous use of the notion of ‘inner ground’, and his 1770 claim that those differences cannot be apprehended conceptually is thought to be false. The author argues that those two charges rest on an uncharitable reading. ‘Inner ground’ is equivocal only if misread as mapping onto Leibniz notion of quality. Concepts suffice to distinguish counterparts, but are insufficient to specify their (...) spatial forms. Kant’s claims are reasonable and plausible, and have been reaffirmed repeatedly in contemporary discussions of demonstrative identification. (shrink)

One of the objections against the thesis of underdetermination of theories by observations is that it is unintelligible. Any two empirically equivalent theories — so the argument goes—are in principle intertranslatable, hence cannot count as rivals in any non-trivial sense. Against that objection, this paper shows that empirically equivalent theories may contain theoretical sentences that are not intertranslatable. Examples are drawn from a related discussion about incommensurability that shows that theoretical non-intertranslatability is possible.

Some authors claim that ‘I’ and ‘now’ are essential indexicals, in the sense that they cannot be eliminated in favor of other indexicals or nonindexical expressions. This article argues that three indexicals of direction—one for each spatial dimension (e.g., ‘up’, ‘front’, and ‘left’)—must also be regarded essential, insofar as they are used as pure indexicals and not as demonstratives.