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Nonexistent Objects

Yale University Press (1980)

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  1. Fiction and fabrication.Harry Deutsch - 1985 - Philosophical Studies 47 (2):201 - 211.
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  • Now, Imagine an Actually Existing Unicorn: On Russellian Worries for Modal Meinongianism.Andreas de Jong - 2020 - Axiomathes 31 (3):365-380.
    Modal Meinongianism provides the semantics of sentences involving intentional verbs Priest. To that end, Modal Meinongianism employs a pointed non-normal quantified modal logic model. Like earlier Meinongian views Modal Meinongianism has a characterisation principle, that claims that any condition whatsoever is satisfied by some object in some world. Recently, Everett has proposed an argument against QCP that, if successful, gives rise to problems identical to those Russell raised for Naïve Meinongianism, namely that it allows for true contradictions, and allows us (...)
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  • “The story says that” operator in story semantics.Charles B. Daniels - 1987 - Studia Logica 46 (1):73-86.
    In [2] a semantics for implication is offered that makes use of stories — sets of sentences assembled under various constraints. Sentences are evaluated at an actual world and in each member of a set of stories. A sentence B is true in a story s just when B s. A implies B iff for all stories and the actual world, whenever A is true, B is true. In this article the first-order language of [2] is extended by the addition (...)
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  • Mally's heresy and the logic of meinong's object theory.Dale Jacquette - 1989 - History and Philosophy of Logic 10 (1):1-14.
    The consistent formalization of Meinong's object theory in recent mathematical logic requires either plural modes of predication, or distinct categories of nuclear or constitutive and extranuclear or nonconstitutive properties. The plural modes of predication approach is rejected because it is reducible to the nuclear extranuclear property distinction, but not conversely, and because the nuclear extranuclear property distinction offers a more satisfactory solution to object theory paradoxes.
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  • On the road to antirealism∗1.Gregory Currie - 1993 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 36 (4):465-483.
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  • What is the Problem of Non-Existence?Tim Crane - 2012 - Philosophia 40 (3):417-434.
    It is widely held that there is a problem of talking about or otherwise representing things that not exist. But what exactly is this problem? This paper presents a formulation of the problem in terms of the conflict between the fact that there are truths about non-existent things and the fact that truths must be answerable to reality, how things are. Given this, the problem of singular negative existential statements is no longer the central or most difficult aspect of the (...)
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  • Is Weak Supplementation analytic?Aaron Cotnoir - 2019 - Synthese:1-17.
    Mereological principles are often controversial; perhaps the most stark contrast is between those who claim that Weak Supplementation is analytic—constitutive of our notion of proper parthood—and those who argue that the principle is simply false, and subject to many counterexamples. The aim of this paper is to diagnose the source of this dispute. I’ll suggest that the dispute has arisen by participants failing to be sensitive to two different conceptions of proper parthood: the outstripping conception and the non-identity conception. I’ll (...)
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  • How the Dead Live.Niall Connolly - 2011 - Philosophia 39 (1):83-103.
    This paper maintains (following Yougrau 1987; 2000 and Hinchliff 1996) that the dead and other former existents count as examples of non-existent objects. If the dead number among the things there are, a further question arises: what is it to be dead—how should the state of being dead be characterised? It is argued that this state should be characterised negatively: the dead are not persons, philosophers etc. They lack any of the (intrinsic) qualities they had while they lived. The only (...)
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  • The Diversity of Fiction and Copredication: An Accommodation Problem.John Collins - 2019 - Erkenntnis 86 (5):1197-1223.
    The paper presents an accommodation problem for extant semantic accounts of fiction. Some accounts of fiction are designed to accommodate one or another form of fictive statement exclusively, what I shall call in-fiction and out-fiction. Thus, typically, the accounts fail to do justice to their respective excluded form. A natural response, entertained by Kripke and in a different fashion by latter-day Meinongians, is to let the two different kinds of fiction have their respective accounts. It is very easy, however, to (...)
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  • The copredication argument.John Collins - 2017 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 60 (7):675-702.
    The standard view of truth-conditional semantics is that it is world-involving in the sense that a theory that specifies truth conditions eo ipso is a theory that specifies the way the world must be if the target sentences are to be true. It would appear to follow that the semantic properties of expressions, such as nominals, specify the very worldly objects that make true or false the sentences that host the nominals. Chomsky and others have raised a fundamental complaint against (...)
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  • Sometimes Some Things Don’t (Really) Exist: Pragmatic Meinongism and the Referential Sub-Problem of Negative Existentials.Lenny Clapp - 2020 - Critica 52 (154).
    To solve the referential sub-problem of negative existentials one must explain why we interpret uses of, e.g., ‘Sherlock Holmes doesn’t exist’ as saying something coherent and intuitively true, even though the speaker purports to refer to something. Pragmatic Meinongism solves this problem by allowing ‘does not exist’ to be pragmatically modulated to express an inclusive sense under which it can be satisfied by something. I establish three points in defense of pragmatic Meinongism: it is superior to Russell-inspired solutions; it is (...)
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  • Negative existentials as corrections: a partial solution to the problem of negative existentials in segmented discourse representation theory.Lenny Clapp - 2021 - Linguistics and Philosophy 44 (6):1281-1315.
    Paradigmatic uses of negative existentials such as ‘Vulcan does not exist’ are problematic because they present the interpreter with a pragmatic paradox: a speaker who uses such a sentence seems to be asserting something that is incompatible with what she presupposes. An adequate solution must therefore explain why we interpret paradigmatic uses of negative existentials as saying something true, even though such uses present us with a pragmatic paradox. I provide such an explanation by analyzing paradigmatic uses of negative existentials (...)
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  • Nonexistent Objects as Truth-Makers: Against Crane’s Reductionism.Filippo Casati & Naoya Fujikawa - 2016 - Philosophia 44 (2):423-434.
    According to Meinongianism, some objects do not exist but we can legitimately refer to and quantify over them. Moreover, Meinongianism standardly regards nonexistent objects as contributing to the truth-makers of sentences about nonexistent objects. Recently, Tim Crane has proposed a weak form of Meinongianism, a reductionism, which denies any contribution of nonexistent objects to truth-making. His reductionism claims that, even though we can truly talk about nonexistent objects by using singular terms and quantifiers about them, any truth about nonexistent objects (...)
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  • Nothingness, Meinongianism and inconsistent mereology.Filippo Casati & Naoya Fujikawa - 2019 - Synthese 196 (9):3739-3772.
    Within the framework of Meinongianism, nothingness turns out to have contradictory features—it seems to be an object and not. In this paper, we explore two different kinds of Meinongian accounts of nothingness. The first one is the consistent account, which rejects the contradiction of nothingness, while the second one is the inconsistent account, which accepts the contradiction of nothingness. First of all, after showing that the consistent account of nothingness defended by Jacquette fails, we express some concerns on the general (...)
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  • Introduction.Filippo Casati, Chris Mortensen & Graham Priest - 2018 - Australasian Journal of Logic 15 (2):28-40.
    Introduction to the Routley/Sylvan Issue.
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  • E. E. Constance Jones on unique existence.Ben Caplan - 2022 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 1 (1):1-24.
    E. E. Constance Jones was one of the first women to study philosophy at the University of Cambridge. This paper focuses on her claim from her first major work, Elements of Logic as a Science of Propositions, that each thing has a unique existence. Jones’s claim follows from claims about tropes and haecceities; but, I suggest, it’s not claims about tropes and haecceities that lead her to accept it. Rather, I suggest, it’s claims about what she calls the denomination of (...)
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  • Fictionalism About Fictional Characters Revisited.Stuart Brock - 2016 - Res Philosophica 93 (2):377-403.
    Fictionalism about fictional characters is a view according to which all claims ostensibly about fictional characters are in fact claims about the content of a story. Claims that appear to refer to or quantify over fictional objects contain an implicit prefix of the form “according to such-and-such story. In.
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  • Absolute Actuality and the Plurality of Worlds.Phillip Bricker - 2006 - Philosophical Perspectives 20 (1):41–76.
    According to David Lewis, a realist about possible worlds must hold that actuality is relative: the worlds are ontologically all on a par; the actual and the merely possible differ, not absolutely, but in how they relate to us. Call this 'Lewisian realism'. The alternative, 'Leibnizian realism', holds that actuality is an absolute property that marks a distinction in ontological status. Lewis presents two arguments against Leibnizian realism. First, he argues that the Leibnizian realist cannot account for the contingency of (...)
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  • What Is Existence?João Branquinho - 2012 - Disputatio 4 (34):575-590.
    This paper has a negative and a positive claim. The negative claim is that the Frege-Russell account of existence as a higher-order predicate is mistaken and should be abandoned, even with respect to general statements of existence such as “Flying mammals exist” (where statements of this sort are supposed to be best accommodated by the account). The Frege-Russell view seems to be supported by two ideas. First, the idea that existence is entirely expressed by the existential quantifier of standard predicate (...)
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  • A Forma Lógica de Afirmações de Existência.João Branquinho - 1998 - Disputatio 5 (5-1):05-33.
    Há alguns anos atrás, algumas pessoas acreditavam que a tese de que a existência não é um predicado, uma tese defendida por autoridades como Gottlob Frege e Bertrand Russell, era um dos traços distintivos da chamada filosofia analítica. Que uma tal crença é afinal falsa pode ser tomado como mais um sinal da vitalidade e do anti-dogmatismo que caracterizam em geral a tradição analítica; e o mesmo se aplica a quaisquer outras crenças do género, que comprometam esta tradição com teses (...)
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  • The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays By David Christensen and Jennifer Lackey.Tomas Bogardus & Anna Brinkerhoff - 2015 - Analysis 75 (2):339-342.
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  • Images, intentionality and inexistence.Ben Blumson - 2009 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 79 (3):522-538.
    The possibilities of depicting non-existents, depicting non-particulars and depictive misrepresentation are frequently cited as grounds for denying the platitude that depiction is mediated by resemblance. I first argue that these problems are really a manifestation of the more general problem of intentionality. I then show how there is a plausible solution to the general problem of intentionality which is consonant with the platitude.
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  • The Selection Problem.Francesco Berto - 2012 - Revue Internationale de Philosophie 262 (4):519-537.
    In 'Fiction and Fictionalism', Mark Sainsbury has recently dubbed “Selection Problem” a serious trouble for Meinongian object theories. Typically, Meinongianism has been phrased as a kind of realism on nonexistent objects : these are mind-independent things, not mental simulacra, having the properties they have independently from the activity of any cognitive agent. But how can one single out an object we have no causal acquaintance with, and which is devoid of spatiotemporal location, picking it out from a pre-determined, mind-independent set (...)
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  • Modal Noneism: Transworld Identity, Identification, and Individuation.Francesco Berto - 2014 - Australasian Journal of Logic 11 (2).
    Noneism a is form of Meinongianism, proposed by Richard Routley and developed and improved by Graham Priest in his widely discussed book Towards Non-Being. Priest's noneism is based upon the double move of building a worlds semantics including impossible worlds, besides possible ones, and admitting a new comprehension principle for objects, differerent from the ones proposed in other kinds of neo-Meinongian theories, such as Parsons' and Zalta's. The new principle has no restrictions on the sets of properties that can deliver (...)
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  • Modal Meinongianism and Characterization.Francesco Berto & Graham Priest - 2014 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 90 (1):183-200.
    In this paper we reply to arguments of Kroon (“Characterization and Existence in Modal Meinongianism”. Grazer Philosophische Studien 86, 23–34) to the effect that Modal Meinongianism cannot do justice to Meinongian claims such as that the golden mountain is golden, and that it does not exist.
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  • Modal meinongianism and fiction: The best of three worlds.Francesco Berto - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 152 (3):313-35.
    We outline a neo-Meinongian framework labeled as Modal Meinongian Metaphysics (MMM) to account for the ontology and semantics of fictional discourse. Several competing accounts of fictional objects are originated by the fact that our talking of them mirrors incoherent intuitions: mainstream theories of fiction privilege some such intuitions, but are forced to account for others via complicated paraphrases of the relevant sentences. An ideal theory should resort to as few paraphrases as possible. In Sect. 1, we make this explicit via (...)
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  • Modal Meinongianism for Fictional Objects.Francesco Berto - 2008 - Metaphysica 9 (2):205-218.
    Drawing on different suggestions from the literature, we outline a unified metaphysical framework, labeled as Modal Meinongian Metaphysics (MMM), combining Meinongian themes with a non-standard modal ontology. The MMM approach is based on (1) a comprehension principle (CP) for objects in unrestricted, but qualified form, and (2) the employment of an ontology of impossible worlds, besides possible ones. In §§1–2, we introduce the classical Meinongian metaphysics and consider two famous Russellian criticisms, namely (a) the charge of inconsistency and (b) the (...)
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  • Book Reviews. [REVIEW]Rezensiert von H. Berger, E. J. Ashworth, J. W. Van Evra, I. Grattan-Guinness, W. Veldman, Kenneth G. Ferguson, Barry Smith, H. A. Lewis, Stephen Read, Michele Malatesta, Bob Hale & Tomis Kapitan - 1991 - History and Philosophy of Logic 12 (2):241-267.
    MEDIEVAL LOGICCARLOS A. DUFOUR, Die Lehre der Proprietates Terminorum. Sinn und Referenz in mittelalterlicher Logik. München, Hamden, Wien: Philosophia, 1989. 312 pp. 148 DM.NORMAN KRETZMANN and BARBARA ENSIGN KRETZMANN The Sophismata of Richard Kilvington. Oxford: Published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 1990. xx + 156 pp. £27.50.LOGIC AND MATHEMATICSSOULEYMANE BACHIR DIAGNE, Boole. Paris: Editions Belin, 1989. 262pp. 75 Ffr.M.-M. TOEPELL, Über die Entstehung von David Hilberts “Grundlagen der Geometrie”. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1986. vii + 293 pp. (...)
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  • Property theory: The Type-Free Approach v. the Church Approach.George Bealer - 1994 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 23 (2):139 - 171.
    In a lengthy review article, C. Anthony Anderson criticizes the approach to property theory developed in Quality and Concept (1982). That approach is first-order, type-free, and broadly Russellian. Anderson favors Alonzo Church’s higher-order, type-theoretic, broadly Fregean approach. His worries concern the way in which the theory of intensional entities is developed. It is shown that the worries can be handled within the approach developed in the book but they remain serious obstacles for the Church approach. The discussion focuses on: (1) (...)
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  • Science and Fiction: Analysing the Concept of Fiction in Science and its Limits.Ann-Sophie Barwich - 2013 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 44 (2):357-373.
    A recent and growing discussion in philosophy addresses the construction of models and their use in scientific reasoning by comparison with fiction. This comparison helps to explore the problem of mediated observation and, hence, the lack of an unambiguous reference of representations. Examining the usefulness of the concept of fiction for a comparison with non-denoting elements in science, the aim of this paper is to present reasonable grounds for drawing a distinction between these two kinds of representation. In particular, my (...)
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  • Much ado about aboutness.Sam Baron, Reginald Mary Chua, Kristie Miller & James Norton - 2019 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy (3).
    Strong non-maximalism holds that some truths require no ontological ground of any sort. Strong non-maximalism allows one to accept that some propositions are true without being forced to endorse any corresponding ontological commitments. We show that there is a version of truthmaker theory available—anti-aboutness truthmaking—that enjoys the dialectical benefits of the strong non-maximalist’s position. According to anti-aboutness truthmaking, all truths require grounds, but a proposition need not be grounded in the very thing(s) that the proposition is about. We argue that (...)
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  • Doubts about One’s Own Existence.Wolfgang Barz - 2014 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (5-6):645-668.
    The aim of this paper is to show that it is not irrational to doubt one’s own existence, even in the face of introspective evidence to the effect that one is currently in a certain mental state. For this purpose, I will outline a situation in which I do not exist, but which cannot be ruled out on the basis of any evidence available to me—including introspective evidence about my current mental states. I use this ‘superskeptical scenario,’ as I will (...)
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  • NONEXISTENCE - A comparative-historical analysis of the problem of nonbeing.Michael D. Bakaoukas - 2014 - E-Logos 21 (1):1-25.
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  • Empty de re attitudes about numbers.Jody Azzouni - 2009 - Philosophia Mathematica 17 (2):163-188.
    I dub a certain central tradition in philosophy of language (and mind) the de re tradition. Compelling thought experiments show that in certain common cases the truth conditions for thoughts and public-language expressions categorically turn on external objects referred to, rather than on linguistic meanings and/or belief assumptions. However, de re phenomena in language and thought occur even when the objects in question don't exist. Call these empty de re phenomena. Empty de re thought with respect to numeration is explored (...)
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  • Hobnobbing with the Nonexistent.Jody Azzouni - 2013 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 56 (4):340-358.
    Recent discussions of Geach sentences by Braun and Salmon are reprised. It is shown that the intractability of providing semantics for Geach sentences (using standard logical tools) is due to the assumption that quantifiers are ontologically committing. Representing the content of these statements is easy using neutral quantifiers. An important concern is consistent identity conditions for nonreferring terms. It may be thought that Meinongian-object approaches handle this better than Azzouni's no-objects-in-any-sense-at-all approach. This is shown to be false. How our truth-inducing (...)
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  • What are negative existence statements about?Jay David Atlas - 1988 - Linguistics and Philosophy 11 (4):373 - 394.
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  • Russell and his sources for non-classical logics.Irving H. Anellis - 2009 - Logica Universalis 3 (2):153-218.
    My purpose here is purely historical. It is not an attempt to resolve the question as to whether Russell did or did not countenance nonclassical logics, and if so, which nonclassical logics, and still less to demonstrate whether he himself contributed, in any manner, to the development of nonclassical logic. Rather, I want merely to explore and insofar as possible document, whether, and to what extent, if any, Russell interacted with the various, either the various candidates or their, ideas that (...)
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  • The Fictional Road Not Taken: A Weak Anti-realist Theory of Fiction.Peter Alward - 2022 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (3):333-344.
    Nathan Salmon has defended what might be called “weak modal anti-realism”—the view that possible-object names can refer to possible objects that neither exist nor are otherwise real. But rather than adopting a similar view in the fictional case, he instead defends fictional creationism—the view that fictional characters are existent but abstract entities created by authors of fiction. In this paper, I first argue that if weak modal antirealism is defensible then weak fictional antirealism is defensible as well. Second, I argue (...)
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  • Description, Disagreement, and Fictional Names.Peter Alward - 2011 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 41 (3):423-448.
    In this paper, a theory of the contents of fictional names — names of fictional people, places, etc. — will be developed.1 The fundamental datum that must be addressed by such a theory is that fictional names are, in an important sense, empty: the entities to which they putatively refer do not exist.2 Nevertheless, they make substantial contributions to the truth conditions of sentences in which they occur. Not only do such sentences have truth conditions, sentences differing only in the (...)
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  • Dissecting Intentionality in the Lab: Meinong’s Theory. [REVIEW]Liliana Albertazzi - 2013 - Axiomathes 23 (3):579-596.
    Besides presenting a phenomenological-experimental analysis of consciousness, Meinong challenged one of the major indisputable axioms of current scientific research, i.e. that perception in awareness has to be veridical on the stimulus. Meinong’s analysis of consciousness, which he conducted through a kind of dissection of its structures from a systematic and an experimental viewpoint, offers relevant insights to contemporary consciousness studies.
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  • Introduction.[author unknown] - 2012 - Introduction 4 (32).
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  • Revising Fiction, Fact, and Faith: A Philosophical Account.Nathaniel Gavaler Goldberg & Chris Gavaler - 2020 - New York: Routledge. Edited by Chris Gavaler.
    This book addresses how our revisionary practices account for relations between texts and how they are read. It offers an overarching philosophy of revision concerning works of fiction, fact, and faith, revealing unexpected insights about the philosophy of language, the metaphysics of fact and fiction, and the history and philosophy of science and religion. It will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of language, metaphysics, philosophy of literature, literary theory and criticism, (...)
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  • Abstract Objects.David Liggins - 2024 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    Philosophers often debate the existence of such things as numbers and propositions, and say that if these objects exist, they are abstract. But what does it mean to call something 'abstract'? And do we have good reason to believe in the existence of abstract objects? This Element addresses those questions, putting newcomers to these debates in a position to understand what they concern and what are the most influential considerations at work in this area of metaphysics. It also provides advice (...)
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  • Abstract objects.Gideon Rosen - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Intentionalism.Tim Crane - 2007 - In Brian P. McLaughlin, Ansgar Beckermann & Sven Walter (eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of mind. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 474-93.
    The central and defining characteristic of thoughts is that they have objects. The object of a thought is what the thought concerns, or what it is about. Since there cannot be thoughts which are not about anything, or which do not concern anything, there cannot be thoughts without objects. Mental states or events or processes which have objects in this sense are traditionally called ‘intentional,’ and ‘intentionality’ is for this reason the general term for this defining characteristic of thought. Under (...)
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  • Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse.Nicholas Asher - 1993 - Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer.
    This volume is about abstract objects and the ways we refer to them in natural language. Asher develops a semantical and metaphysical analysis of these entities in two stages. The first reflects the rich ontology of abstract objects necessitated by the forms of language in which we think and speak. A second level of analysis maps the ontology of natural language metaphysics onto a sparser domain--a more systematic realm of abstract objects that are fully analyzed. This second level reflects the (...)
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  • Metaphysics of Ersatzism about Possible Worlds.Lenart Karol - 2023 - Dissertation, Jagiellonian University
    According to actualism about possible worlds everything that exists is actual. Possible worlds and individuals are actually existing abstract parts of the actual world. Aristotelian actualism is a view that there are only actual individuals but no possible ones, nor their individual abstract representatives. Because of that, our actualist account of modality should differ depending on whether it concerns actual individuals or possible ones. The main goal of the dissertation is to develop a metaphysical framework for Aristotelian actualism. Chapter 1 (...)
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  • The Fictional Character of Scientific Models.Stacie Friend - 2019 - In Arnon Levy & Peter Godfrey-Smith (eds.), The Scientific Imagination. New York, US: Oup Usa. pp. 101-126.
    Many philosophers have drawn parallels between scientific models and fictions. In this paper I will be concerned with a recent version of the analogy, which compares models to the imagined characters of fictional literature. Though versions of the position differ, the shared idea is that modeling essentially involves imagining concrete systems analogously to the way that we imagine characters and events in response to works of fiction. Advocates of this view argue that imagining concrete systems plays an ineliminable role in (...)
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  • Fictional Creations.Maarten Steenhagen - 2021 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
    Many people assume that fictional entities are encapsulated in the world of fiction. I show that this cannot be right. Some works of fiction tell us about pieces of poetry, music, or theatre written by fictional characters. Such creations are fictional creations, as I will call them. Their authors do not exist. But that does not take away that we can perform, recite, or otherwise generate actual instances of such works. This means we can bring such individuals actually into existence, (...)
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  • The Truth and Nothing but the Truth: Non-Literalism and The Habits of Sherlock Holmes.Heidi Savage - 2020 - Southwest Philosophy Review 36 (2).
    Abstract: Many, if not most philosophers, deny that a sentence like ‘Sherlock Holmes smokes’ could be true. However, this attitude conflicts with the assignment of true to that sentence by natural language speakers. Furthermore, this process of assigning truth values to sentences like ‘Sherlock Holes smokes’ seems indistinguishable from the process that leads speakers to assign true to other sentences, those like ‘Bertrand Russell smokes’. I will explore the idea that when speakers assign the value true to the first sentence, (...)
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