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  1. Rules to Infinity: The Normative Role of Mathematics in Scientific Explanation.Mark Povich - 2024 - Oxford University Press USA.
    One central aim of science is to provide explanations of natural phenomena. What role(s) does mathematics play in achieving this aim? How does mathematics contribute to the explanatory power of science? Rules to Infinity defends the thesis, common though perhaps inchoate among many members of the Vienna Circle, that mathematics contributes to the explanatory power of science by expressing conceptual rules, rules which allow the transformation of empirical descriptions. Mathematics should not be thought of as describing, in any substantive sense, (...)
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  • A Quinean Reformulation of Fregean Arguments.Nathaniel Gan - 2023 - Acta Analytica 38 (3):481-494.
    In ontological debates, realists typically argue for their view via one of two approaches. The _Quinean approach_ employs naturalistic arguments that say our scientific practices give us reason to affirm the existence of a kind of entity. The _Fregean approach_ employs linguistic arguments that say we should affirm the existence of a kind of entity because our discourse contains reference to those entities. These two approaches are often seen as distinct, with _indispensability arguments_ typically associated with the former, but not (...)
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  • Alethic Pluralism for Pragmatists.Tom Kaspers - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-19.
    Pragmatism and the correspondence theory of truth are longtime foes. Nevertheless, there is an argument to be made that pragmatists must embrace truth as correspondence. I show that there is a distinctive pragmatic utility to taking truth to be correspondence, and I argue that it would be inconsistent for pragmatists to accept the utility of the belief that truth is correspondence while resisting the premise that this belief is correct. -/- In order to show how pragmatists can embrace truth as (...)
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  • The Root of the Third Dogma of Empiricism: Davidson vs. Quine on Factualism.Ali Hossein Khani - 2023 - Acta Analytica 38 (1):161-183.
    Davidson has famously argued that conceptual relativism, which, for him, is based on the content-scheme dualism, or the “third dogma” of empiricism, is either unintelligible or philosophically uninteresting and has accused Quine of holding onto such a dogma. For Davidson, there can be found no intelligible ground for the claim that there may exist untranslatable languages: all languages, if they are languages, are in principle inter-translatable and uttered sentences, if identifiable as utterances, are interpretable. Davidson has also endorsed the Quinean (...)
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  • (1 other version)Relativism.Maria Baghramian & J. Adam Carter - 2015 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:1-60.
    Relativism, roughly put, is the view that truth and falsity, right and wrong, standards of reasoning, and procedures of justification are products of differing conventions and frameworks of assessment and that their authority is confined to the context giving rise to them. More precisely, ‘relativism’ covers views which maintain that—at a level of high abstraction—at least some class of things have properties they have not simpliciter, but only relative to a given framework of assessment, and correspondingly, that the truth of (...)
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  • How to have a metalinguistic dispute.Poppy Mankowitz - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):5603-5622.
    There has been recent interest in the idea that speakers who appear to be having a verbal dispute may in fact be engaged in a metalinguistic negotiation: they are communicating information about how they believe an expression should be used. For example, individuals involved in a dispute about whether a racehorse is an athlete might be communicating their diverging views about how ‘athlete’ should be used. While many have argued that metalinguistic negotiation is a pervasive feature of philosophical and everyday (...)
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  • Islam and Science: The Philosophical Grounds for a Genuine Debate.Ali Hossein Khani - 2020 - Zygon 55 (4):1011-1040.
    What does it take for Islam and science to engage in a genuine conversation with each other? This essay is an attempt to answer this question by clarifying the conditions which make having such a conversation possible and plausible. I will first distinguish between three notions of conversation: the trivial conversation (which requires sharing a common language and the meaning of its ordinary expressions), superficial conversation (in which although the language is shared, the communicators fail to share the meaning of (...)
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  • (1 other version)Quantifier Variance Dissolved.Suki Finn & Otávio Bueno - 2018 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 82:289-307.
    Quantifier variance faces a number of difficulties. In this paper we first formulate the view as holding that the meanings of the quantifiers may vary, and that languages using different quantifiers may be charitably translated into each other. We then object to the view on the basis of four claims: (i) quantifiers cannot vary their meaning extensionally by changing the domain of quantification; (ii) quantifiers cannot vary their meaning intensionally without collapsing into logical pluralism; (iii) quantifier variance is not an (...)
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  • What Does Davidson Reject When He Rejects Conceptual Schemes?Greg Lynch - 2018 - Acta Analytica 33 (4):463-481.
    According to a common line of criticism, Donald Davidson’s argument in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” is invalid because it moves illicitly from the relatively weak thesis that conceptual schemes cannot be incommensurable to the stronger thesis that the idea of a conceptual scheme itself is incoherent. I argue in this paper that such objections fail because they misunderstand the position that Davidson’s argument is intended to rule out. According to the “scheme-content dualism” Davidson targets, conceptual schemes (...)
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  • Davidson and a Twist of Wittgenstein: Metaontology, Self-Canceling Paradox, and Settled Insight.Jeremy Barris - 2018 - Philosophia 46 (2):255-274.
    The paper proposes with Davidson that the talk of metaontology is literally meaningless, but with Wittgenstein that it is so in a way that grants a unique type of insight. More specifically, it argues both that Davidson’s arguments have a cogency that is hard to dismiss, and also that, since his own arguments are metaontological, they are self-referential, and consequently in turn undermine their own meaning as well. The paper argues further that metaontological statements cannot be avoided. Consequently, this kind (...)
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  • Why the debate about composition is factually empty.Mark Balaguer - 2018 - Synthese 195 (9):3975-4008.
    I argue in this paper that the debate over composition is factually empty; in other words, I argue that there’s no fact of the matter whether there are any composite objects like tables and rocks and cats. Moreover, at the end of the paper, I explain how my argument is suggestive of a much more general conclusion, namely, that there’s no fact of the matter whether there are any material objects at all. Roughly speaking, the paper proceeds by arguing that (...)
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  • Why metaphysical debates are not merely verbal.Mark Balaguer - 2020 - Synthese 197 (3):1181-1201.
    A number of philosophers have argued in recent years that certain kinds of metaphysical debates—e.g., debates over the existence of past and future objects, mereological sums, and coincident objects—are merely verbal. It is argued in this paper that metaphysical debates are not merely verbal. The paper proceeds by uncovering and describing a pattern that can be found in a very wide range of philosophical problems and then explaining how, in connection with any problem of this general kind, there is always (...)
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  • Carnap’s epistemological critique of metaphysics.Darren Bradley - 2018 - Synthese 195 (5):2247-2265.
    Many who take a dismissive attitude towards metaphysics trace their view back to Carnap’s ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’. But the reason Carnap takes a dismissive attitude to metaphysics is a matter of controversy. I will argue that no reason is given in ‘Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology’, and this is because his reason for rejecting metaphysical debates was given in ‘Pseudo-Problems in Philosophy’. The argument there assumes verificationism, but I will argue that his argument survives the rejection of verificationism. The root (...)
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  • (1 other version)Relativism.Maria Baghramian & Adam J. Carter - 2020 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Relativism has been, in its various guises, both one of the most popular and most reviled philosophical doctrines of our time. Defenders see it as a harbinger of tolerance and the only ethical and epistemic stance worthy of the open-minded and tolerant. Detractors dismiss it for its alleged incoherence and uncritical intellectual permissiveness. Debates about relativism permeate the whole spectrum of philosophical sub-disciplines. From ethics to epistemology, science to religion, political theory to ontology, theories of meaning and even logic, philosophy (...)
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  • An Argument for the Ontological Innocence of Mereology.Rohan French - 2016 - Erkenntnis 81 (4):683-704.
    In Parts of Classes David Lewis argued that mereology is ‘ontologically innocent’, mereological notions not incurring additional ontological commitments. Unfortunately, though, Lewis’s argument for this is not fully spelled out. Here we use some formal results concerning translations between formal languages to argue for the ontological innocence of mereology directly.
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  • Against the New Metaphysics of Race.David Ludwig - 2015 - Philosophy of Science 82 (2):244-265.
    The aim of this article is to develop an argument against metaphysical debates about the existence of human races. I argue that the ontology of race is underdetermined by both empirical and non-empirical evidence due to a plurality of equally permissible candidate meanings of "race." Furthermore, I argue that this underdetermination leads to a deflationist diagnosis according to #hich disputes about the existence of human races are non-substantive verbal disputes. $hile this diagnosis resembles general deflationist strategies in contemporary metaphysics" I (...)
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  • Verbal Disputes and Substantiveness.Brendan Balcerak Jackson - 2014 - Erkenntnis 79 (1):31-54.
    One way to challenge the substantiveness of a particular philosophical issue is to argue that those who debate the issue are engaged in a merely verbal dispute. For example, it has been maintained that the apparent disagreement over the mind/brain identity thesis is a merely verbal dispute, and thus that there is no substantive question of whether or not mental properties are identical to neurological properties. The goal of this paper is to help clarify the relationship between mere verbalness and (...)
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  • Logic and Ontological Pluralism.Jason Turner - 2012 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 41 (2):419-448.
    Ontological pluralism is the doctrine that there are different ways or modes of being. In contemporary guise, it is the doctrine that a logically perspicuous description of reality will use multiple quantifiers which cannot be thought of as ranging over a single domain. Although thought defeated for some time, recent defenses have shown a number of arguments against the view unsound. However, another worry looms: that despite looking like an attractive alternative, ontological pluralism is really no different than its counterpart, (...)
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  • Ontologia e metafisica.Achille C. Varzi - 2002 - In Franca D’Agostini & Nicla Vassallo (eds.), Storia della Filosofia Analitica. Einaudi. pp. 81-117.
    A critical survey of topics that play a central role in contemporary analytic ontology and metaphysics, including, identity, persistence through time, the problem of universals, the notion of ontological commitment, and the boundary between semantic issues and metaphysics proper.
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  • Metaontology.Matti Eklund - 2006 - Philosophy Compass 1 (3):317-334.
    Metaontology – the study of the nature of ontological issues – has flourished in recent years. The focus of this summary will be on some views and arguments that are central to today’s debate. One theme will be that of how seriously to take ontology: whether there is reason to take a skeptical or deflationary attitude toward ontological claims, as theorists like Rudolf Carnap, Hilary Putnam, and Eli Hirsch in different ways have urged. The other theme will be that of (...)
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  • What is Metaphysical Equivalence?Kristie Miller - 2005 - Philosophical Papers 34 (1):45-74.
    Abstract Theories are metaphysically equivalent just if there is no fact of the matter that could render one theory true and the other false. In this paper I argue that if we are judiciously to resolve disputes about whether theories are equivalent or not, we need to develop testable criteria that will give us epistemic access to the obtaining of the relation of metaphysical equivalence holding between those theories. I develop such ?diagnostic? criteria. I argue that correctly inter-translatable theories are (...)
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  • Relativism.Chris Swoyer - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Neo-fregeanism and quantifier variance.Theodore Sider - 2007 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 81 (1):201–232.
    NeoFregeanism is an intriguing but elusive philosophy of mathematical existence. At crucial points, it goes cryptic and metaphorical. I want to put forward an interpretation of neoFregeanism—perhaps not one that actual neoFregeans will embrace—that makes sense of much of what they say. NeoFregeans should embrace quantifier variance.
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  • Neo-Fregean ontology.Matti Eklund - 2006 - Philosophical Perspectives 20 (1):95-121.
    Neo-Fregeanism in the philosophy of mathematics consists of two main parts: the logicist thesis, that mathematics (or at least branches thereof, like arithmetic) all but reduce to logic, and the platonist thesis, that there are abstract, mathematical objects. I will here focus on the ontological thesis, platonism. Neo-Fregeanism has been widely discussed in recent years. Mostly the discussion has focused on issues specific to mathematics. I will here single out for special attention the view on ontology which underlies the neo-Fregeans’ (...)
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  • Is Conceptual Relativism a Prerequisite for Philosophy as Conceptual Engineering?Pavol Labuda - 2021 - Filozofia 76 (1):3-17.
    The aim of the paper is to examine whether conceptual relativism is a prerequi-site for conceptual engineering (and if so, then to what extent). In the first part of the paper, I explore and classify varieties of relativism to prepare a distinctive definition of conceptual relativism. In the second part I analyse conceptual relativism and I consequently propose two different readings of conceptual scheme: (i) conceptual scheme as a monolithic, timeless, and determinate systems of meanings, and (ii) conceptual scheme as (...)
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  • Conciliatory metaontology, permissive ontology, and nature’s joints.David Mokriski - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2335-2351.
    According to the conciliatory view in metaontology, there are multiple possible languages corresponding to the popular positions in ontology. In each of these languages, the term ‘exists’ expresses a distinct “existence-like” property, and consequently the claims associated with each of the rival ontological positions come out true in some such language. Species of the conciliatory view can be distinguished based on claims about how the various existence-like properties are related vis-à-vis metaphysical naturalness. On some versions, all of the existence-like properties (...)
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  • Knowledgeable assertion in the image of knowledgeable belief.Nick Hughes - 2019 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (2):168-184.
    ABSTRACTI describe two ways of thinking about what constitutes a knowledgeable assertion – the ‘orthodox view’ and the ‘isomorphic view’. I argue that we should discard the orthodox view and replace it with the isomorphic view. The latter is more natural and has greater theoretical utility than the former.
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  • The nature of intuitions and their role in material object metaphysics.Andrew Higgins - 2014 - Dissertation, University of Illinois
    I argue for three central theses: ‘intuition’ is ambiguous, in material object metaphysics ‘intuition’ refers to pre-theoretical beliefs, and these pre-theoretical beliefs are generated by an innate physical reasoning system. I begin by outlining the relevant background discussions on the nature of intuitions and their role in philosophy to motivate the need for a more careful investigation of the meaning of ‘intuition’ and the role of intuitions in specific sub-disciplines of philosophy. In chapters one and two I argue that ‘intuition’ (...)
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  • Bad company and neo-Fregean philosophy.Matti Eklund - 2009 - Synthese 170 (3):393-414.
    A central element in neo-Fregean philosophy of mathematics is the focus on abstraction principles, and the use of abstraction principles to ground various areas of mathematics. But as is well known, not all abstraction principles are in good standing. Various proposals for singling out the acceptable abstraction principles have been presented. Here I investigate what philosophical underpinnings can be provided for these proposals; specifically, underpinnings that fit the neo-Fregean's general outlook. Among the philosophical ideas I consider are: general views on (...)
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  • New Wave Pluralism.David Ludwig - 2013 - Dialectica 67 (4):545-560.
    The aim of this paper is to develop a pluralist interpretation of the phenomenal concept strategy (PCS). My starting point is Horgan and Tienson's deconstructive argument according to which proponents of PCS face the following dilemma: either phenomenal concepts or physical concepts allow us to conceive phenomenal states as they are in themselves. If phenomenal concepts allow us to conceive phenomenal states as they are in themselves, then phenomenal states are non-physical states and physicalism is wrong. If physical concepts allow (...)
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  • Ordinary objects.Daniel Z. Korman - 2011 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    An encyclopedia entry which covers various revisionary conceptions of which macroscopic objects there are, and the puzzles and arguments that motivate these conceptions: sorites arguments, the argument from vagueness, the puzzles of material constitution, arguments against indeterminate identity, arguments from arbitrariness, debunking arguments, the overdetermination argument, and the problem of the many.
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  • Introduction to the special issue: Skepticism, relativism, pluralism.Veli Mitova, Robert McIntyre & Sherif Salem - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy.
    The precise and proper territorial boundaries of skepticism, relativism, and pluralism have been perennial topics of debate in philosophy. Very few philosophers endorse these positions in an unqual...
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  • Neo-Carnapian Metaphysics.Jack Ritchie - 2021 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 29 (3):392-407.
    Any movement worth its salt has a creation myth. Analytic metaphysics is no exception. According to legend, it was born from the clash of two titans. On the one side, was the anti-metaphysical Logi...
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  • Quantifier Variance and Realism: Essays in Metaontology. [REVIEW]David Liebesman - 2013 - Philosophical Review 122 (2):310-314.
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  • Beyond Physicalism and Dualism? Putnam’s Pragmatic Pluralism and the Philosophy of Mind.David Ludwig - 2011 - European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 3 (1):245-257.
    Although Hilary Putnam has played a significant role in shaping contemporary philosophy of mind, he has more recently criticised its metaphysical foundations as fun-damentally flawed. According to Putnam, the standard positions in the philosophy of mind rest on dubious ontological assumptions which are challenged by his “pragmatic pluralism” and the idea that we can always describe reality in different but equally fun-damental ways. Putnam considers this pluralism about conceptual resources as an alterna-tive to both physicalism and dualism. Contrary to physicalism, (...)
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  • Conceptual Schemes Revisited: Davidsonian Metaphysical Pluralism. [REVIEW]Timothy J. Nulty - 2009 - Metaphysica 10 (1):123-134.
    Davidson’s 1974 argument denying the possibility of incommensurable conceptual schemes is widely interpreted as entailing a denial of metaphysical pluralism. Speakers may group objects differently or have different beliefs about the world, but there is just one world. I argue there is tension arising from three aspects of Davidson’s philosophy: the 1974 argument against conceptual schemes; Davidson’s more recent emphasis on primitive triangulation as a necessary condition for thought and language; and Davidson’s semantic approach to metaphysics, what he calls ‘the (...)
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  • Against Vague and Unnatural Existence: Reply to Liebesman and Eklund.Theodore Sider - 2009 - Noûs 43 (3):557 - 567.
    In "Sider on Existence" (Noužs, 2007), David Liebesman and Matti Eklund argue that my "indeterminacy argument", according to which quantifiers are never vague, clashes with my "naturalness argument", according to which quantifiers "carve at the joints". There is, I argue, no outright inconsistency. But Liebesman and Eklund have shown that my arguments are not as independent as it may have appeared. The best defense of the indeterminacy argument is via the naturalness argument.
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  • Beyond Physicalism and Dualism?David Ludwig - 2011 - European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 3 (2).
    Although Hilary Putnam has played a significant role in shaping contemporary philosophy of mind, he has more recently criticised its metaphysical foundations as fundamentally flawed. According to Putnam, the standard positions in the philosophy of mind rest on dubious ontological assumptions which are challenged by his “pragmatic pluralism” and the idea that we can always describe reality in different but equally fundamental ways. Putnam considers this pluralism about conceptual resources as an alternative to both physicalism and dualism. Contrary to physicalism, (...)
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  • Names exist when carving begins (shi zhi you ming 始制有名): A theory of names in Daodejing(道德經).Hao Hong - 2024 - Asian Philosophy 34 (2):136-152.
    Naming or names (ming 名) is one of the key concepts in Daodejing (道德經). According to a popular understanding, names in Daodejing correspond to features (xing 形) of things; ordinary things have names, but Dao is featureless and nameless. What is missing, however, is atheory of the relationship between names and features explaining why ordinary things have names but Dao does not. In this paper, I develop a theory of names in Daodejing that explains how names relate to things and (...)
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  • Putnam’s Internal Realism: A Radical Restatement.Lieven Decock & Igor Douven - 2012 - Topoi 31 (1):111-120.
    Putnam’s internal realism is aimed at reconciling realist and antirealist intuitions about truth and the nature of reality. A common complaint about internal realism is that it has never been stated with due precision. This paper attempts to render the position precise by drawing on the literature on conceptual spaces as well as on earlier work of the authors on the notion of identity.
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  • Ontological Commitment and Quantifiers.T. Parent - 2020 - In Ricki Bliss & James Miller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics. New York, NY: Routledge.
    This is a slightly opinionated review of three main factions in metaontology: Quineans, Carnapians, and Meinongians. Emphasis is given to the last camp, as the metaontological aspect of Meinongianism has been underappreciated. The final section then offers some general remarks about the legitimacy of ontology, touching on ideas I have developed in other publications.
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  • On the substantive nature of disagreements in ontology.Kathrin Koslicki - 2005 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (1):85–151.
    This paper concerns a fundamental dispute in ontology between the “Foundational Ontologist”, who believes that there is only one correct way of characterizing what there is, and the ontological “Skeptic”, who believes that there are viable alternative characterizations of what there is. I examine in detail an intriguing recent proposal in Dorr (2005), which promises to yield (i) a way of interpreting the Skeptic by means of a counterfactual semantics; and (ii) a way of converting the Skeptic to a position (...)
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  • The Existential Quantifier, Composition and Contingency.Kristie Miller - 2010 - Erkenntnis 73 (2):211 - 235.
    There is a good deal of disagreement about composition. There is firstorder disagreement: there are radically different answers to the special composition question—the question of under what circumstances the xs compose a y. There is second-order disagreement: there are different answers to the question of whether first-order disagreement is real or merely semantic. Virtually all disputants with respect to both the first-and second-order issues agree that the answer or answers to the special composition question will take the form of a (...)
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  • Material constitution.Ryan Wasserman - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Ontological commitment and reconstructivism.Massimiliano Carrara & Achille C. Varzi - 2001 - Erkenntnis 55 (1):33-50.
    Some forms of analytic reconstructivism take natural language (and common sense at large) to be ontologically opaque: ordinary sentences must be suitably rewritten or paraphrased before questions of ontological commitment may be raised. Other forms of reconstructivism take the commitment of ordinary language at face value, but regard it as metaphysically misleading: common-sense objects exist, but they are not what we normally think they are. This paper is an attempt to clarify and critically assess some common limits of these two (...)
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  • Sider's Ontologese Introduction Instructions.Wesley Wrigley - 2018 - Theoria 84 (4):295-308.
    In response to Hirsch's deflationary arguments, Sider attempts to introduce a special Ontologese quantifier to preserve the substantivity of fundamental debates in metaphysics. He claims that this strategy can be effected by two distinct means, one of which is a list of instructions for metaphysicians, which he argues suffice to give the new quantifier a meaning that carves nature at the joints. I argue that these instructions will not allow someone to start speaking Ontologese if their prior language is sufficiently (...)
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  • A Davidsonian argument against incommensurability.Igor Douven & Henk W. De Regt - 2002 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 16 (2):157 – 169.
    The writings of Kuhn and Feyerabend on incommensurability challenged the idea that science progresses towards the truth. Davidson famously criticized the notion of incommensurability, arguing that it is incoherent. Davidson's argument was in turn criticized by Kuhn and others. This article argues that, although at least some of the objections raised against Davidson's argument are formally correct, they do it very little harm. What remains of the argument once the objections have been taken account of is still quite damaging to (...)
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  • Putnam, Context, and Ontology.Steven Gross - 2004 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (4):507 - 553.
    When a debate seems intractable, with little agreement as to how one might proceed towards a resolution, it is understandable that philosophers should consider whether something might be amiss with the debate itself. Famously in the last century, philosophers of various stripes explored in various ways the possibility that at least certain philosophical debates are in some manner deficient in sense. Such moves are no longer so much in vogue. For one thing, the particular ways they have been made have (...)
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  • On the Interplay between Logic and Metaphysics.Achille C. Varzi - 2009 - Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations 8:13-36.
    On the one hand, logic has (or ought to have) nothing to do with metaphysics; it ought to have nothing to do with questions concerning what there is, or whether there is anything at all. On the other hand, metaphysics can hardly get off the ground without the help of logical analysis; to be is to be a truth-maker, and the search for truth-makers requires that we lay open the logical structure of our language. So something’s gotta give: either logical (...)
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  • (1 other version)Anti‐Metaphysicalism, Necessity, and Temporal Ontology.Mark Balaguer - 2016 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 89 (1):145-167.
    This paper argues for a certain kind of anti-metaphysicalism about the temporal ontology debate, i.e., the debate between presentists and eternalists over the existence of past and future objects. Three different kinds of anti-metaphysicalism are defined—namely, non-factualism, physical-empiricism, and trivialism. The paper argues for the disjunction of these three views. It is then argued that trivialism is false, so that either non-factualism or physical-empiricism is true. Finally, the paper ends with a discussion of whether we should endorse non-factualism or physical-empiricism. (...)
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