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  1. Attitudes, Conditional and General.Daniel Drucker - forthcoming - Linguistics and Philosophy.
    I consider difficult data involving the interaction of attitudes and conditionals, specifically non-doxastic attitude expressions like 'regret'. I first show that felicitous attitude conditionals in "ignorance contexts", where the relevant person doesn't know the antecedent is true, give rise to a number of difficult problems given widely held assumptions in semantics. I then argue that, even so, we should expect these conditionals to be true and reasonable to utter in ignorance contexts, given certain other kinds of attitude construction that tend (...)
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  • Fregeanism, sententialism, and scope.Harvey Lederman - 2022 - Linguistics and Philosophy 45 (6):1235-1275.
    Among philosophers, Fregeanism and sententialism are widely considered two of the leading theories of the semantics of attitude reports. Among linguists, these approaches have received little recent sustained discussion. This paper aims to bridge this divide. I present a new formal implementation of Fregeanism and sententialism, with the goal of showing that these theories can be developed in sufficient detail and concreteness to be serious competitors to the theories which are more popular among semanticists. I develop a modern treatment of (...)
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  • Cognitive Significance.Aidan Gray - 2021 - In Heimir Geirsson & Stephen Biggs (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Reference. New York: Routledge.
    Frege's Puzzle is a founding problem in analytic philosophy. It lies at the intersection of central topics in the philosophy of language and mind: the theory of reference, the nature of propositional attitudes, the nature of semantic theorizing, the relation between semantics and pragmatics, etc. This chapter is an overview of the puzzle and of the space of contemporary approaches to it.
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  • Perspectivism.Jeremy Goodman & Harvey Lederman - 2021 - Noûs 55 (3):623-648.
    Consider the sentence “Lois knows that Superman flies, but she doesn’t know that Clark flies”. In this paper we defend a Millian contextualist semantics for propositional attitude ascriptions, according to which ordinary uses of this sentence are true but involve a mid-sentence shift in context. Absent any constraints on the relevant parameters of context sensitivity, such a semantics would be untenable: it would undermine the good standing of systematic theorizing about the propositional attitudes, trivializing many of the central questions of (...)
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  • Classical Opacity.Michael Caie, Jeremy Goodman & Harvey Lederman - 2019 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 101 (3):524-566.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, EarlyView.
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  • Cognition and Content.João Branquinho - 2005 - Lisboa, Portugal: Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa.
    Os tópicos e problemas filosóficos discutidos no volume são de natureza bastante variada: a natureza da complexidade computacional no processamento de uma língua natural; a relação entre o significado linguístico e o sentido Fregeano; as conexões entre a a agência e o poder; o conteúdo semântico da ficção; a explicação dos impasses éticos; a natureza dos argumentos cépticos; as conexões entre as dissociações cognitivas e o carácter modular da mente; a relação entre a referência e o significado. Estes tópicos deixam-se (...)
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  • Sometimes a Great Notion: A Critical Notice of Mark Crimmins’Talk About Beliefs.Kent Bach - 1993 - Mind and Language 8 (3):431-441.
    Anyone weary of endless philosophical debate on belief reports will find welcome relief in this book. Talking not just about belief talk but about belief itself, it offers much that is new, interesting, and subtle. The central thesis, though interestingly and subtly developed, is not exactly new. It is a version of the “hidden indexical theory” (HIT) of..
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  • Mental Files.François Récanati - 2012 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    Over the past fifty years the philosophy of language and mind has been dominated by a nondescriptivist approach to content and reference. This book attempts to recast and systematize that approach by offering an indexical model in terms of mental files. According to Recanati, we refer through mental files, the function of which is to store information derived through certain types of contextual relation the subject bears to objects in his or her environment. The reference of a file is determined (...)
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  • Belief Reports and the Property Theory of Content.Neil Feit - 2013 - In Neil Feit & Alessandro Capone (eds.), Attitudes De Se: Linguistics, Epistemology, Metaphysics. CSLI Publications. pp. 105-31.
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  • (1 other version)What Does it Take to Refer?Kent Bach - 2005 - In Ernie Lepore & Barry C. Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. pp. 516--554.
    This article makes a number of points about reference, both speaker reference and linguistic reference. The bottom line is simple: reference ain't easy — at least not nearly as easy as commonly supposed. Much of what speakers do that passes for reference is really something else, and much of what passes for linguistic reference is really nothing more than speaker reference. Referring is one of the basic things we do with words, and it would be a good idea to understand (...)
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  • Transparency and the Context-Sensitivity of Attitude Reports.Cian Dorr - 2014 - In Manuel García-Carpintero & Genoveva Martí (eds.), Empty Representations: Reference and Non-Existence. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 25-66.
    This paper defends the claim that although ‘Superman is Clark Kent and some people who believe that Superman flies do not believe that Clark Kent flies’ is a logically inconsistent sentence, we can still utter this sentence, while speaking literally, without asserting anything false. The key idea is that the context-sensitivity of attitude reports can be - and often is - resolved in different ways within a single sentence.
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  • Quasi-Singular Propositions: The Semantics of Belief Reports.François Récanati & Mark Crimmins - 1995 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 69 (1):175 - 209.
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  • A unified theory of truth and reference.Barry Smith & Berit Brogaard - 2000 - Logique Et Analyse 43 (169-170):49–93.
    The truthmaker theory rests on the thesis that the link between a true judgment and that in the world to which it corresponds is not a one-to-one but rather a one-to-many relation. An analogous thesis in relation to the link between a singular term and that in the world to which it refers is already widely accepted. This is the thesis to the effect that singular reference is marked by vagueness of a sort that is best understood in supervaluationist terms. (...)
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  • Illogical Belief.Nathan Salmon - 1989 - Philosophical Perspectives 3:243-285.
    A sequel to the author’s book /Frege’s Puzzle/ (1986).
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  • Attitude Reports: Do You Mind the Gap?Berit Brogaard - 2008 - Philosophy Compass 3 (1):93-118.
    Attitude reports are reports about people’s states of mind. They are reports about what people think, believe, know, know a priori, imagine, hate, wish, fear, and the like. So, for example, I might report that s knows p, or that she imagines p, or that she hates p, where p specifies the content to which s is purportedly related. One lively current debate centers around the question of what sort of specification is involved when such attitude reports are successful. Some (...)
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  • What's in a name.Kent Bach - 1981 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 59 (4):371 – 386.
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  • Singular thought and the cartesian theory of mind.Kirk A. Ludwig - 1996 - Noûs 30 (4):434-460.
    (1) Content properties are nonrelational, that is, having a content property does not entail the existence of any contingent object not identical with the thinker or a part of the thinker.2 (2) We have noninferential knowledge of our conscious thoughts, that is, for any of our..
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  • The semantics of belief ascriptions.Michael McKinsey - 1999 - Noûs 33 (4):519-557.
    nated discussion of the semantics of such verbs. I will call this view.
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  • Do belief reports report beliefs?Kent Bach - 1997 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 78 (3):215-241.
    The traditional puzzles about belief reports puzzles rest on a certain seemingly innocuous assumption, that 'that'-clauses specify belief contents. The main theories of belief reports also rest on this "Specification Assumption", that for a belief report of the form 'A believes that p' to be true,' the proposition that p must be among the things A believes. I use Kripke's Paderewski case to call the Specification Assumption into question. Giving up that assumption offers prospects for an intuitively more plausible approach (...)
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  • Conciliatory strategies in philosophy.Axel Arturo Barceló Aspeitia - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 17 (1):e12809.
    In philosophy, as in any other theoretical endeavor, it is not rare to find conflicting but equally well grounded positions. Besides defending one of the positions and criticizing the other, philosophers can opt for pursuing other, more sophisticated, approaches aimed at incorporating the insights, intuitions, and arguments from both sides of the debate into a unified theory: Dialetheism, Analetheism, Gradualism, Pluralism and Relativism. The purpose of this article is to present each strategy's basic argumentative structure, relative strengths, and challenges, trying (...)
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  • Can Truth‐Conditional Theorists of Content Do Without ‘That’‐Clause Ascriptions?Lionel Shapiro - 2019 - Analytic Philosophy 61 (1):1-27.
    Hartry Field has proposed a fundamental division of theories of linguistic and mental content into those that do, and those that don’t, give a central role to ‘that’-clause ascriptions. Here I investigate the commitments of theories that (in accord with Field’s position) deny ‘that’-clause ascriptions a central role, but (in contrast to Field’s position) give truth conditions a central role. Such non-oblique truth-conditionalism promises significant advantages. However, the stance is costlier than it may appear. Non-oblique truth-conditionalists, I argue, must renounce (...)
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  • The Speaker Authority Problem for Context-Sensitivity.Karen S. Lewis - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (6):1527-1555.
    Context-sensitivity raises a metasemantic question: what determines the value of a context-sensitive expression in context? Taking gradable adjectives as a case study, this paper argues against various forms of intentionalist metasemantics, i.e. that speaker intentions determine values for context-sensitive expressions in context, including the coordination account recently defended by King :219–237, 2014a; in: Burgess, Sherman Metasemantics: New essays on the foundations of meaning, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 97–118, 2014b). The paper argues that all intentionalist accounts face the speaker authority (...)
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  • Representation without Thought: Confusion, Reference, and Communication.Elmar Unnsteinsson - 2015 - Dissertation, Cuny Graduate Center
    I develop and argue for a novel theory of the mental state of identity confusion. I also argue that this mental state can corrupt the proper function of singular terms in linguistic communication. Finally, I propose a theory according to which identity confusion should be treated as a the source of a new sort of linguistic performance error, similar to malapropism, slips of the tongue, and so-called intentional obfuscation (inducing false belief by manipulating language in specific ways). -/- Going into (...)
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  • Belief as Question‐Sensitive.Seth Yalcin - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 97 (1):23-47.
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  • Policy Externalism.Daniel Drucker - 2017 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (2):261-285.
    I develop and argue for a kind of externalism about certain kinds of non-doxastic attitudes that I call policy externalism. Policy externalism about a given type of attitude is the view that all the reasonable policies for having attitudes of that type will not involve the agent's beliefs that some relevant conditions obtain. My defense primarily involves attitudes like hatred, regret, and admiration, and has two parts: a direct deductive argument and an indirect linguistic argument, an inference to the best (...)
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  • Empty Singular Terms in the Mental-File Framework.François Recanati - 2014 - In Manuel García-Carpintero & Genoveva Martí (eds.), Empty Representations: Reference and Non-Existence. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 162-185.
    Mental files, in Recanati's framework, function as 'singular terms in the language of thought' ; they serve to think about objects in the world (and to store information about them). But they have a derived, metarepresentational function : they serve to represent how other subjects think about objects in the world. To account for the metarepresentational use of files, Recanati introduces the notion of an 'indexed file', i.e. a vicarious file that stands, in the subject's mind, for another subject's file (...)
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  • (1 other version)Context Dependence.Kent Bach - 2012 - In Manuel García-Carpintero & Max Kölbel (eds.), The Continuum companion to the philosophy of language. New York: Continuum International.
    All sorts of things are context-dependent in one way or another. What it is appropriate to wear, to give, or to reveal depends on the context. Whether or not it is all right to lie, harm, or even kill depends on the context. If you google the phrase ‘depends on the context’, you’ll get several hundred million results. This chapter aims to narrow that down. In this context the topic is context dependence in language and its use. It is commonly (...)
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  • Is there a fact of the matter between direct reference theory and (neo-)Fregeanism?Mark Balaguer - 2011 - Philosophical Studies 154 (1):53-78.
    It is argued here that there is no fact of the matter between direct reference theory and neo-Fregeanism. To get a more precise idea of the central thesis of this paper, consider the following two claims: (i) While direct reference theory and neo-Fregeanism can be developed in numerous ways, they can be developed in essentially parallel ways; that is, for any (plausible) way of developing direct reference theory, there is an essentially parallel way of developing neo-Fregeanism, and vice versa. And (...)
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  • Knowledge-the and propositional attitude ascriptions.Berit Brogaard - 2008 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 77 (1):147-190.
    Determiner phrases embedded under a propositional attitude verb have traditionally been taken to denote answers to implicit questions. For example, 'the capital of Vermont' as it occurs in 'John knows the capital of Vermont' has been thought to denote the proposition which answers the implicit question 'what is the capital of Vermont?' Thus, where 'know' is treated as a propositional attitude verb rather than an acquaintance verb, 'John knows the capital of Vermont' is true iff John knows that Montpelier is (...)
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  • Rigidity and direct reference.François Recanati - 1988 - Philosophical Studies 53 (1):103 - 117.
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  • Reference, Context, and Propositions.Kai-Yee Wong - 1990 - Dissertation, Australian National University
    The main chapters of this thesis develop and defend a version of two-dimensional semantics that provides an account of Kripkean a posteriori necessity.
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  • Getting a Thing into a Thought.Kent Bach - 2010 - In Robin Jeshion (ed.), New Essays on Singular Thought. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press. pp. 39.
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  • Complex demonstratives, singular thought, and belief attributions.José Manuel Viejo - 2022 - Synthese 200 (1):1-27.
    Jeffrey King has famously argued that there are several prima facie problems with the direct reference theory of the semantics of complex demonstratives, three of which apparently resist solution. King concludes by observing that, if these outstanding problems cannot be solved, then the prospects for a direct reference semantics for complex demonstratives will be poor. I shall focus on just one of these outstanding problems—the objection from belief attributions—and suggest that it, at least, can be answered.
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  • (1 other version)Replies.François Recanati - 2015 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (4):408-437.
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  • (1 other version)Pragmatic Attitudes and Semantic Competence.Maite Ezcurdia - 2004 - Critica 36 (108):55-82.
    In this paper I argue against the account Soames offers in Beyond Rigidity of the semantics and pragmatics of propositional attitude reports. I defend a particular constraint for identifying semantic content of phrases based on conditions for semantic competence, and argue that failure of substitutivity is an essential component of our competence conditions with propositional attitude predicates. Given that Soames's account makes no room for this, I conclude that he does not offer an adequate explanation of propositional attitude reports. /// (...)
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  • Quantifying In from a Fregean Perspective.Seth Yalcin - 2015 - Philosophical Review 124 (2):207-253.
    As Quine observed, the following sentence has a reading which, if true, would be of special interest to the authorities: Ralph believes that someone is a spy. This is the reading where the quantifier is naturally understood as taking wide scope relative to the attitude verb and as binding a variable within the scope of the attitude verb. This essay is interested in addressing the question what the semantic analysis of this kind of reading should look like from a Fregean (...)
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  • (1 other version)Replies to the papers in the issue "Recanati on Mental Files".François Recanati - 2015 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 58 (4):408-437.
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  • Against Direct Reference.Michael Devitt - 1989 - Midwest Studies in Philosophy 14 (1):206-240.
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  • Reflections on reference and reflexivity.Kent Bach - 2005 - In Michael O'Rourke & Corey Washington (eds.), Situating Semantics: Essays on the Philosophy of John Perry. MIT Press. pp. 395--424.
    In Reference and Reflexivity, John Perry tries to reconcile referentialism with a Fregean concern for cognitive significance. His trick is to supplement referential content with what he calls ‘‘reflexive’’ content. Actually, there are several levels of reflexive content, all to be distinguished from the ‘‘official,’’ referential content of an utterance. Perry is convinced by two arguments for referentialism, the ‘‘counterfactual truth-conditions’’ and the ‘‘same-saying’’ arguments, but he also acknowledges the force of two Fregean arguments against it, arguments that pose the (...)
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  • Thought by description.Michael Mckinsey - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78 (1):83-102.
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  • On referring and not referring.Kent Bach - unknown
    Even though it’s based on a bad argument, there’s something to Strawson’s dictum. He might have likened ‘referring expression’ to phrases like ‘eating utensil’ and ‘dining room’: just as utensils don’t eat and dining rooms don’t dine, so, he might have argued, expressions don’t refer. Actually, that wasn’t his argument, though it does make you wonder. Rather, Strawson exploited the fact that almost any referring expression, whether an indexical, demonstrative, proper name, or definite description, can be used to refer to (...)
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  • Referencia y realismo científico.Jesús Baceta - 2019 - Apuntes Filosóficos 28 (55):21-40.
    The elements of the referential proposal of Kripke and Putnam are presented. The consequences of such semantics in regard to the theory of truth and epistemology are examined. Some critical arguments are commented and, finally, it concludes with a general evaluation of the proposal of Kripke and Putnam.
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  • De Re And De Dicto: Against The Conventional Wisdom.Ken Taylor - 2002 - Noûs 36 (s16):225-265.
    Conventional wisdom has it that there is a class of attitude ascriptions such that in making an ascription of that sort, the ascriber undertakes a commitment to specify the contents of the ascribee’s head in what might be called a notionally sensitive, ascribee-centered way. In making such an ascription, the ascriber is supposed to undertake a commitment to specify the modes of presentation, concepts or notions under which the ascribee cognizes the objects (and properties) that her beliefs are about. Consequently, (...)
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  • Opacity and the attitudes.Francois Recanati - 2000 - In Alex Orenstein & Petr Kotatko (eds.), Knowledge, Language and Logic: Questions for Quine. Dordrecht, Netherland: Kluwer Academic Print on Demand. pp. 367--406.
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  • How I Really Say What You Think.José Manuel Viejo - 2021 - Axiomathes 31 (3):251-277.
    The apparently obviously true doctrine of opacity has been thought to be inconsistent with two others, to which many philosophers of language are also attracted: the referentialist account of the semantics of proper names and indexicals, on the one hand, and the principle of semantic innocence, on the other. I discuss here one of the most popular strategies for resolving the apparent inconsistency, namely Mark Richard’s theory of belief ascriptions, and raise three problems for it. Finally, I propose an alternative (...)
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  • Indexicals and essential demonstrations.Carlo Penco - 2021 - Semiotica 2021 (240):261-284.
    In this paper, I discuss some of Maximilian de Gaynesford’s arguments regarding indexicals. Although I agree with his treatment of the first singular personal pronoun as a prototype of demonstrative expressions, I challenge his refusal to treat indexicals as complex demonstratives. To offer an alternative to this refusal I try to develop a common ground from different theories that consider indexicals as linguistic constructions that embed a nonlinguistic element, following an original idea in Frege’s latest writings. These views form the (...)
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  • Mental Files and Naïve Semantic Accounts of Substitution Failure.Mayank Bora - 2019 - Acta Analytica 34 (3):301-325.
    Ever since Kripke’s influential arguments against descriptivism philosophers have attempted to provide solutions to Frege’s puzzle of substitution failure that adhere to Naïve Semantics—the view that names contribute their referents and referents alone to propositions expressed by sentences containing them. Recently, philosophers have also appealed to psychological objects called mental files, which are used to represent and store information on individuals, in solving the puzzle. Combining the two promises to revive a simple commonsensical theory while, at least prima facie, doing (...)
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  • Multiplying senses.Jonathan Sutton - manuscript
    My aim is to motivate and develop a view of what senses are. Senses, as I conceive of them, avoid a number of the problems that plague a broadly Fregean approach to the semantics of belief ascriptions, as I hope to show. The chief innovation of my view that enables these solutions is that beliefs are taken to have multiple, truth-conditionally equivalent contents. In traditional Fregean terminology, a belief does not involve a relation to a single thought, but to many (...)
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  • Reply to Fernandez Moreno.François Recanati - unknown
    Response to Fernandez-Moreno's contribution in the proceedings of the Granada workshop.
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  • The contingenta priori: An example free of existential worry.David Cowles - 1994 - Philosophical Studies 74 (2):137 - 141.
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