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  1. Forms of Luminosity: Epistemic Modality and Hyperintensionality in Mathematics.David Elohim - 2017 - Dissertation, Arché, University of St Andrews
    This book concerns the foundations of epistemic modality and hyperintensionality and their applications to the philosophy of mathematics. I examine the nature of epistemic modality, when the modal operator is interpreted as concerning both apriority and conceivability, as well as states of knowledge and belief. The book demonstrates how epistemic modality and hyperintensionality relate to the computational theory of mind; metaphysical modality and hyperintensionality; the types of mathematical modality and hyperintensionality; to the epistemic status of large cardinal axioms, undecidable propositions, (...)
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  • Forms of Luminosity: Epistemic Modality and Hyperintensionality in Mathematics.David Elohim - 2017
    This book concerns the foundations of epistemic modality and hyperintensionality and their applications to the philosophy of mathematics. I examine the nature of epistemic modality, when the modal operator is interpreted as concerning both apriority and conceivability, as well as states of knowledge and belief. The book demonstrates how epistemic modality and hyperintensionality relate to the computational theory of mind; metaphysical modality and hyperintensionality; the types of mathematical modality and hyperintensionality; to the epistemic status of large cardinal axioms, undecidable propositions, (...)
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  • Abstracta and Possibilia: Hyperintensional Foundations of Mathematical Platonism.David Elohim - manuscript
    This paper aims to provide hyperintensional foundations for mathematical platonism. I examine Hale and Wright's (2009) objections to the merits and need, in the defense of mathematical platonism and its epistemology, of the thesis of Necessitism. In response to Hale and Wright's objections to the role of epistemic and metaphysical modalities in providing justification for both the truth of abstraction principles and the success of mathematical predicate reference, I examine the Necessitist commitments of the abundant conception of properties endorsed by (...)
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  • Collapse and the Varieties of Quantifier Variance.Matti Eklund - 2021 - In James Miller (ed.), The Language of Ontology.
    The aim of the paper is to bring clarity regarding the doctrine of quantifier variance (due to Eli Hirsch), and two prominent arguments against this doctrine, the collapse argument and the Eklund-Hawthorne argument. Different versions of the doctrine of quantifier variance are distinguished, and it is shown that the effectiveness of the arguments against it depends on what version of the doctrine is at issue. The metaontological significance of the different versions of the doctrine are also assessed. Roughly, quantifier variance (...)
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  • Quantifier Variance.Rohan Sud & David Manley - 2020 - In Ricki Bliss & James Miller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 100-17.
    We provide an overview of the meta-ontological position known as "Quantifier Variance".
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  • The Metametaphysics of Neo-Fregeanism.Matti Eklund - 2020 - In Ricki Bliss & James Miller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics. New York, NY: Routledge.
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  • Why are (some) Platonists so insouciant?William Lane Craig - 2011 - Philosophy 86 (2):213-229.
    Some platonists truly agonize over the ontological commitments which their platonism demands of them. Peter van Inwagen, for example, confesses candidly,I am happy to admit that I am uneasy about believing in the existence of ‘causally irrelevant’ objects. The fact that abstract objects, if they exist, can be neither causes or [sic] effects is one of the many features of abstract objects that make nominalism so attractive. I should very much like to be a nominalist, but I don't see how (...)
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  • Truthmaking, Second‐Order Quantification, and Ontological Commitment.Ross P. Cameron - 2019 - Analytic Philosophy 60 (4):336-360.
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  • Truthmakers and ontological commitment: or how to deal with complex objects and mathematical ontology without getting into trouble.Ross P. Cameron - 2008 - Philosophical Studies 140 (1):1 - 18.
    What are the ontological commitments of a sentence? In this paper I offer an answer from the perspective of the truthmaker theorist that contrasts with the familiar Quinean criterion. I detail some of the benefits of thinking of things this way: they include making the composition debate tractable without appealing to a neo-Carnapian metaontology, making sense of neo-Fregeanism, and dispensing with some otherwise recalcitrant necessary connections.
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  • Chains of Being: Infinite Regress, Circularity, and Metaphysical Explanation.Ross P. Cameron - 2022 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    'Chains of Being' argues that there can be infinite chains of dependence or grounding. Cameron also defends the view that there can be circular relations of ontological dependence or grounding, and uses these claims to explore issues in logic and ontology.
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  • Existence, Mathematical Nominalism, and Meta-Ontology: An Objection to Azzouni on Criteria for Existence.Farbod Akhlaghi-Ghaffarokh - 2018 - Philosophia Mathematica 26 (2):251-265.
    Jody Azzouni argues that whilst it is indeterminate what the criteria for existence are, there is a criterion that has been collectively adopted to use ‘exist’ that we can employ to argue for positions in ontology. I raise and defend a novel objection to Azzouni: his view has the counterintuitive consequence that the facts regarding what exists can and will change when users of the word ‘exist’ change what criteria they associate with its usage. Considering three responses, I argue Azzouni (...)
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  • Ontološki pluralizam i ontološka kategorija.Ataollah Hashemi & Davood Hosseini - 2023 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 19 (1):1-16.
    Ontološki pluralizam je gledište prema kojemu postoje različiti načini postojanja. Povijesno gledano, načini postojanja su usklađeni s ontološkim kategorijama. Ovaj rad istražuje zašto postoji takva veza i kako je treba shvatiti. Ontološki pluralizam pati od prigovora prema kojem se ontološki pluralizam urušava u ontološki monizam, tj. u gledište da postoji samo jedan način postojanja. Priznavanje ontoloških kategorija može spasiti ontološki pluralizam od ovog prigovora ako načini postojanja utemeljuju ontološke kategorije.
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  • Hale and Wright on the Metaontology of Neo-Fregeanism.Matti Eklund - 2016 - In Philip A. Ebert & Marcus Rossberg (eds.), Abstractionism: Essays in Philosophy of Mathematics. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press UK.
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  • Carnap's Metaontology.Matti Eklund - 2011 - Noûs 47 (2):229-249.
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  • God and Abstract Objects: The Coherence of Theism: Aseity.William Lane Craig - 2017 - Cham: Springer.
    This book is an exploration and defense of the coherence of classical theism’s doctrine of divine aseity in the face of the challenge posed by Platonism with respect to abstract objects. A synoptic work in analytic philosophy of religion, the book engages discussions in philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and metaontology. It addresses absolute creationism, non-Platonic realism, fictionalism, neutralism, and alternative logics and semantics, among other topics. The book offers a helpful taxonomy of the wide range of options (...)
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  • Quantifier Variance and Indefinite Extensibility.Jared Warren - 2017 - Philosophical Review 126 (1):81-122.
    This essay clarifies quantifier variance and uses it to provide a theory of indefinite extensibility that I call the variance theory of indefinite extensibility. The indefinite extensibility response to the set-theoretic paradoxes sees each argument for paradox as a demonstration that we have come to a different and more expansive understanding of ‘all sets’. But indefinite extensibility is philosophically puzzling: extant accounts are either metasemantically suspect in requiring mysterious mechanisms of domain expansion, or metaphysically suspect in requiring nonstandard assumptions about (...)
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  • Quantifier Variance, Semantic Collapse, and “Genuine” Quantifiers.Jared Warren - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 179 (3):745-757.
    Quantifier variance holds that different languages can have unrestricted quantifier expressions that differ in meaning, where an expression is a “quantifier” just in case it plays the right inferential role. Several critics argued that J.H. Harris’s “collapse” argument refutes variance by showing that identity of inferential role is incompatible with meaning variance. This standard, syntactic collapse argument has generated several responses. More recently, Cian Dorr proved semantic collapse theorems to generate a semantic collapse argument against variance. The argument is significantly (...)
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  • The easy approach to ontology.Amie L. Thomasson - 2009 - Axiomathes 19 (1):1-15.
    This paper defends the view that ontological questions (properly understood) are easy—too easy, in fact, to be subjects of substantive and distinctively philosophical debates. They are easy, roughly, in the sense that they may be resolved straightforwardly—generally by a combination of conceptual and empirical enquiries. After briefly outlining the view and some of its virtues, I turn to examine two central lines of objection. The first is that this ‘easy’ approach is itself committed to substantive ontological views, including an implausibly (...)
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  • The New Collapse Argument against Quantifier Variance.Theodore Sider - 2023 - The Monist 106 (3):342-361.
    Quantifier variantists accept multiple alternative ontological languages in which quantifiers obey the usual inference rules despite having different meanings. But collapse arguments seem to show that these quantifiers would be provably equivalent to one another. Cian Dorr has pushed this discussion forward by formulating the collapse argument in terms of an algebra of meanings that are common amongst the languages. I attempt to show that quantifier variantists can respond. But an important distinction between types of quantifier variance emerges, between those (...)
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  • Outscoping and Discourse Threat.Theodore Sider - 2014 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (4):413-426.
    Sometimes we give truth-conditions for sentences of a discourse in other terms. According to Agustín Rayo, when doing so it is sometimes legitimate to use the terms of that very discourse, so long as the terms do not occur in the truth-conditions themselves. I argue that giving truth-conditions in this "outscoping" way prevents one from answering "discourse threat" (for example, the threat of indeterminacy).
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  • Hirsch’s attack on ontologese.Theodore Sider - 2014 - Noûs 48 (3):565-572.
    Eli Hirsch has argued in many places that non-commonsensical ontological claims just couldn't be true, since there is strong metasemantic pressure to charitably interpret natural language---correct interpretations must, unless all else is highly unequal, count a sentence (especially a perceptual sentence) as true if ordinary speakers regard it as being obviously true. In previous work I replied that ontologists can stipulatively introduce a new language, "Ontologese", that is exempt from this pressure toward charity. Hirsch has recently objected to this proposal; (...)
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  • What is a second order theory committed to?Charles Sayward - 1983 - Erkenntnis 20 (1):79 - 91.
    The paper argues that no second order theory is ontologically commited to anything beyond what its individual variables range over.
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  • Quantification in the Ontology Room.Bradley Rettler - 2019 - Dialectica 73 (4):563-585.
    There is a growing movement towards construing some classic debates in ontology as meaningless, either because the answers seem obvious or the debates seem intractable. In this paper, I respond to this movement. The response has three components: First, the members of the two sides of the ontological debates that dismissivists have targeted are using different quantifiers. Second, the austere ontologist is using a more fundamental quantifier than her opponent. Third, the austere ontologist’s more fundamental quantifier is a restriction of (...)
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  • Semanticism and Ontological Commitment.Eli Pitcovski - 2024 - Erkenntnis 89 (1):27-43.
    It is widely assumed that if ontological disputes turn out to be verbal they ought to be dismissed. I dissociate the semantic question concerning the verbalness of ontological disputes from the pragmatic question on whether they ought to be dismissed. I argue that in the context of ontological disputes ontologists ought to be taken to communicate views with conflicting ontological commitments even if it turns out that on the correct view of semantics they fail to literally-express their disagreement. I argue, (...)
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  • Fundamental Quantification and the Language of the Ontology Room.Daniel Z. Korman - 2013 - Noûs 49 (2):298-321.
    Nihilism is the thesis that no composite objects exist. Some ontologists have advocated abandoning nihilism in favor of deep nihilism, the thesis that composites do not existO, where to existO is to be in the domain of the most fundamental quantifier. By shifting from an existential to an existentialO thesis, the deep nihilist seems to secure all the benefits of a composite-free ontology without running afoul of ordinary belief in the existence of composites. I argue that, while there are well-known (...)
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  • Quantifier Variance Without Meaning Variance.Davood Hosseini - 2020 - Axiomathes 30 (3):313-325.
    Quantifier variance entails that ‘there exists’ has a variety of meanings. Determining what makes all these meanings quantifier meanings is a problem associated with this view. A reasonable candidate suggested by Hirsch is the set of formal rules governing quantification. However, the collapse argument presents a notorious objection to the viability of the candidate: there cannot be more than one quantifier obeying the same rules up to logical equivalence. It is proposed that a quantifier variantist who intends to retain Hirsch’s (...)
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  • N eo-F regeanism and Q uantifier V ariance.Katherine Hawley - 2007 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 81 (1):233-249.
    In his paper in the same volume, Sider argues that, of maximalism and quantifier variance, the latter promises to let us make better sense of neo-Fregeanism. I argue that neo-Fregeans should, and seemingly do, reject quantifier variance. If they must choose between these two options, they should choose maximalism.
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  • Neo-Fregeanism and Quantifier Variance.Bob Hale - 2007 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 107 (1pt3):375-385.
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  • Arbitrariness and the long road to permissivism.Maegan Fairchild - 2022 - Noûs 56 (3):619-638.
    Radically permissive ontologies like mereological universalism and material plenitude are typically motivated by concerns about arbitrariness or anthropocentrism: it would be objectionably arbitrary, the thought goes, to countenance only those objects that we ordinarily take there to be. Despite the prevalence of this idea, it isn't at all clear what it is for a theory to be “objectionably arbitrary,” or what follows from a commitment to avoiding arbitrariness in metaphysics. This paper aims to clarify both questions, and examines whether arguments (...)
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  • The existence of personites.Matti Eklund - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (7):2051-2071.
    Mark Johnston and Eric Olson have both pressed what Johnston has dubbed the personite problem. Personites, if they exist, are person-like entities whose lives extend over a continuous proper part of a person’s life. They are so person-like that they seem to have moral status if persons do. But this threatens to wreak havoc with ordinary moral thinking. For example, simple decisions to suffer some short-term hardship for long-term benefits become problematic. And ordinary punishment is always also punishment of the (...)
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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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  • Platitudes in mathematics.Thomas Donaldson - 2015 - Synthese 192 (6):1799-1820.
    The term ‘continuous’ in real analysis wasn’t given an adequate formal definition until 1817. However, important theorems about continuity were proven long before that. How was this possible? In this paper, I introduce and refine a proposed answer to this question, derived from the work of Frank Jackson, David Lewis and other proponents of the ‘Canberra plan’. In brief, the proposal is that before 1817 the meaning of the term ‘continuous’ was determined by a number of ‘platitudes’ which had some (...)
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  • Carnap and ontological pluralism.Matti Eklund - 2009 - In David Chalmers, David Manley & Ryan Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Oxford University Press. pp. 130--56.
    My focus here will be Rudolf Carnap’s views on ontology, as these are presented in the seminal “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology” (1950). I will first describe how I think Carnap’s distinction between external and internal questions is best understood. Then I will turn to broader issues regarding Carnap’s views on ontology. With certain reservations, I will ascribe to Carnap an ontological pluralist position roughly similar to the positions of Eli Hirsch and the later Hilary Putnam. Then I turn to some (...)
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  • Introduction : a guided tour of metametaphysics.David Manley - 2009 - In David Chalmers, David Manley & Ryan Wasserman (eds.), Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology. Oxford University Press.
    Metaphysics is concerned with the foundations of reality. It asks questions about the nature of the world, such as: Aside from concrete objects, are there also abstract objects like numbers and properties? Does every event have a cause? What is the nature of possibility and necessity? When do several things make up a single bigger thing? Do the past and future exist? And so on. -/- Metametaphysics is concerned with the foundations of metaphysics. It asks: Do the questions of metaphysics (...)
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  • Methodology in the ontology of artworks: exploring hermeneutic fictionalism.Elisa Caldarola - 2020 - In Concha Martinez Vidal & José Luis Falguera Lopez (ed.), Abstract Objects: For and Against.
    There is growing debate about what is the correct methodology for research in the ontology of artworks. In the first part of this essay, I introduce my view: I argue that semantic descriptivism is a semantic approach that has an impact on meta-ontological views and can be linked with a hermeneutic fictionalist proposal on the meta-ontology of artworks such as works of music. In the second part, I offer a synthetic presentation of the four main positive meta-ontological views that have (...)
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  • Necessarily Maybe. Quantifiers, Modality and Vagueness.Alessandro Torza - 2015 - In Quantifiers, Quantifiers, and Quantifiers. Themes in Logic, Metaphysics and Language. (Synthese Library vol 373). Springer. pp. 367-387.
    Languages involving modalities and languages involving vagueness have each been thoroughly studied. On the other hand, virtually nothing has been said about the interaction of modality and vagueness. This paper aims to start filling that gap. Section 1 is a discussion of various possible sources of vague modality. Section 2 puts forward a model theory for a quantified language with operators for modality and vagueness. The model theory is followed by a discussion of the resulting logic. In Section 3, the (...)
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  • Life on the Range.G. Aldo Antonelli - 2015 - In A. Torza (ed.), Quantifiers, Quantifiers, and Quantifiers. Synthese LIbrary. pp. 171-189.
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  • Quantifier Variance without Collapse.Hans Halvorson - manuscript
    The thesis of quantifier variance is consistent and cannot be refuted via a collapse argument.
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  • Carnap's Legacy for the Contemporary Metaontological Debate.Matti Eklund - 2016 - In Stephan Blatti & Sandra Lapointe (eds.), Ontology After Carnap.
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  • The ontological implications of neo-Fregeanism.María de Ponte - 2016 - Daimon: Revista Internacional de Filosofía 69:159-174.
    Neo-Fregeanism is a combination of two ideas: logicism, according to which arithmetic can be derived from logic plus definitions, and Platonism, according to which there are mathematical objects. Neo-Fregeans propose a new interpretation of Frege’s principles of abstraction and of the role of reconceptualization and implicit definition for the introduction of numbers into our ontology. I analyze the ontological implications of neo-Fregeanism, not only for mathematics, but for abstract entities in general. After briefly introducing some of the main elements of (...)
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