Beliefs are concrete particulars containing ideas of properties and notions of things, which also are concrete. The claim made in a belief report is that the agent has a belief (i) whose content is a specific singular proposition, and (ii) which involves certain of the agent's notions and ideas in a certain way. No words in the report stand for the notions and ideas, so they are unarticulated constituents of the report's content (like the relevant place in "it's raining"). The (...) belief puzzles (Hesperus, Cicero, Pierre) involve reports about two different notions. So the analysis gets the puzzling truth values right. (shrink)

This book deals with foundational issues in the theory of the nature of action, the intentionality of action, the compatibility of freedom of action with determinism, and the explantion of action. Ginet's is a volitional view: that every action has as its core a 'simple' mental action. He develops a sophisticated account of the individuation of actions and also propounds a challenging version of the view that freedom of action is incompatible with determinism.

This book is a defense of modal realism; the thesis that our world is but one of a plurality of worlds, and that the individuals that inhabit our world are only a few out of all the inhabitants of all the worlds. Lewis argues that the philosophical utility of modal realism is a good reason for believing that it is true.

The present volume collects some of Barwise's papers written since then, those directly concerned with relations among logic, situation theory, and situation semantics. Several papers appear here for the first time.

This is the 1991 (2nd) edition of the 1986 book (MIT Press), considered to be the classic defense of Millianism. The nature of the information content of declarative sentences is a central topic in the philosophy of language. The natural view that a sentence like "John loves Mary" contains information in which two individuals occur as constituents is termed the naive theory, and is one that has been abandoned by most contemporary scholars. This theory was refuted originally by philosopher Gottlob (...) Frege. His argument that the naive theory did not work is termed Frege's puzzle, and his rival account of information content is termed the orthodox theory. In this detailed study, Nathan Salmon defends a version of the naive theory and presents a proposal for its extension that provides a better picture of information content than the orthodox theory gives. He argues that a great deal of what has generally been taken for granted in the philosophy of language over the past few decades is either mistaken or unsupported, and consequently, much current research is focused on the wrong set of questions. Salmon dissolves Frege's puzzle as it is usually formulated and demonstrates how it can be reconstructed and strengthened to yield a more powerful objection to the naive theory. He then defends the naive theory against the new Frege puzzle by presenting an idea that yields both a surprisingly rich and powerful extension of the naive theory and a better picture of information content than that of the original orthodox theory. Nathan Salmon is Professor of Philosophy, University of California at Santa Barbara. (shrink)

There has been much discussion of whether there could be objects A and B that are “individuatively vague” in the following way: object A and object B neither determinately stand in the relation of identity to one another, nor do they determinately fail to stand in this relation. If there are objects of this type, then we would have a genuine case of metaphysical vagueness, or “vagueness-in-the-world.” The possibility of vague objects in this sense strikes many as incoherent. The possibility’s (...) very description not only seems to talk of two objects but, much worse, it seems to point to a feature that distinguishes them: unlike object A, object B is not determinately identical to object A. This suspicion of incoherence is voiced in the famous arguments given against the possibility by Gareth Evans and Nathan Salmon. But the status of those arguments and others is uncertain. Here I present a new argument against vague objects — or more precisely, against the possibility of individuatively vague objects that satisfy an important and common additional condition that I will call “Democracy.” Since my argument turns on a connection between what is indeterminate and what is possible, I call it “the modal argument.”. (shrink)

Vagueness provides the first comprehensive examination of a topic of increasing importance in metaphysics and the philosophy of logic and language. Timothy Williamson traces the history of this philosophical problem from discussions of the heap paradox in classical Greece to modern formal approaches such as fuzzy logic. He illustrates the problems with views which have taken the position that standard logic and formal semantics do not apply to vague language, and defends the controversial realistic view that vagueness is a kind (...) of ignorance--that there really is a grain of sand whose removal turns a heap into a non-heap, but we cannot know which one it is. (shrink)

Mathematicians tend to think of themselves as scientists investigating the features of real mathematical things, and the wildly successful application of mathematics in the physical sciences reinforces this picture of mathematics as an objective study. For philosophers, however, this realism about mathematics raises serious questions: What are mathematical things? Where are they? How do we know about them? Offering a scrupulously fair treatment of both mathematical and philosophical concerns, Penelope Maddy here delineates and defends a novel version of mathematical realism. (...) She answers the traditional questions and poses a challenging new one, refocusing philosophical attention on the pressing foundational issues of contemporary mathematics. (shrink)

I hear the patter of little feet around the house, I expect Bruce. What I expect is a cat, a particular cat. If I heard such a patter in another house, I might expect a cat but no particular cat. What I expect then seems to be a Meinongian incomplete cat. I expect winter, expect stormy weather, expect to shovel snow, expect fatigue---a season, a phenomenon, an activity, a state. I expect that someday mankind will inhabit at least five planets. (...) This time what I expect is a state of affairs. If we let surface grammar be our guide, the objects of expectation seem quite a miscellany. The same goes for belief, since expectation is one kind of belief. The same goes for desire: I could want Bruce, want a cat but no particular cat, want winter, want stormy weather, want to shovel snow, want fatigue, or want that someday mankind will inhabit at least five planets. The same goes for other attitudes to the extent that they consist partly of beliefs or desires or lacks thereof. But the seeming diversity of objects might be an illusion. Perhaps the objects of attitudes are uniform in category, and it is our ways of speaking elliptically about these uniform objects that are diverse. That indeed is our consensus. We mostly think that the attitudes uniformly have propositions as their objects. That is why we speak habitually of "propositional attitudes.". (shrink)

This paper provides a new approach to a family of outstanding logical and semantical puzzles, the most famous being Frege's puzzle. The three main reductionist theories of propositions (the possible-worlds theory, the propositional-function theory, the propositional-complex theory) are shown to be vulnerable to Benacerraf-style problems, difficulties involving modality, and other problems. The nonreductionist algebraic theory avoids these problems and allows us to identify the elusive nondescriptive, non-metalinguistic, necessary propositions responsible for the indicated family of puzzles. The algebraic approach is also (...) used to defend antiexistentialism against existentialist prejudices. The paper closes with a suggestion about how this theory of content might enable us to give purely semantic (as opposed to pragmatic) solutions to the puzzles based on a novel formulation of the principle of compositionality. (shrink)

Is the way we use propositions to individuate beliefs and other intentional states analogous to the way we use numbers to measure weights and other physical magnitudes? In an earlier paper [2], I argued that there is an important disanalogy. One and the same weight can be 'related to' different numbers under different units of measurement. Moreover, the choice of a unit of measurement is arbitrary,in the sense that which way we choose doesn't affect the weight attributed to the object. (...) But it makes little sense to say that one and the same belief can be related to different propositions: different proposition means different belief. So there is no analogous arbitrary choice. (shrink)

Various as these are, they have enough in common for them all to count as events, and in recent years philosophers have turned their attention to this..

The dissertation is a defense of realism about propositions . According to the propositionlist, there is a realm of entities that simultaneously serve as inter-subjectively shareable "objects" or "contents" of assertion and belief, as units of information more generally, as fundamental bearers of truth-values, and as entities capable of having certain modal, logical and epistemological properties. ;In chapter one, I flesh out a traditional concept of proposition, and I sketch a general argument in favor of propositionalism. ;In chapter two, I (...) argue that we cannot do away with propositions by employing other entities--e.g., sentences, utterances, facts--that we may have already admitted into our ontology. And I argue that we cannot explain away the evidence that supports propositionalism by appealing to some "unloaded" notion of existence. ;In chapter three, I go part way towards dispelling the worry that various types of conceptual messiness --indeterminacy, holism and vagueness--pose a problem for propositionalism. ;In chapter four, I take up my central concern: the problem of identity conditions. I argue that the correct theory of identity conditions for propositions may be underdetermined by relevant philosophical considerations. ;In chapter five, I argue that this "underdetermination hypothesis" does not undermine propositionalism, but that it does imply both that propositions are sui generis entities, and that they are "entities without identity". They are sui generis entities in the sense that they cannot be reduced to any entities not already known to be propositions. And propositions are entities without identity in the sense that certain identity statements linking terms for propositions have indeterminate truth-value. This is so because, as the underdetermination hypothesis shows, our concept of proposition is "individuatively vague": when employing the concept we variously slough between several distinct ways of individuating propositions. The indeterminacy of the identity statements is nicely explained by applying a supervaluation semantics over these different schemes of individuation. ;In chapter six, I briefly discuss five lingering questions about the detailed nature of propositions. (shrink)

This book makes a stimulating contribution to the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. It begins with a spirited defence of the view that propositions are structured and that propositional structure is 'psychologically real'. The author then develops a subtle view of propositions and attitude ascription. The view is worked out in detail with attention to such topics as the semantics of conversations, iterated attitude ascriptions, and the role of propositions as bearers of truth. Along the way important issues (...) in the philosophy of mind are addressed. Though intended primarily for professional philosophers and graduate students the book will also interest cognitive scientists and linguists. (shrink)

E. J. Lowe; Are the natural numbers individuals or sorts?, Analysis, Volume 53, Issue 3, 1 July 1993, Pages 142–146, https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/53.3.142.