Results for ' abstraction'

950 found
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  1. Abstract Objects and the Semantics of Natural Language.Friederike Moltmann - 2012 - Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    This book pursues the question of how and whether natural language allows for reference to abstract objects in a fully systematic way. By making full use of contemporary linguistic semantics, it presents a much greater range of linguistic generalizations than has previously been taken into consideration in philosophical discussions, and it argues for an ontological picture is very different from that generally taken for granted by philosophers and semanticists alike. Reference to abstract objects such as properties, numbers, propositions, and degrees (...)
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  2. Abstract Artifact Theory about Fictional Characters Defended — Why Sainsbury’s Category-Mistake Objection is Mistaken.Zsófia Zvolenszky - 2013 - Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics Vol. 5/2013.
    In this paper, I explore a line of argument against one form of realism about fictional characters : abstract artifact theory, the view according to which fictional characters like Harry Potter are part of our reality, but, they are abstract objects created by humans, akin to the institution of marriage and the game of soccer. I will defend artifactualism against an objection that Mark Sainsbury considers decisive against it: the category-mistake objection. The objection has it that artifactualism attributes to people (...)
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  3. Abstraction and the Environment.Louis Caruana - manuscript
    The way we understand the environment is analogous to the way we draw a map. Drawing insights from this analogy, this paper shows how the abstraction that occurs in ecological explanation can lead to damaging distortion. It is mistaken, therefore, to assume that by abstraction we can easily determine the correct variables for controlling a given ecosystem as if it were ideally closed. Recent work shows that the environment is a global composite with a very high degree of (...)
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  4. Abstract Creationism and Authorial Intention.David Friedell - 2016 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 (2):129-137.
    Abstract creationism about fictional characters is the view that fictional characters are abstract objects that authors create. I defend this view against criticisms from Stuart Brock that hitherto have not been adequately countered. The discussion sheds light on how the number of fictional characters depends on authorial intention. I conclude also that we should change how we think intentions are connected to artifacts more generally, both abstract and concrete.
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  5. Explanatory Abstractions.Lina Jansson & Juha Saatsi - 2019 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (3):817–844.
    A number of philosophers have recently suggested that some abstract, plausibly non-causal and/or mathematical, explanations explain in a way that is radically dif- ferent from the way causal explanation explain. Namely, while causal explanations explain by providing information about causal dependence, allegedly some abstract explanations explain in a way tied to the independence of the explanandum from the microdetails, or causal laws, for example. We oppose this recent trend to regard abstractions as explanatory in some sui generis way, and argue (...)
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  6. Abstract Objects and the Core-Periphery Distinction in the Ontological and the Conceptual Domain of Natural Language.Friederike Moltmann - 2020 - In José Luis Falguera & Concha Martínez-Vida (eds.), Abstract Objects: For and Against. Springer. pp. 255-276.
    This paper elaborates distinctions between a core and a periphery in the ontological and the conceptual domain associated with natural language. The ontological core-periphery distinction is essential for natural language ontology and is the basis for the central thesis of my 2013 book Abstract Objects and the Semantics of Natural Language, namely that natural language permits reference to abstract objects in its periphery, but not its core.
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  7. Abstraction and the Origin of General Ideas.Stephen Laurence & Eric Margolis - 2012 - Philosophers' Imprint 12:1-22.
    Philosophers have often claimed that general ideas or representations have their origin in abstraction, but it remains unclear exactly what abstraction as a psychological process consists in. We argue that the Lockean aspiration of using abstraction to explain the origins of all general representations cannot work and that at least some general representations have to be innate. We then offer an explicit framework for understanding abstraction, one that treats abstraction as a computational process that operates (...)
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  8. Explanatory Abstraction and the Goldilocks Problem: Interventionism Gets Things Just Right.Thomas Blanchard - 2020 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (2):633-663.
    Theories of explanation need to account for a puzzling feature of our explanatory practices: the fact that we prefer explanations that are relatively abstract but only moderately so. Contra Franklin-Hall ([2016]), I argue that the interventionist account of explanation provides a natural and elegant explanation of this fact. By striking the right balance between specificity and generality, moderately abstract explanations optimally subserve what interventionists regard as the goal of explanation, namely identifying possible interventions that would have changed the explanandum.
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  9. Categorical Abstractions of Molecular Structures of Biological Objects: A Case Study of Nucleic Acids.Jinyeong Gim - 2023 - Global Philosophy 33 (5):No.43.
    The type-level abstraction is a formal way to represent molecular structures in biological practice. Graphical representations of molecular structures of biological objects are also used to identify functional processes of things. This paper will reveal that category theory is a formal mathematical language not only to visualize molecular structures of biological objects as type-level abstraction formally but also to understand how to infer biological functions from the molecular structures of biological objects. Category theory is a toolkit to understand (...)
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  10. Assessing abstract thought and its relation to language with a new nonverbal paradigm: Evidence from aphasia.Peter Langland-Hassan, Frank R. Faries, Maxwell Gatyas, Aimee Dietz & Michael J. Richardson - 2021 - Cognition 211 (C):104622.
    In recent years, language has been shown to play a number of important cognitive roles over and above the communication of thoughts. One hypothesis gaining support is that language facilitates thought about abstract categories, such as democracy or prediction. To test this proposal, a novel set of semantic memory task trials, designed for assessing abstract thought non-linguistically, were normed for levels of abstractness. The trials were rated as more or less abstract to the degree that answering them required the participant (...)
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  11. Abstraction and grounding.Louis deRosset & Øystein Linnebo - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 109 (1):357-390.
    The idea that some objects are metaphysically “cheap” has wide appeal. An influential version of the idea builds on abstractionist views in the philosophy of mathematics, on which numbers and other mathematical objects are abstracted from other phenomena. For example, Hume's Principle states that two collections have the same number just in case they are equinumerous, in the sense that they can be correlated one‐to‐one:. The principal aim of this article is to use the notion of grounding to develop this (...)
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  12. The abstract space and the alienation of political public space in the Middle East.Farzad Zamani & Asma Mehan - 2019 - Archnet-IJAR: International Journal of Architectural Research 13 (3):483-497.
    Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explain how abstract space of the State – universally and specifically within the context of Middle Eastern cities – aims to homogenise the city and eliminate any anomaly that threatens its power structure. Design/methodology/approach – Through a historical and discourse analysis of these policies and processes in the two case studies, this paper presents a contextualised reading of Lefebvre’s concept of abstract space and process of abstraction in relation to the (...)
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  13. Individual Maxim Tokens, not Abstract Maxim Types.Samuel Kahn - 2024 - Kantian Review:1-17.
    I argue that Kant’s Categorical Imperative should be applied to individual maxim tokens rather than abstract maxim types. The article is divided into five sections. In the first, I explain my thesis. In the second, I show that my thesis disagrees with Rawls. In the third, I argue for my thesis on the basis of the wording of the Categorical Imperative and on the basis of considerations about autonomy. In the fourth, I argue for my thesis on the basis of (...)
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  14. Empiricism without Magic: Transformational Abstraction in Deep Convolutional Neural Networks.Cameron Buckner - 2018 - Synthese (12):1-34.
    In artificial intelligence, recent research has demonstrated the remarkable potential of Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (DCNNs), which seem to exceed state-of-the-art performance in new domains weekly, especially on the sorts of very difficult perceptual discrimination tasks that skeptics thought would remain beyond the reach of artificial intelligence. However, it has proven difficult to explain why DCNNs perform so well. In philosophy of mind, empiricists have long suggested that complex cognition is based on information derived from sensory experience, often appealing to (...)
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  15. Abstract objects? Who cares!Graham Oppy - 2014 - London UK: Bloomsbury Academic.
    This is my main contribution to P. Gould (ed.) Beyond the Control of God?: Six Views on the Problem of God and Abstract Objects Bloomsbury. (The other contibutors to this work are: Keith Yandell; Paul Gould and Rich Davis; Greg Welty; William Lane Craig; and Scott Shalkowski.) I argue that, when it comes to a comparative assessment of the merits of theism and atheism, it makes no difference whether one opts for realism or fictionalism concerning abstract objects.
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  16.  44
    (1 other version)Hume on Abstraction and Identity.Donald L. M. Baxter - 2017 - In Stefano Di Bella & Tad M. Schmaltz (eds.), The Problem of Universals in Early Modern Philosophy. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 285-304.
    Hume’s critique of traditional abstraction entails a result that undercuts his account of the idea of identity. To save his account of identity, Hume would have to accept abstraction as well. What links these two discussions is (1) Hume’s widely shared assumption that traditional abstraction is separating in the mind what are inseparable in reality, (2) his principle that what are different are mentally separable, and (3) his principle that we cannot conceive of the impossible. Given these, (...)
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  17. Abstraction and Individuation in Whitehead and Wiehl: A Comparative Historical Approach.Anderson Weekes - 2006 - In Michel Weber Pierfrancesco Basile (ed.), Subjectivity, Process, and Rationality. Ontos Verlag. pp. 31-119.
    This paper looks at the history of the problem of individuation from Plato to Whitehead. Part I takes as its point of departure Reiner Wiehl’s interpretation of the different meanings of “abstract” in the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead and arrives at a corresponding taxonomy of different ways things can be called concrete. Part II compares the way philosophers in different periods understand the relation between thought and intuition. The view mostly associated with ancient philosophy is that thought and sense-perception (...)
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  18. Abstraction and Self-Alienation in Mannheim and Husserl.Iaan Reynolds - 2023 - In Andrej Božič (ed.), Thinking Togetherness: Phenomenology and Sociality. Institute Nova Reijva for the Humanities. pp. 31-44.
    In this paper, I explore the approaches to methodological abstraction and self-alienation developed respectively in Karl Mannheim’s early sociology of intellectuals and in Edmund Husserl’s late transcendental phenomenology. In Mannheim’s early and experimental works, the resistance to abstraction and alienation is located in a stratum of intellectuals able to meaningfully combine diverse cultural currents in a social process of cultivation (Bildung). In Husserl, to contrast, this resistance is grasped as a constant crisis in the methods of pursuing philosophical (...)
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  19. Abstract entities in a presentist world.Aldo Filomeno - 2016 - Metaphysica 17 (2):177-193.
    How can a metaphysics of abstract entities be built upon a metaphysics of time? In this paper, I address the question of how to accommodate abstract entities in a presentist world. I consider both the traditional metaontological approach of unrestricted fundamental quantification and then ontological pluralism. I argue that under the former we need to impose two constraints in the characterization of presentism in order to avoid undesired commitments to abstract entities: we have to characterize presentism as a thesis only (...)
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  20.  34
    How Abstraction Works.Leon Horsten & Hannes Leitgeb - 2009 - In Alexander Hieke & Hannes Leitgeb (eds.), Reduction, abstraction, analysis: proceedings of the 31th International Ludwig Wittgenstein-Symposium in Kirchberg, 2008. Frankfurt: de Gruyter. pp. 217-226.
    In this paper we describe and interpret the formal machinery of abstraction processes in which the domain of abstracta is a subset of the domain of objects from which is abstracted.
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  21. Abstraction Relations Need Not Be Reflexive.Jonathan Payne - 2013 - Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 2 (2):137-147.
    Neo-Fregeans such as Bob Hale and Crispin Wright seek a foundation of mathematics based on abstraction principles. These are sentences involving a relation called the abstraction relation. It is usually assumed that abstraction relations must be equivalence relations, so reflexive, symmetric and transitive. In this article I argue that abstraction relations need not be reflexive. I furthermore give an application of non-reflexive abstraction relations to restricted abstraction principles.
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  22. Abstracts in Iranian dental journals: A linguistic analysis.Enayat A. Shabani & Nafiseh Emadi - 2021 - International Journal of Language Studies 4 (15):127-152.
    This study investigated the rhetorical move structure of the dental sciences research article abstract (RAA) genre using Swales’ (2004) model of move analysis, CARS (Create a Research Space), to find the frequency of rhetorical moves and steps in RAAs of the selected journals and also to examine the association between the frequency of moves and steps in the RAAs. To this end, 251 abstracts from articles published in 2018, 2019, and 2020 in four Iranian PubMed-indexed dentistry journals were selected and (...)
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  23. Collective Abstraction.Jon Erling Litland - 2022 - Philosophical Review 131 (4):453-497.
    This paper develops a novel theory of abstraction—what we call collective abstraction. The theory solves a notorious problem for noneliminative structuralism. The noneliminative structuralist holds that in addition to various isomorphic systems there is a pure structure that can be abstracted from each of these systems; but existing accounts of abstraction fail for nonrigid systems like the complex numbers. The problem with the existing accounts is that they attempt to define a unique abstraction operation. The theory (...)
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  24. Is All Abstracting Idealizing?Nicholaos Jones - 2008 - The Reasoner 2 (4):4-5.
    I defend a distinction between abstraction and idealization. Idealizations distort; abstractions do not.
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  25. Abstract Objects, Causal Efficacy, and Causal Exclusion.Tim Juvshik - 2018 - Erkenntnis 83 (4):805-827.
    objects are standardly taken to be causally inert, but this claim is rarely explicitly argued for. In the context of his platonism about musical works, in order for musical works to be audible, Julian Dodd argues that abstracta are causally efficacious in virtue of their concrete tokens participating in events. I attempt to provide a principled argument for the causal inertness of abstracta by first rejecting Dodd’s arguments from events, and then extending and generalizing the causal exclusion argument to the (...)
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  26. The Problem Of Abstract Thinking In The Categorical Imperative.Bora Barut - 2024 - Meditations: The Undergraduate Journal of Philosophy at Ucla 10 (11):50-76.
    This paper delves into Hegel's critique of Kantian ethics, focusing on the accusation that Kant's Categorical Imperative (CI) represents an abstract ethical philosophy. Hegel argues that Kantian ethics relies on an unproductive form of abstract thinking, exemplified in Kant's emphasis on universalizing maxims without considering the concrete particularities of situations. The author contends that Hegel's critique remains valid even when considering Christine Korsgaard's responses. The paper unfolds by elucidating Hegel's notion of "abstract thinking" and explaining how the CI's emphasis on (...)
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  27. Updating the “abstract–concrete” distinction in Ancient Near Eastern numbers.Karenleigh Overmann - 2018 - Cuneiform Digital Library Journal 1:1–22.
    The characterization of early token-based accounting using a concrete concept of number, later numerical notations an abstract one, has become well entrenched in the literature. After reviewing its history and assumptions, this article challenges the abstract–concrete distinction, presenting an alternative view of change in Ancient Near Eastern number concepts, wherein numbers are abstract from their inception and materially bound when most elaborated. The alternative draws on the chronological sequence of material counting technologies used in the Ancient Near East—fingers, tallies, tokens, (...)
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  28. Abstract Logic of Oppositions.Fabien Schang - 2012 - Logic and Logical Philosophy 21 (4):415--438.
    A general theory of logical oppositions is proposed by abstracting these from the Aristotelian background of quantified sentences. Opposition is a relation that goes beyond incompatibility (not being true together), and a question-answer semantics is devised to investigate the features of oppositions and opposites within a functional calculus. Finally, several theoretical problems about its applicability are considered.
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  29. The Abstractness of Artworks and Its Implications for Aesthetics.John Dilworth - 2008 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66 (4):341-353.
    Artworks have at least some necessary content properties, as do abstract entities such as propositions. But no concrete item, whether an object, event, process etc., could have any necessary content property. So no artwork could be identical with a concrete item. Hence artworks must be abstract. I also argue that artworks are only contingently connected with concrete items, just as propositions are only contingently linked to their linguistic tokens.
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  30. Creating abstract objects.David Friedell - 2021 - Philosophy Compass 16 (10):e12783.
    Beach's Gaelic Symphony is plausibly an abstract object that Beach created. The view that people create some abstract objects is called abstract creationism. There are abstract creationists about many kinds of objects, including musical works, fictional characters, arguments, words, internet memes, installation artworks, bitcoins, and restaurants. Alternative theories include materialism and Platonism. This paper discusses some of the most serious objections against abstract creationism. Arguably, these objections have ramifications for questions in metaphysics pertaining to the abstract/concrete distinction, time, causation, vague (...)
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  31. Abstract rationality: the ‘logical’ structure of attitudes.Franz Dietrich, Antonios Staras & Robert Sugden - 2024 - Economics and Philosophy 40 (1):12-41.
    We present an abstract model of rationality that focuses on structural properties of attitudes. Rationality requires coherence between your attitudes, such as your beliefs, values, and intentions. We define three 'logical' conditions on attitudes: consistency, completeness, and closedness. They parallel the familiar logical conditions on beliefs, but contrast with standard rationality conditions like preference transitivity. We establish a formal correspondence between our logical conditions and standard rationality conditions. Addressing John Broome's programme 'rationality through reasoning', we formally characterize how you can (...)
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  32. Software is an abstract artifact.Nurbay Irmak - 2012 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 86 (1):55-72.
    Software is a ubiquitous artifact, yet not much has been done to understand its ontological nature. There are a few accounts offered so far about the nature of software. I argue that none of those accounts give a plausible picture of the nature of software. I draw attention to the striking similarities between software and musical works. These similarities motivate to look more closely on the discussions regarding the nature of the musical works. With the lessons drawn from the ontology (...)
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  33. Idealizing, Abstracting, and Semantic Dispositionalism.Adam C. Podlaskowski & Nicholaos J. Jones - 2010 - European Journal of Philosophy 20 (1):166-178.
    Abstract: According to certain dispositional accounts of meaning, an agent's meaning is determined by the dispositions that an idealized version of this agent has in optimal conditions. We argue that such attempts cannot properly fix meaning. For even if there is a way to determine which features of an agent should be idealized without appealing to what the agent means, there is no non-circular way to determine how those features should be idealized. We sketch an alternative dispositional account that avoids (...)
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  34. James and Dewey on Abstraction.Rasmus Grønfeldt Winther - 2014 - The Pluralist 9 (2):1-28.
    Reification is to abstraction as disease is to health. Whereas abstraction is singling out, symbolizing, and systematizing, reification is neglecting abstractive context, especially functional, historical, and analytical-level context. William James and John Dewey provide similar and nuanced arguments regarding the perils and promises of abstraction. They share an abstraction-reification account. The stages of abstraction and the concepts of “vicious abstractionism,” “/the/ psychologist’s fallacy,” and “the philosophic fallacy” in the works of these pragmatists are here analyzed (...)
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  35. Composition as Abstraction.Jeffrey Sanford Russell - 2017 - Journal of Philosophy 114 (9):453-470.
    The existence of mereological sums can be derived from an abstraction principle in a way analogous to numbers. I draw lessons for the thesis that “composition is innocent” from neo-Fregeanism in the philosophy of mathematics.
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  36. Awareness of Abstract Objects.Elijah Chudnoff - 2012 - Noûs 47 (4):706-726.
    Awareness is a two-place determinable relation some determinates of which are seeing, hearing, etc. Abstract objects are items such as universals and functions, which contrast with concrete objects such as solids and liquids. It is uncontroversial that we are sometimes aware of concrete objects. In this paper I explore the more controversial topic of awareness of abstract objects. I distinguish two questions. First, the Existence Question: are there any experiences that make their subjects aware of abstract objects? Second, the Grounding (...)
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  37. Abstracta and Abstraction in Trope Theory.A. R. J. Fisher - 2020 - Philosophical Papers 49 (1):41-67.
    Trope theory is a leading metaphysical theory in analytic ontology. One of its classic statements is found in the work of Donald C. Williams who argued that tropes qua abstract particulars are the very alphabet of being. The concept of an abstract particular has been repeatedly attacked in the literature. Opponents and proponents of trope theory alike have levelled their criticisms at the abstractness of tropes and the associated act of abstraction. In this paper I defend the concept of (...)
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  38. Abstract Artifacts in Pretence.Sarah Sawyer - 2002 - Philosophical Papers 31 (2):183-198.
    Abstract In this paper I criticise a recent account of fictional discourse proposed by Nathan Salmon. Salmon invokes abstract artifacts as the referents of fictional names in both object- and meta-fictional discourse alike. He then invokes a theory of pretence to forge the requisite connection between object-fictional sentences and meta-fictional sentences, in virtue of which the latter can be assigned appropriate truth-values. I argue that Salmon's account of pretence renders his appeal to abstract artifacts as the referents of fictional names (...)
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  39. Abstract logical structuralism.Jean-Pierre Marquis - 2020 - Philosophical Problems in Science 69:67-110.
    Structuralism has recently moved center stage in philosophy of mathematics. One of the issues discussed is the underlying logic of mathematical structuralism. In this paper, I want to look at the dual question, namely the underlying structures of logic. Indeed, from a mathematical structuralist standpoint, it makes perfect sense to try to identify the abstract structures underlying logic. We claim that one answer to this question is provided by categorical logic. In fact, we claim that the latter can be seen—and (...)
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  40. How Abstract Liberty Relates to Private Property: a One-Page Outline.J. C. Lester - manuscript
    Libertarianism—and classical liberalism generally—entails (or presupposes) a specific, but implicit, conception of liberty. Imagine two lists of property-rights: one list is all those that currently appear to be libertarian (self-ownership, property acquired by use of natural resources, property acquired by consensual exchange, etc.); the other list is all those that currently appear not to be libertarian (aggressively imposed slavery, property acquired by theft or fraud, property acquired by coerced transfers due to welfare claims, etc.). What determines into which list a (...)
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  41. Conflating Abstraction with Empirical Observation: The False Mind-Matter Dichotomy.Bernardo Kastrup - 2018 - Constructivist Foundations 13 (3):341-361.
    > Context • The alleged dichotomy between mind and matter is pervasive. Therefore, the attempt to explain mat- ter in terms of mind (idealism) is often considered a mirror image of that of explaining mind in terms of mat- ter (mainstream physicalism), in the sense of being structurally equivalent despite being reversely arranged. > Problem • I argue that this is an error arising from language artifacts, for dichotomies must reside in the same level of abstraction. > Method • (...)
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  42. The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Abstract Metaphysics.Daniel Nolan - 2015 - Oxford Studies in Metaphysics 9:61-88.
    In Metaphysics A, Aristotle offers some objections to Plato’s theory of Forms to the effect that Plato’s Forms would not be explanatory in the right way, and seems to suggest that they might even make the explanatory project worse. One interesting historical puzzle is whether Aristotle can avoid these same objections to his own theory of universals. The concerns Aristotle raises are, I think, cousins of contemporary concerns about the usefulness and explanatoriness of abstract objects, some of which have recently (...)
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  43.  83
    Abstract Objects, Ideal Forms, and Works of Art: An Epistemic and Aesthetic Analysis.Robert Rose-Coutré - 2006 - New York: iUniverse.
    Joining philosophy of language with phenomenological aesthetics, this book defines the epistemological status of abstract objects and works of art. Beginning with a provocative conversation between Socrates, Plato, Wittgenstein, and Jung, the book introduces the concept, and coins the term, "Platonic Inductive Fallacy," deriving from a cycle of language games. The author then invokes Robert Stalnaker to clarify the difference between real and actual objects, which gives new insight into the epistemology of abstract objects. Armed with defined abstract objects, the (...)
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  44. Knowledge of Abstract Objects in Physics and Mathematics.Michael J. Shaffer - 2017 - Acta Analytica 32 (4):397-409.
    In this paper a parallel is drawn between the problem of epistemic access to abstract objects in mathematics and the problem of epistemic access to idealized systems in the physical sciences. On this basis it is argued that some recent and more traditional approaches to solving these problems are problematic.
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  45. On the Varieties of Abstract Objects.James E. Davies - 2019 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 97 (4):809-823.
    I reconcile the spatiotemporal location of repeatable artworks and impure sets with the non-location of natural numbers despite all three being varieties of abstract objects. This is possible because, while the identity conditions for all three can be given by abstraction principles, in the former two cases spatiotemporal location is a congruence for the equivalence relation featuring in the relevant principle, whereas in the latter it is not. I then generalize this to other ‘physical’ properties like shape, mass, and (...)
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  46. Thin Mereological Sums, Abstraction, and Interpretational Modalities.Giorgio Lando - 2023 - Theoria 89 (3):1-18.
    Some tools introduced by Linnebo to show that mathematical entities are thin objects can also be applied to non-mathematical entities, which have been thought to be thin as well for a variety of reasons. In this paper, I discuss some difficulties and opportunities concerning the application of abstraction and interpretational modalities to mereological sums. In particular, I show that on one hand some prima facie attractive candidates for the role of an explanatory plural abstraction principle for mereological sums (...)
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  47. Can Emotions Have Abstract Objects? The Example of Awe.Fredericks Rachel - 2017 - Philosophia 46 (3):733-746.
    Can we feel emotions about abstract objects, assuming that abstract objects exist? I argue that at least some emotions can have abstract objects as their intentional objects and discuss why this conclusion is not just trivially true. Through critical engagement with the work of Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, I devote special attention to awe, an emotion that is particularly well suited to show that some emotions can be about either concrete or abstract objects. In responding to a possible objection, (...)
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  48. Mathematical Abstraction, Conceptual Variation and Identity.Jean-Pierre Marquis - 2014 - In Peter Schroeder-Heister, Gerhard Heinzmann, Wilfred Hodges & Pierre Edouard Bour (eds.), Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Proceedings of the 14th International Congress. London, UK: pp. 299-322.
    One of the key features of modern mathematics is the adoption of the abstract method. Our goal in this paper is to propose an explication of that method that is rooted in the history of the subject.
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  49. Abstract mathematical tools and machines for mathematics.Jean-Pierre Marquis - 1997 - Philosophia Mathematica 5 (3):250-272.
    In this paper, we try to establish that some mathematical theories, like K-theory, homology, cohomology, homotopy theories, spectral sequences, modern Galois theory (in its various applications), representation theory and character theory, etc., should be thought of as (abstract) machines in the same way that there are (concrete) machines in the natural sciences. If this is correct, then many epistemological and ontological issues in the philosophy of mathematics are seen in a different light. We concentrate on one problem which immediately follows (...)
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  50. Abstract Expressionism and the Communication Problem.David Liggins - 2014 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 65 (3):599-620.
    Some philosophers have recently suggested that the reason mathematics is useful in science is that it expands our expressive capacities. Of these philosophers, only Stephen Yablo has put forward a detailed account of how mathematics brings this advantage. In this article, I set out Yablo’s view and argue that it is implausible. Then, I introduce a simpler account and show it is a serious rival to Yablo’s. 1 Introduction2 Yablo’s Expressionism3 Psychological Objections to Yablo’s Expressionism4 Introducing Belief Expressionism5 Objections and (...)
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