What sort of logic do we get if we adopt a supervaluational semantics for vagueness? As it turns out, the answer depends crucially on how the standard notion of validity as truth preservation is recasted. There are several ways of doing that within a supervaluational framework, the main alternative being between “global” construals (e.g., an argument is valid iff it preserves truth-under-all-precisifications) and “local” construals (an argument is valid iff, under all precisifications, it preserves truth). The former alternative is by (...) far more popular, but I argue in favor of the latter, for (i) it does not suffer from a number of serious objections, and (ii) it makes it possible to restore global validity as a defined notion. (shrink)

I focus on three mereological principles: the Extensionality of Parthood (EP), the Uniqueness of Composition (UC), and the Extensionality of Composition (EC). These principles are not equivalent. Nonetheless, they are closely related (and often equated) as they all reflect the basic nominalistic dictum, No difference without a difference maker. And each one of them—individually or collectively—has been challenged on philosophical grounds. In the first part I argue that such challenges do not quite threaten EP insofar as they are either self-defeating (...) or unsupported. In the second part I argue that they hardly undermine the tenability of EC and UC as well. (shrink)

Aristotle’s typical procedure is to identify something's four causes. Intentional action has typically been treated as an exception: most think that Aristotle has the standard causalist account, according to which an intentional action is a bodily movement efficiently caused by an attitude of the appropriate sort. I show that action is not an exception to Aristotle’s typical procedure: he has the resources to specify four causes of action, and thus to articulate a powerful theory of action unlike any other on (...) offer. (shrink)

We can see mereology as a theory of parthood and topology as a theory of wholeness. How can these be combined to obtain a unified theory of parts and wholes? This paper examines various non-equivalent ways of pursuing this task, with specific reference to its relevance to spatio-temporal reasoning. In particular, three main strategies are compared: (i) mereology and topology as two independent (though mutually related) chapters; (ii) mereology as a general theory subsuming topology; (iii) topology as a general theory (...) subsuming mereology. Some more speculative strategies and directions for further research are also considered. (shrink)

I argue that Universalism (the thesis that mereological composition is unrestricted) entails Extensionalism (the thesis that sameness of composition is sufficient for identity) as long as the parthood relation is transitive and satisfies the Weak Supplementation principle (to the effect that whenever a thing has a proper part, it has another part disjoint from the first).

One logic or many? I say—many. Or rather, I say there is one logic for each way of specifying the class of all possible circumstances, or models, i.e., all ways of interpreting a given language. But because there is no unique way of doing this, I say there is no unique logic except in a relative sense. Indeed, given any two competing logical theories T1 and T2 (in the same language) one could always consider their common core, T, and settle (...) on that theory. So, given any language L, one could settle on the minimal logic T0 corresponding to the common core shared by all competitors. That would be a way of resisting relativism, as long as one is willing to redraw the bounds of logic accordingly. However, such a minimal theory T0 may be empty if the syntax of L contains no special ingredients the interpretation of which is independent of the specification of the relevant L-models. And generally—I argue—this is indeed the case. (shrink)

Some have argued that the vagueness exhibited by geographic names and descriptions such as ‘Albuquerque’, ‘the Outback’, or ‘Mount Everest’ is ultimately ontological: these terms are vague because they refer to vague objects, objects with fuzzy boundaries. I take the opposite stand and hold the view that geographic vagueness is exclusively semantic, or conceptual at large. There is no such thing as a vague mountain. Rather, there are many things where we conceive a mountain to be, each with its precise (...) boundary, and when we say ‘Everest’ we are just being vague as to which thing we are referring to. This paper defends this view against some plausible objections. (shrink)

I argue that the conjunction of perdurantism (the view that objects are temporally extended) and universalism (the thesis that any old class of things has a mereological fusion) gives rise to undesired complications when combined with certain plausible assumptions concerning the semantics of tensed statements.

In previous work I have argued that talk about negative events should not be taken at face value: typically, what we are inclined to think of as a negative event (John’s failure to go jogging) is just an ordinary, positive event (his going to the movie instead); it is a positive event under a negative description. Here I consider more closely the difficulties that arise in those cases where no positive event seems available to do the job, as with putative (...) cases of causation by omission. In particular, I elaborate on Helen Beebee’s idea that not all causal explanations are reports of causation. When we mention John’s failure to turn off the gas as an explanans of why there was an explosion, we do not say what caused the explosion. We do not mention any of the relevant causes. We just remark that one sort of event that was supposed to occur, and whose occurrence would have prevented the explosion, did not in fact occur. (shrink)

Peter Simons has argued that the expression ‘the universe’ is not a genuine singular term: it can name neither a single, completely encompassing individual, nor a collection of individuals. (It is, rather, a semantically plural term standing equally for every existing object.) I offer reasons for resisting Simons’s arguments on both scores.

A lot of work in metaphysics relies on linguistic analysis and intuitions. Do we want to know what sort of things there are or could be? Then let’s see what sort of things there must be in order for what we truthfully say to be true. Do we want to see whether x is distinct from y? Then let’s see whether there is any statement that is true of x but not of y. And so on. In this paper I (...) argue that this way of proceeding is full of traps and is bound to be pretty useless unless we already have a good idea of what sort of things there are, and of how we are going to count them. (shrink)

A critical review of the main themes arising out of recent literature on the semantics of ordinary event talk. The material is organized in four sections: (i) the nature of events, with emphasis on the opposition between events as particulars and events as universals; (ii) identity and indeterminacy, with emphasis on the unifier/multiplier controversy; (iii) events and logical form, with emphasis on Davidson’s treatment of the form of action sentences; (iv) linguistic applications, with emphasis on issues concerning aspectual phenomena, the (...) telicity/atelicity distinction, the treatment of statives, and temporal quantification. (shrink)

Assuming that events form a genuine ontological category, shall we say that a good inventory of the world ought to include “negative” events—failures, omissions, things that didn’t happen—along with positive ones? I argue that we shouldn’t. Talk of non-occurring events is like talk of non-existing objects and should not be taken at face value. We often speak as though there were such things, but deep down we want our words to be interpreted in such a way as to avoid serious (...) ontological commitment. (shrink)

This is a revised and extended version of the formal theory of holes outlined in the Appendix to the book "Holes and Other Superficialities". The first part summarizes the basic framework (ontology, mereology, topology, morphology). The second part emphasizes its relevance to spatial reasoning and to the semantics of spatial prepositions in natural language. In particular, I discuss the semantics of ‘in’ and provide an account of such fallacious arguments as “There is a hole in the sheet. The sheet is (...) in the drawer. Ergo *there is a hole in the drawer”. (shrink)

According to a popular line of reasoning, diachronic vagueness creates a problem for the endurantist conception of persistence. Some authors have replied that this line of reasoning is inconclusive, since the endurantist can subscribe to a principle of Diachronic Unrestricted Composition (DUC) that is perfectly parallel to the principle required by the perdurantist’s semantic account. I object that the endurantist should better avoid DUC. And I argue that even DUC, if accepted, would fail to provide the endurantist with the necessary (...) resources for explaining diachronic vagueness in familiar semantic terms. (shrink)

Many advocate practices of ‘local food’ or ‘locavorism’ as a partial solution to the injustices and unsustainability of contemporary food systems. I think that there is much to be said in favor of local food movements, but these virtues are insufficient to immunize locavorism from criticism. In particular, three duties of international ethics—beneficence, repair and fairness—may provide reasons for constraining the developed world’s permissible pursuit of local food. A complete account of why (and how) the fulfillment of these duties constrains (...) locavorism will require extensive empirical evidence about the relationship between agricultural demand-led industrialization, international trade (rules), and local food practices. In this paper I can only gesture at some of this evidence and, for that reason, my policy prescriptions are merely provisional. Instead, the upshot of this paper is that advocates of locavorism ought to be attentive to the empirical-dependence of the moral permissibility of their projects. As local food ‘scales up’—and comes to be embraced as a goal of political communities—these concerns should receive even greater attention. (shrink)

The semantics of our event talk is a complex affair. What is it that we are talking about when we speak of Brutus’s stabbing of Caesar? Exactly where and when did it take place? Was it the same event as the killing of Caesar? Some take questions such as these to be metaphysical questions. I think they are questions of semantics—questions about the way we talk and about what we mean. And I think that this conflict between metaphysic and semantic (...) concerns is indicative of a “deep indeterminacy” (Bennett’s phrase) in our event concept. We do talk about events; but what events a statement is about is not something that can be inferred from the event names we use; it depends heavily (more heavily than with ordinary material objects) on local context and unprincipled intuitions. This paper illustrates this view in connection with two examples: the phenomenon of vagueness and the dispute over identity statements. (shrink)

The paper investigates the link between the theory of modal occurrents (where individuals are allowed to stretch across possible worlds) and Lewis’s counterpart theory (where all individuals are world-bound but have counterparts in other worlds). First I show how to interpret modal talk extensionally within the theory of modal occurrents. Then I show that the assumption that worlds be pairwise discrete is all that is needed to reconstruct the bulk of counterpart theory (i.e., to define the concept of a counterpart (...) and to derive the standard postulates governing that concept) in terms of the theory of modal occurrents. Finally, I argue that this reconstruction allows us to view the indeterminacy of our modal intuitions as being part and parcel with the indeterminacy of our criteria for individuating modal occurrents, and that this indeterminacy is naturally explained in terms of linguistic (as opposed to ontic) vagueness. (shrink)

A plausible thought about vagueness is that it involves semantic incompleteness. To say that a predicate is vague is to say (at the very least) that its extension is incompletely specified. Where there is incomplete specification of extension there is indeterminacy, an indeterminacy between various ways in which the specification of the predicate might be completed or sharpened. In this paper we show that this idea is bound to founder by presenting an argument to the effect that there are vague (...) predicates which cannot be sharpened in such a way as to meet certain basic constraints (of penumbral connection and public accessibility) that must be imposed on the very notion of a sharpening. (shrink)

Since its first appearance in 1966, the notion of a supervaluation has been regarded by many as a powerful tool for dealing with semantic gaps. Only recently, however, applications to semantic gluts have also been considered. In previous work I proposed a general framework exploiting the intrinsic gap/glut duality. Here I also examine an alternative account where gaps and gluts are treated on a par: although they reflect opposite situations, the semantic upshot is the same in both cases--the value of (...) some expressions is not uniquely defined. Other strategies for generalizing supervaluations are considered and some comparative facts are discussed. (shrink)

Fictionalism in ontology is a mixed bag. Here I focus on three main variants—which I label after the names of Pascal, Berkeley, and Hume—and consider their relative strengths and weaknesses. The first variant is just a version of the epistemic Wager, applied across the board. The second variant builds instead on the fact that ordinary language is not ontologically transparent; we speak with the vulgar, but deep down we think with the learned. Finally, on the Humean variant it’s the structure (...) of the ontological inventory, not its content, that may turn out to involve fictional elements. That is, for the Humean the fiction lies, not in the reality of common-sense ontology, but in the laws—of unity, identity, causation, etc.—in terms of which we articulate our experience of that reality. In the end, this is the kind of fictionalism that I find most interesting, sensible, and tenable. And I argue that it is even compatible with the sort of “naive” realism we have all come to appreciate in the work of Paolo Bozzi, to whom the paper is dedicated. (shrink)

It is common lore that standard, Kripke-style semantics for quantified modal logic is incompatible with the view that no individual may belong to more than one possible world, a view that seems to require a counterpart-theoretic semantics instead. Strictly speaking, however, this thought is wrong-headed. This note explains why.

This paper focuses on the semantics of statements of the form ‘x is P at t’ vis-à-vis its metaphysical underpinnings. I begin by considering four main readings, corresponding to the four basic parsings of the temporal modifier ‘at t’: (1) at-t x is P, (2) x-at-t is P, (3) x is-at-t P, and (4) x is P-at-t. Each of these readings—which correspond to different metaphysical conceptions of the nature of temporal change—is found inadequate or otherwise problematic. In the second part (...) of the paper I therefore consider a fifth account whose advantages over (1)–(4), I argue, exceed its revisionary costs. This fifth account is based on a conception of objects as entia successiva held together by a nexus of temporal counterparthood and reads ‘x is P at t’ as ‘the t-counterpart of x is P’. (shrink)

Abstract. As a general theory of reasoning—and as a general theory of what holds true under every possible circumstance—logic is supposed to be ontologically neutral. It ought to have nothing to do with questions concerning what there is, or whether there is anything at all. It is for this reason that traditional Aristotelian logic, with its tacit existential presuppositions, was eventually deemed inadequate as a canon of pure logic. And it is for this reason that modern quantification theory, too, with (...) its residue of existentially loaded theorems and patterns of inference, has been claimed to suffer from a defect of logical purity. The law of non-contradiction rules out certain circumstances as impossible—circumstances in which a statement is both true and false, or perhaps circumstances where something both is and is not the case. Is this to be regarded as a further ontological bias? (shrink)

Quine’s desert is generally contrasted with Meinong’s jungle, as a sober ontological alternative to the exuberant luxuriance that comes with the latter. Here I focus instead on the desert as a sober metaphysical alternative to the Aristotelian garden, with its tidily organized varieties of flora and fauna neatly governed by fundamental laws that reflect the essence of things and the way they can be, or the way they must be. In the desert there are no “natural joints”; all the boundaries (...) we find are lines we have drawn, artificial fencings that merely reflect of our own demarcations, our classifications, our desperate need to ward off the flux and meet an excusable but ungrounded demand for order and stability. The desert returns a picture of reality that is radically anti-realist. And yet the picture does not amount to a form of irrealism. The desert is out there and is what it is regardless of how we feel. And it is not completely structureless. It’s just that the structure it has is very thin and does not correspond to the sort of structure that so-called metaphysical realists—and scientific realists alike—tend to attribute to it. (shrink)

The theory according to which most ordinary objects are mere “entia successiva”—sequences of distinct mereological aggregates, whose unity resides exclusively in our minds—is a variant of the standard, three-dimensional conception of objects. For the aggregates are, at bottom, endurants, i.e., entities that persist through time by being fully present at any time at which they exist. In this paper I compare this theory with the so-called “stage view”, according to which ordinary objects—indeed, all objects—are sequences of momentary entities that cannot (...) truly be said to persist through time. Both theories face a number of intuitive difficulties but the stage view, I argue, has a lot more to offer in return. (shrink)

Jacob Klapwijk’s book Purpose in the Living World? (Cambridge 2998) is examined with special attention given to the scholarly background from out of which it emerges as a significant contribution to reformational philosophical reflection. As an initial step to clarify some important issues raised by Klapwijk’s critical comments about Dooyeweerd’s “essentialist” concept of species, the article probes facets of the way Jan Lever incorporated reformational philosophical concepts into his biological theory and considers the 1959 review written by Herman Dooyeweerd of (...) Lever’s Creation and Evolution. The analysis focuses specifically upon the social responsibilities of these two scholars and the confrontation of their respective views. With the work of Lever and Dooyeweerd we sense something of the ambiguities when reformational philosophy confronts an evangelical scholasticism. This confrontation is an important facet of the context in which Klapwijk has set forth his discussion of creation and emergent evolution. Purpose is also the fruit of scholarly collaboration across disciplines, providing a welcome stimulus for a deepened understanding of the corporate character of the student vocation. (shrink)

In ‘Something to Do with Vagueness ...’, Linda Burns defends an analogy between the informational and the borderline-case variety of vagueness. She argues that the latter is in fact less extraordinary and less disastrous than people in the tradition of Michael Dummett and Crispin Wright have told us. However, her account involves presuppositions that cannot be taken for granted. Here is to take a closer look at some of these presuppositions and argue hat they may--when left unguarded--undermine much of Burns’ (...) general account. (shrink)

For any given society, its particular technology of communication has far-reaching consequences, not merely as regards social organization, but on the epistemic level as well. Plato's name-theory of meaning represents the transition from the age of primary orality to that of literacy; Wittgenstein's use-theory of meaning stands for the transition from the age of literacy to that of a second orality (audiovisual communication, electronic information processing). On the basis of a use-theory of meaning the problem of machine consciousness, to which (...) the later Wittgenstein again and again returned, is capable of a non-essentialist solution: appropriate changes in our form of life might well entail a radically different psychological language-game. (shrink)

Universalist and nihilist answers to philosophical questions may be extreme, but they are clear enough. Aliquidist answers, by contrast, are typically caught between the Scylla of vagueness and indeterminacy and the Charybdis of ungroundedness and arbitrariness, and steering a proper middle course—saying exactly where in the middle one is going to settle—demands exceptional navigating powers. I myself tend to favor extreme answers precisely for this reason. Here, however, I consider one sense in which Something may claim superiority over its polar (...) competitors, Everything and Nothing, when it comes to answerting the ontological question, “What is there?”. (shrink)

A review of a 2010 translation of the inaugural address of Dr Jaap Klapwijk as professor of Philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam in 1976.

A compact overview of the main formal theories of parthood and of their mutual relationships, up to Classical Extensional Mereology. Written as an Appendix to the other essays included in the volume.

Pojęcie niszy (otoczenia, kontekstu, siedliska, środowiska) nie cieszy się specjalnym zainteresowaniem ontologów, mimo że ma szerokie zastosowanie w rozmaitych dyscyplinach, od biologii ewolucyjnej po ekonomię. Niniejszy artykuł zawiera pierwszą teorię formalną tego pojęcia — teorię relacji pomiędzy przedmiotami a ich niszami. Teoria ta opiera się na istniejącym dorobku mereologii, topologii i teorii lokalizacji przestrzennej, które są narzędziami ontologii formalnej. Jest ona tutaj ilustrowana głównie za pomocą prostych przykładów z biologii, ale pojęcie niszy należy rozumieć — podobnie jak pojęcia części, granicy (...) i położenia — jako pojęcie strukturalne, znajdujące zastosowanie w obszernym zakresie różnych dziedzin. (shrink)

In his book The Austrian Mind (1972) W. M. Johnston observes that between 1861 and 1938 a striking number of Austrian intellectuals committed uicide. He also remarks that prior to 1920 suicide was relatively rare among Hungarian intellectuals, and as a possible explanation he refers to their more intensive political activity. The present paper investigates relations between a society's intellectual life and its general suicidal tendencies. In so doing it takes up a central theme of T. G. Masaryk's Suicide as (...) a Social Mass Phenomenon of Modern Civilization, published in Vienna in 1881. (shrink)

This is the Guest Editor's Introduction to a volume of Philosophia Reformata that considers Jaap Klapwijk's book in which he seeks to discuss evolutionary biology in relation to Christian philosophy.

I offer a diagnosis of the parallelism between the Doctrine of Potential Parts and the Doctrine of Potential Wholes and briefly examine its bearing on Johansson’s account of the Tibbles-Tib Problem.

An outline of the wealth of philosophical material that hides behind the flat world of geographic maps, with special reference to (i) the centrality of the boundary concept, (ii) the problem of vagueness, and (iii) the metaphysical question (if such there be) of the identity and persistence conditions of geographic entities.

Are there any bona fide boundaries, i.e., boundaries that carve at the joints? Or is any boundary—hence any object—the result of a fiat articulation reflecting our cognitive biases and our social practices and conventions? Does the choice between these two options amount to a choice between realism and wholesome relativism?

In a calculation involving imaginary numbers, we begin with real numbers that represent concrete measures and we end up with numbers that are equally real, but in the course of the operation we find ourselves walking “as if on a bridge that stands on no piles”. How is that possible? How does that work? And what is involved in the as-if stance that this metaphor introduces so beautifully? These are questions that bother Törless deeply. And that Törless is bothered by (...) such questions is a central question for any reader of Törless. Here I offer my interpretation, along with a reconstruction of the philosophical intuition that lies behind it all. (shrink)

This work gives an extended presentation of the treatment of variable-binding operators adumbrated in [3:1993d]. Illustrative examples include elementary languages with quantifiers and lambda-equipped categorial languages. Some remarks are also offered to illustrate the philosophical import of the resulting picture. Particularly, a certain conception of logic emerges from the account: the view that logics are true theories in the model-theoretic sense, i.e. the result of selecting a certain class of models as the only “admissible” interpretation structures (for a given language).

Some philosophers have argued that the vagueness exhibited by names and descriptions such as ‘Mount Everest’, ‘Downtown Manhattan’, or ‘that cloud in the sky’ is ultimately ontological: they are vague because they refer to vague objects, objects with fuzzy boundaries. I take the opposite stand and argue for the view that all vagueness is semantic. There is no such thing as a vague mountain. Rather, there are many things where we conceive the mountain to be, each with its precise boundary, (...) and when we say ‘Everest’ we are just being vague as to which thing we are referring to. This paper defends this view against some plausible objections. (shrink)

This article encourages a reconsideration of Christian sociology. It explains how deism makes a decisive impact in the theoretical foundations of the discipline. Dutch neocalvinistic philosophy in its North American immigrant setting after World War II issued a challenge which drew attention to the dogmas of deism implicit in sociology, but this challenge has not been met. Christian sociology, however, still retains its God-given vocation to find ways to encourage people everywhere to positively form complex differentiated social settings in the (...) Spirit of the Suffering and Glorified Messiah. (shrink)

An outline of the wealth of philosophical material that hides behind the flat world of geographic maps, with special reference to (i) the centrality of the boundary concept, (ii) the problem of vagueness, and (iii) the metaphysical question (if such there be) of the identity and persistence conditions of geographic entities. Serves as an introduction to the special issue of "Topoi" (20:2, 2001) on the Philosophy of Geography.

This is a review of Henk Woldring's book on Karl Mannheim.

Suppose we get a chance to ask an angel a question of our choice. What should we ask to make the most of our unique opportunity? Ned Markosian has shown that the task is trickier than it might seem. Ted Sider has suggested playing safe and asking: What is the true proposition (or one of the true propositions) that would be most beneficial for us to be told? Let's see whether we can do any better than that.

A critical survey of topics that play a central role in contemporary analytic ontology and metaphysics, including, identity, persistence through time, the problem of universals, the notion of ontological commitment, and the boundary between semantic issues and metaphysics proper.

The “Game of the Rule” is easy enough: I give you the beginning of a sequence of numbers (say) and you have to figure out how the sequence continues, to uncover the rule by means of which the sequence is generated. The game depends on two obvious constraints, namely (1) that the initial segment uniquely identify the sequence, and (2) that the sequence be non-random. As it turns out, neither constraint can fully be met, among other reasons because the relevant (...) notion of randomness is either vacuous or undecidable. This may not be a problem when we play for fun. It is, however, a serious problem when it comes to playing the game for real, i.e., when the player to issue the initial segment is not one of us but the world out there, the sequence consisting not of numbers (say) but of the events that make up our history. Moreover, when we play for fun we know exactly what initial segment to focus on, but when we play for real we don’t even know that. This is the core difficulty in the philosophy of the inductive sciences. (shrink)

This research note is penned in honour of Johan Vander Hoeven on his retirement as Editor-in-Chief of Philosophia Reformata. It is to acknowledge his helpful contribution to the critical exposition of phenomenology. I first read his work almost 30 years ago and it challenged me to develop a sympathetic Christian critique of this philosophical movement. This note is to offer some reflection upon the Christian interpretation of phenomeology. In particular, it raises questions about how some famous phrases, one by Dilthey, (...) the other by Husserl, have been construed. (shrink)

Assuming that events form a genuine ontological category, shall we say that a good inventory of the world ought to include “negative” events—failures, omissions, things that didn’t happen—along with positive ones? I argue that we shouldn’t. Talk of non-occurring events is like talk of non-existing objects and should not be taken at face value. We often speak as though there were such things, but deep down we want our words to be interpreted in such a way as to avoid serious (...) ontological commitment. (shrink)