Results for 'sortals'

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  1. Sortals and criteria of identity.Brian Epstein - 2012 - Analysis 72 (3):474-478.
    In a recent article, Harold Noonan argues that application conditions and criteria of identity are not distinct from one another. This seems to threaten the standard approach to distinguishing sortals from adjectival terms. I propose that his observation, while correct, does not have this consequence. I present a simple scheme for distinguishing sortals from adjectival terms. I also propose an amended version of the standard canonical form of criteria of identity.
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  2. Perceptual Kinds as Supervening Sortals.Błażej Skrzypulec - 2018 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 100 (1):174-201.
    It seems intuitive that in situations of perceptual recognition additional properties are represented. While much has been written about the significance of such properties for perceptual phenomenology, it is still unclear (a) what is the relation between recognition-based properties and lower-level perceptual properties, and (b) whether it is justified to classify them as kind-properties. Relying on results in cognitive psychology, I argue that recognition-based properties (I) are irreducible, high-level properties, (II) are kind properties by virtue of being sortal properties, but (...)
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  3. Criteria of identity without sortals.Justin Mooney - 2023 - Noûs 57 (3):722-739.
    Many philosophers believe that the criteria of identity over time for ordinary objects entail that such objects are permanent members of certain sortal kinds. The sortal kinds in question have come to be known as substance sortal kinds. But in this article, I defend a criterion of identity that is suited to phasalism, the view that alleged substance sortals are in fact phase sortals. The criterion I defend is a sortal‐weighted version of a change‐minimizing criterion first discussed by (...)
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  4. Singling Out Objects without Sortals.Anne Newstead - 2003 - In Slezak Peter (ed.), International Conference on Cognitive Science (ICCS).
    It is argued that there are ways of individuating the objects of perception without using sortal concepts. The result is an moderate anti-sortalist position on which one can single out objects using demonstrative expressions without knowing exactly what sort of thing those objects are.
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  5. Preserving the principle of one object to a place: A novel account of the relations among objects, sorts, sortals, and persistence conditions.Michael B. Burke - 1994 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (3):591-624.
    This article offers a novel, conservative account of material constitution, one that incorporates sortal essentialism and features a theory of dominant sortals. It avoids coinciding objects, temporal parts, relativizations of identity, mereological essentialism, anti-essentialism, denials of the reality of the objects of our ordinary ontology, and other departures from the metaphysic implicit in ordinary ways of thinking. Defenses of the account against important objections are found in Burke 1997, 2003, and 2004, as well as in the often neglected six (...)
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  6. Sortal Quality: Pleasure, Desire, and Moral Worth.David Hunter - forthcoming - Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    (DRAFT: I'll update when the book is published.) This started as a book about desire. I was hoping to complement what I had said about belief in my (2022). To believe something, I argued, is to be positioned to do, think and feel things in light of a possibility whose obtaining would make one right. I argued that believing is not representational, that belief states are not causes or causal powers, and that the objects of belief are ways the world (...)
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  7. Vagueness Intuitions and the Mobility of Cognitive Sortals.Bert Baumgaertner - 2012 - Minds and Machines 22 (3):213-234.
    One feature of vague predicates is that, as far as appearances go, they lack sharp application boundaries. I argue that we would not be able to locate boundaries even if vague predicates had sharp boundaries. I do so by developing an idealized cognitive model of a categorization faculty which has mobile and dynamic sortals (`classes', `concepts' or `categories') and formally prove that the degree of precision with which boundaries of such sortals can be located is inversely constrained by (...)
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  8. Moderate monism, persistence and sortal concepts.Harold Noonan - manuscript
    Coincidence comes in two varieties – permanent and temporary. Moderate monism is the position that permanent coincidence, but not temporary coincidence, entails identity. Extreme monism is the position that even temporary coincidence entails identity. Pluralists are opponents of monism tout court. The intuitively obvious, commonsensical position is moderate monism. It is therefore important to see if it can be sustained.
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  9. More Kinds of Being: A Further Study of Individuation, Identity, and the Logic of Sortal Terms. By E. J. Lowe. [REVIEW]Tuomas E. Tahko - 2013 - Mind 122 (485):302-305.
    Book review of 'More Kinds of Being: A Further Study of Individuation, Identity, and the Logic of Sortal Terms'. By E. J. LOWE.
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  10. Becoming a Statue.Justin Mooney - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    ABSTRACT One simple but relatively neglected solution to the notorious coincidence puzzle of the statue and the piece of clay claims that the property of being a statue is a phase sortal property that the piece of clay instantiates temporarily. I defend this view against some standard objections, by reinforcing it with a novel counterpart-theoretic account of identity under a sortal. This proposal does not require colocation, four-dimensionalism, eliminativism, deflationism, or unorthodox theses about classical identity.
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  11. Wiggins' defence of essentialism.Bruce Langtry - 1975 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 13 (4):459-469.
    This paper is a critique of David Wiggins's treatment of essentialism in his book Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity (Blackwell 1967). I argue in detail that he has not provided an adequate account either of the concept of a sortal term or of the concept of a substance-concept, even though both concepts play important roles in his case for essentialism. I also discuss Wiggins's views on how substance-concepts are related to judgments of identity through time.
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  12. What counts as "a" sound and how "to count" a sound, the problems of individuating and identifying sounds.Jorge Luis Méndez-Martínez - 2019 - Synthesis Philosophica 1 (67):173-190.
    This paper addresses the problem of sound individuation (SI) and its connection to sound ontology (SO). It is argued that the problems of SI, such as aspatiality, extreme individuation, indexical perplexity and duration puzzles are due to SO’s uncertainties. Besides, I describe the views in SO, including the wave view (WV), the property view (PV), and the event view (EV), as Casey O’Callaghan defends it. According to O’Callaghan, EV offers clear standards to individuate sounds. However, this claim is countered by (...)
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  13. Do we see apples as edible?Bence Nanay - 2011 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 92 (3):305-322.
    Do we (sometimes) perceive apples as edible? One could argue that it is just a manner of speaking to say so: we do not really see an object as edible, we see it as having certain shape, size and color and we only infer on the basis of these properties that it is. I argue that we do indeed see objects as edible, and do not just believe that they are. My argument proceeds in two steps. First, I point out (...)
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  14. Essence, modality, and intrinsicality.Gaétan Bovey - 2021 - Synthese 198 (8):7715-7737.
    Kit Fine famously objected against the idea that essence can be successfully analyzed in terms of de re necessity. In response, I want to explore a novel, interesting, but controversial modal account of essence in terms of intrinsicality and grounding. In the first section, I will single out two theoretical requirements that any essentialist theory should meet—the essentialist desideratum and the essentialist challenge—in order to clarify Fine’s objections. In the second section, I will assess Denby’s improved modal account, which appeals (...)
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  15. Essence and the Grounding Problem.Mark Jago - 2016 - In Reality Making. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press UK. pp. 99-120.
    Pluralists about coincident entities say that distinct entities may be spatially coincident throughout their entire existence. The most pressing issue they face is the grounding problem. They say that coincident entities may differ in their persistence conditions and in the sortals they fall under. But how can they differ in these ways, given that they share all their microphysical properties? What grounds those differences, if not their microphysical properties? Do those differences depend only on the way we conceptualise those (...)
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  16. An Episodic Account of Divine Personhood.Justin Mooney - 2021 - Religious Studies 57 (4):654-668.
    I present Ned Markosian's episodic account of identity under a sortal, and then use it to sketch a new model of the Trinity. I show that the model can be used to solve at least three important Trinitarian puzzles: the traditional ‘logical problem of the Trinity’, a less-discussed problem that has been dubbed the ‘problem of triunity’, and a problem about the divine processions that has been enjoying increased attention in the recent literature.
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  17. Conceptual fingerprints: Lexical decomposition by means of frames – a neuro-cognitive model.Wiebke Petersen & Markus Werning - 2007 - In U. Priss, S. Polovina & R. Hill (eds.), Conceptual structures: Knowledge architectures for smart applications. Heidelberg: pp. 415-428.
    Frames, i.e., recursive attribute-value structures, are a general format for the decomposition of lexical concepts. Attributes assign unique values to objects and thus describe functional relations. Concepts can be classified into four groups: sortal, individual, relational and functional concepts. The classification is reflected by different grammatical roles of the corresponding nouns. The paper aims at a cognitively adequate decomposition, particularly, of sortal concepts by means of frames. Using typed feature structures, an explicit formalism for the characterization of cognitive frames is (...)
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  18. The Matter of Coincidence.Justin Mooney - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (1):98-114.
    The phasalist solution to the puzzle of the statue and the piece of clay claims that being a statue is a phase sortal property of the piece of clay, just like being a child is a phase sortal property of a human being. Some philosophers reject this solution because it cannot account for cases where the statue seems to gain and lose parts that the piece of clay does not. I rebut this objection by arguing, contrary to the prevailing view, (...)
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  19. Objects in Time: Studies of Persistence in B-time.Tobias Hansson Wahlberg - 2009 - Dissertation, Lund University
    This thesis is about the conceptualization of persistence of physical, middle-sized objects within the theoretical framework of the revisionary ‘B-theory’ of time. According to the B-theory, time does not flow, but is an extended and inherently directed fourth dimension along which the history of the universe is ‘laid out’ once and for all. It is a widespread view among philosophers that if we accept the B-theory, the commonsensical ‘endurance theory’ of persistence will have to be rejected. The endurance theory says (...)
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  20. Animalism and Person as a Basic Sort.Roger Melin - 2011 - Argument: Biannual Philosophical Journal 1 (1):69-86.
    In this paper Animalism is analysed. It will be argued that Animalism is correct in claiming (i) that being of a certain sort of animal S is a fundamental individuative substance sortal concept (animal of the species Homo Sapiens), (ii) that this implies that Animalism is correct in claiming that persons such as us are, by necessity, human beings, (iii) that remaining the same animal is a necessary condition for our identity over time. Contrary to Animalism it will be argued (...)
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  21. Dion and theon: An essentialist solution to an ancient puzzle.Michael B. Burke - 1994 - Journal of Philosophy 91 (3):129-139.
    Dion is a full-bodied man. Theon is that part of him which consists of all of him except his left foot. What becomes of Dion and Theon when Dion’s left foot is amputated? Employing the doctrine of sortal essentialism, I defend a surprising answer last defended by Chrysippus: that Dion survives while the seemingly unscathed Theon perishes. For replies to critics, see my publications of 1997 and (especially) 2003.
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  22. Plato, Aristotle, and the λόγος ἐκ τῶν πρός τι.Dirk Baltzly - 1997 - Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 15:177-206.
    In his commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics, Alexander of Aphrodisias quotes from Aristotle's now-lost work On the Ideas -- his account of the arguments offered by Plato for the theory of Forms and his criticisms of those arguments. This paper considers one of these arguments, the Argument from Relatives (ta pros ti). It considers how Plato argued for Forms or Ideas such as the Large Itself, the Just Itself and so on and whether Plato supposed that there were Forms corresponding to (...)
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  23. Duration in relativistic spacetime.Antony Eagle - 2009 - In Dean Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics: Volume 5. Oxford University Press UK. pp. 113-17.
    In ‘Location and Perdurance’ (2010), I argued that there are no compelling mereological or sortal grounds requiring the perdurantist to distinguish the molecule Abel from the atom Abel in Gilmore’s original case (2007). The remaining issue Gilmore originally raised concerned the ‘mass history’ of Adam and Abel, the distribution of ‘their’ mass over spacetime. My response to this issue was to admit that mass histories needed to be relativised to a way of partitioning the location of Adam/Abel, but that did (...)
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  24. Absolute Identity and the Trinity.Chris Tweedt - 2023 - Religious Studies 59 (1):34-54.
    Trinitarians are charged with at least two contradictions. First, the Father is God and the Son is God, so it seems to follow that the Father is the Son. Trinitarians affirm the premises but deny the conclusion, which seems contradictory. Second, the Father is a God, the Son is a God, and the Holy Spirit is a God, but the Father is not the Son, the Father is not the Holy Spirit, and the Son is not the Holy Spirit. This (...)
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  25. On Communication-Based D e Re Thought, Commitments D e Dicto, and Word Individuation.Adele Mercier - 1999 - In Kumiko Murasugi & Robert Stainton (eds.), Philosophy and linguistics. Boulder: Westview Press. pp. 85--111.
    Provides an account of how necessary subjective syntactic investments on the part of speakers affect the semantic contents of their words and the possibilities for their thought-contents.
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  26. Can Deep CNNs Avoid Infinite Regress/Circularity in Content Constitution?Jesse Lopes - 2023 - Minds and Machines 33 (3):507-524.
    The representations of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are formed from generalizing similarities and abstracting from differences in the manner of the empiricist theory of abstraction (Buckner, Synthese 195:5339–5372, 2018). The empiricist theory of abstraction is well understood to entail infinite regress and circularity in content constitution (Husserl, Logical Investigations. Routledge, 2001). This paper argues these entailments hold a fortiori for deep CNNs. Two theses result: deep CNNs require supplementation by Quine’s “apparatus of identity and quantification” in order to (1) (...)
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  27. Dion, theon, and the many-thinkers problem.Michael B. Burke - 2004 - Analysis 64 (3):242–250.
    Dion is a full-bodied man. Theon is that part of him which consists of all of him except his left foot. What becomes of Dion and Theon when Dion’s left foot is amputated? In Burke 1994, employing the doctrine of sortal essentialism, I defended a surprising position last defended by Chrysippus: that Dion survives while the seemingly unscathed Theon perishes. This paper defends that position against objections by Stone, Carter, Olson, and others. Most notably, it offers a novel, conservative solution (...)
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  28. Geometrical objects and figures in practical, pure, and applied geometry.Mario Bacelar Valente - 2020 - Disputatio. Philosophical Research Bulletin 9 (15):33-51.
    The purpose of this work is to address what notion of geometrical object and geometrical figure we have in different kinds of geometry: practical, pure, and applied. Also, we address the relation between geometrical objects and figures when this is possible, which is the case of pure and applied geometry. In practical geometry it turns out that there is no conception of geometrical object.
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  29. Kinds of Being by E.J. Lowe. [REVIEW]Michael Baur - 1992 - Review of Metaphysics 46 (1):166-168.
    This book is an extended reflection on a basic but far-reaching claim: "There are no 'bare' particulars". Because "individuals are necessarily individuals of a kind," Lowe argues, "realism with regard to particulars or individuals... implies realism with regard to sorts or kinds". A "sortal" concept is "a concept of a distinct sort or kind of individuals". Lowe's purpose in this book is to examine the meaning and implications of sortal concepts, and to challenge relativist conceptions of identity and reductivist strategies (...)
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  30. Introduction to 'Mass and Count in Linguistics, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science'.Friederike Moltmann - 2020 - In Mass and Count in Linguistics, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
    This introduction to 'Mass and Count...' gives an overview of different views of the mass-count distinction as well as an introduction to the papers in the edited volume.
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  31. Names, light nouns, and countability.Friederike Moltmann - 2022 - Linguistic Inquiry 54 (1):117 - 146.
    Proper names are generally taken to be count nouns. This paper argues that this is mistaken and that at least in some languages, for example German, names divide into mass and count. Making use of Kayne's (2005, 2010) theory of light nouns, this paper argues that light nouns are part of (simple) names and that a mass-count distinction among light nouns explains the behavior of certain types of names in German as mass rather than count. The paper elaborates the role (...)
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  32. Personales Leben und menschlicher Tod: Personale Identität als Prinzip der biomedizinischen Ethik, by Michael Quante. [REVIEW]Arto Laitinen - 2007 - European Journal of Philosophy 15 (2):306–313.
    Issues of personal identity are relevant in biomedical ethics, but in what way? The mainclaim that structures Quante’s book is that the debates about bioethics and medical ethicshave not been sufficiently clear about the different meanings of ‘personal identity’. Hedistinguishes four questions: 1)conditions of personhood (what properties and capacitiesmust a thing have to be a person: consciousness? self-consciousness? consciousness of timeand one’s persistence in time? rationality? capacity to recognize others and communicate with them?), 2) the question of unity or synchronous (...)
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  33. Towards a Cognitive Semantics of Type.Daniele Porello & Giancarlo Guizzardi - 2017 - In Daniele Porello & Giancarlo Guizzardi (eds.), AI*IA 2017 Advances in Artificial Intelligence - XVIth International Conference of the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence, Bari, Italy, November 14-17, 2017, Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 10640. pp. 428-440.
    Types are a crucial concept in conceptual modelling, logic, and knowledge representation as they are an ubiquitous device to un- derstand and formalise the classification of objects. We propose a logical treatment of types based on a cognitively inspired modelling that ac- counts for the amount of information that is actually available to a cer- tain agent in the task of classification. We develop a predicative modal logic whose semantics is based on conceptual spaces that model the ac- tual information (...)
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  34. Modeling Unicorns and Dead Cats: Applying Bressan’s ML ν to the Necessary Properties of Non-existent Objects.Tyke Nunez - 2018 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 47 (1):95–121.
    Should objects count as necessarily having certain properties, despite their not having those properties when they do not exist? For example, should a cat that passes out of existence, and so no longer is a cat, nonetheless count as necessarily being a cat? In this essay I examine different ways of adapting Aldo Bressan’s MLν so that it can accommodate an affirmative answer to these questions. Anil Gupta, in The Logic of Common Nouns, creates a number of languages that have (...)
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