Recombining non-qualitative reality

Haecceitism and Hume’s Dictum are each controversial theses about necessity and possibility. According to haecceitism, there are qualitatively indiscernible possible worlds that differ only with respect to which individuals occupy which qualitative roles. According to Hume’s Dictum, there are no necessary connections between distinct entities or, as Humeans sometimes put it, reality admits of “free recombination” so any entities can co-exist or fail to co-exist. This paper introduces a puzzle that results from the combination of haecceitism and Hume’s Dictum. This puzzle revolves around the free recombination of non-qualitative properties like being Socrates. After considering several responses to this puzzle, I defend an ideology-driven solution, which dispenses with non-qualitative properties like being Socrates in favour of primitive theoretical ideology while, at the same time, preserving a commitment to both haecceitism and Hume’s Dictum.

     

Fusion First

Logics of part/whole relations frequently take parthood or proper parthood as primitive, defining the remaining mereological properties and relations in terms of them. I argue from considerations involving Weak Supplementation for the conclusion that we should take fusion as our mereological primitive. I point out that the intuitions supporting Weak Supplementation also support a stronger principle, Weak Supplementation of Pluralities, and that the principle can only do the work demanded by our intuitions when formulated in terms of a notion of fusion that cannot be defined merely in terms of mereological properties and relations, logic, and a membership relation. So, insofar as we think any definition of fusion must be so restricted, we have motivation to take fusion as primitive; further, we have greater insight into the motivation for our supplementation principle and which version of that principle we ought to endorse.     

Predication and cartographic representation

I argue that maps do not feature predication, as analyzed by Frege and Tarski. I take as my foil (Casati and Varzi, Parts and places, 1999), which attributes predication to maps. I argue that the details of Casati and Varzi’s own semantics militate against this attribution. Casati and Varzi emphasize what I call the Absence Intuition: if a marker representing some property (such as mountainous terrain) appears on a map, then absence of that marker from a map coordinate signifies absence of the corresponding property from the corresponding location. Predication elicits nothing like the Absence Intuition. “F(a)” does not, in general, signify that objects other than a lack property F. On the basis of this asymmetry, I argue that attaching a marker to map coordinates is a different mode of semantic composition than attaching a predicate to a singular term.     

Emotions–Adaptive Standards And/Or Primitive Constructs: A Reply to Mascolo and Mancuso

Abstract

In replying to Mascolo & Mancuso's paper, I have contrasted their functionalist approach to emotional states and experience with my position on emotions as epigenetically-available primitive constructs. Biologically, Mascolo & Mancuso treat emotions as mobilizaiton in the face of discrepancies. My proposal of a four-dimensional model provides a biological grounding for the marvellous diverisyt of human emotional experience. Where Mascolo & Mancuso treat emotions as discrete entities and highlight emotion knowledge, J have suggested emotions operate as bipolar constructs, and I have highlighted experience. We should attend to emotions in terms of both knowledge and experience, but it is important to maintain the distinction     

Why Colour Primitivism?

Primitivism is the view that colors are sui generis properties of physical objects. The basic insight underlying primitivism is that colours are as we see them, i.e. they are categorical properties of physical objects—simple, monadic, constant, etc.—just like shapes. As such, they determine the content of colour experience. Accepting the premise that colours are sui generis properties of physical objects, this paper seeks to show that ascribing primitive properties to objects is, ipso facto, ascribing to objects irreducible dispositions to look coloured, and that anything that primitive redness can do, the non-reductive disposition to look red can do just as well. What makes primitivism suspect is not the commitment to sui generis properties, but instead the claim that colours are more than dispositions. Since, as I show, whatever primitivism appeals to for the purpose of arguing that colours are more than dispositions—objectivity, explanation, causation, phenomenology, constancy, etc.—can also be invoked by non-reductive dispositionalism, the feature that purportedly renders colours more than dispositions remains mysterious.     

Semantic emphasis in causal sentences

A shift in emphasis can change the truth-value of a singular causal sentence. This poses a challenge to the view that singular sentences predicate a relation. I argue that emphasized causal sentences conjoin predication of a causal relation between events with predication of a relation of causal relevance between states of affairs (or perhaps facts). This is superior to the treatments of such sentences offered by Achinstein, Dretske, Kim, Sanford, Bennett, and Levin. My proposal affords clarity regarding logical structure, at least at a certain level of detail. It makes the relation between the content of an emphasized causal sentence and the unemphasized version clear. It answers some questions about the ontological requirements of the truth of emphasized causal sentences, without introducing new entities (as do some other accounts) or unacceptable consequences for identity and individuation of events.     

Nominalizing Quantifiers

Quantified expressions in natural language generally are taken to act like quantifiers in logic, which either range over entities that need to satisfy or not satisfy the predicate in order for the sentence to be true or otherwise are substitutional quantifiers. I will argue that there is a philosophically rather important class of quantified expressions in English that act quite differently, a class that includes something, nothing, and several things. In addition to expressing quantification, such expressions act like nominalizations, introducing a new domain of objects that would not have been present in the semantic structure of the sentence otherwise. The entities those expressions introduce are of just the same sort as those that certain ordinary nominalizations refer to (such as John's wisdom or John's belief that S), namely they are tropes or entities related to tropes. Analysing certain quantifiers as nominalizing quantifiers will shed a new light on philosophical issues such as the status of properties and the nature of propositional attitudes.     

Grounding the Unreal

The scientific successes of the last 400 years strongly suggest a picture on which our scientific theories exhibit a layered structure of dependence and determination. Economics is dependent on and determined by psychology; psychology in its turn is, plausibly, dependent on and determined by biology; and so it goes. It is tempting to explain this layered structure of dependence and determination among our theories by appeal to a corresponding layered structure of dependence and determination among the entities putatively treated by those theories. In this paper, I argue that we can resist this temptation: we can explain the sense in which, e.g., the biological truths are dependent on and determined by chemical truths without appealing to properly biological or chemical entities. This opens the door to a view on which, though there are more truths than just the purely physical truths, there are no entities, states, or properties other than the purely physical entities, states, and properties. I argue that some familiar strategies to explicate the idea of a layered structure of theories by appeal to reduction, ground, and truthmaking encounter difficulties. I then show how these difficulties point the way to a more satisfactory treatment which appeals to something very close to the notion of ground. Finally, I show how this treatment provides a theoretical setting in which we might fruitfully frame debates about which entities there really are.     

Coincidence: The Grounding Problem,Object-Specifying Principles,and Some Consequences

This paper lays out the basic structure of any view involving coincident entities, in the light of the grounding problem. While the account is not novel, I highlight fundamental features, to which attention is not usually properly drawn. With this in place, I argue for a number of further claims: (1) The basic differences between coincident objects are modal differences, and any other differences between them need to be explained in terms of these differences. More specifically, the basic difference is not a difference in sort. (2) A number of recent defenses of coincidence, which share the basic structure I outline, misidentify what, in their accounts, plays the basic role of addressing (if not solving) the grounding problem. More tentatively, I argue (3) Coincident entities differ only in these modal properties, and properties they entail. In particular, they do not differ in properties like ‘being a tree,’ ‘being a statue,’ or aesthetic properties, and finally (4) in light of how the account of coincidence offered addresses the grounding problem, the grounding problem provides no reason to prefer monism to pluralism.     

Comparing pluralities

What does it mean to compare sets of objects along a scale, for example by saying “the men are taller than the women”? We explore comparison of pluralities in two experiments, eliciting comparison judgments while varying the properties of the members of each set. We find that a plurality is judged as “bigger” when the mean size of its members is larger than the mean size of the competing plurality. These results are incompatible with previous accounts, in which plural comparison is inferred from many instances of singular comparison between the members of the sets (Matushansky &; Ruys, 2006). Our results suggest the need for a type of predication that ascribes properties to plural entities, not just individuals, based on aggregate statistics of their members. More generally, these results support the idea that sets and their properties are actively represented as single units.     

Calvin's Metaphysics of Our Union with Christ

This study of the Calvin corpus asks whether the older works of Emmen, Dominicé and Kolfhaus and English monographs adequately answer the question of how human beings can receive life‐giving properties from the person of Christ without recognizing Calvin's use of the conceptual tool of reduplicative predication to explain our unio spiritualis cum Christo. Thanks to a renaissance in the use of conceptual analysis in the service of theology, we identify Calvin's use of this conceptual tool and propose a tentative solution to the vexing question of how he predicates a unio spiritualis between humans and the person of the Mediator, since he states that the unio is, in the first instance, between our self‐subsistent natura humana and Christ's anhypostatic natura humana. How then can this unio‘channel’ life‐giving properties to us? Calvin himself states the rule that ‘the flesh of Christ does not of itself have a power so great as to quicken us’; that is, only a supposit, not a nature, can perform such operations. Calvin relieves this predicative tension by employing the conceptual tool of reduplicative predication – the borrowing and ‘channeling’ of properties across the hypostatic union of Christ as well as across the unio spiritualis– such that Homo secundum istum unionem est iustus.     

Aristotle on Predication

A predicate logic typically has a heterogeneous semantic theory. Subjects and predicates have distinct semantic roles: subjects refer; predicates characterize. A sentence expresses a truth if the object to which the subject refers is correctly characterized by the predicate. Traditional term logic, by contrast, has a homogeneous theory: both subjects and predicates refer; and a sentence is true if the subject and predicate name one and the same thing. In this paper, I will examine evidence for ascribing to Aristotle the view that subjects and predicates refer. If this is correct, then it seems that Aristotle, like the traditional term logician, problematically conflates predication and identity claims. I will argue that we can ascribe to Aristotle the view that both subjects and predicates refer, while holding that he would deny that a sentence is true just in case the subject and predicate name one and the same thing. In particular, I will argue that Aristotle's core semantic notion is not identity but the weaker relation of constitution. For example, the predication ‘All men are mortal’ expresses a true thought, in Aristotle's view, just in case the mereological sum of humans is a part of the mereological sum of mortals.     

God’s spatial unlocatedness prevents him from being the creator of the universe: A new argument for the nonexistence of God

I discuss the relations between God and spatial entities, such as the universe. An example of a relation between God and a spatial entity is the relation,causes. Such relations are, in D.M. Armstrong’s words, ‘realm crossing’ relations: relations between or among spatial entities and entities in the realm of the spatially unlocated. I discuss an apparent problem with such realm crossing relations. If this problem is serious enough, as I will argue it is, it implies that God cannot be the creator of the universe I also discuss that if God cannot be the creator of the universe, then God does not exist.     

Mereology in Aristotle's Assertoric Syllogistic

How does Aristotle think about sentences like ‘Every x is y’ in the Prior Analytics? A recently popular answer conceives of these sentences as expressing a mereological relationship between x and y: the sentence is true just in case x is, in some sense, a part of y. I argue that the motivations for this interpretation have so far not been compelling. I provide a new justification for the mereological interpretation. First, I prove a very general algebraic soundness and completeness result that unifies the most important soundness and completeness results to date. Then I argue that this result vindicates the mereological interpretation. In contrast to previous interpretations, this argument shows how Aristotle's conception of predication in mereological terms can do important logical work.     

BRING BACK THE MAGIC

Abstract:  Magical ersatzism is the view that possible worlds are primitive abstract entities. In On the Plurality of Worlds , David Lewis presented what appeared to many to be a devastating argument against magical ersatzism. In this paper, I show that Lewis' central argument does not succeed. Magical ersatzism remains a viable theory of possible worlds.     

Is transcendental idealism coherent?

I argue that transcendental idealism can be understood as a coherent and plausible account of experience. I begin by proposing an interpretation of the claim that we know only appearances that does not imply that the objects of experience are anything other than independently real objects. As I understand it, the claim here is abouthow objects appear to us, and not aboutwhat objects appear to us. After this, I offer a version of a correspondence account of veridical experience, in virtue of which these independent entities can satisfy the contents of our experiences. Specifically, I claim that veridical experience can be construed as a kind of map of reality in itself, and that these independent entities satisfy the contents of our experiences when they are, given the proper method of projection, the objects mapped by those experiences.     

Evidence for a predication effect in deciding on the personal significance of abstract word meanings

Two experiments were conducted on college students (combinedN=240) to test for the effect of sentence predication on the independent judgement of word significance. Students judge which of two nouns was personally more significant to them. They also employed these nouns in a task which required them to place one word in the subject location and the other in the predicate location of an incomplete sentence. Administration order of these two experimental tasks was counterbalanced. Experiment I demonstrated that when the sentence-completion task is taken first-in which a predication is necessarily framed between the two nouns-the student will subsequently be more likely to judge the noun placed in the subject location of the sentence as more significant than its counterpart (p<.025). Experiment II provided a cross-validation of these findings and also demonstrated that the location of the more significant noun in the sentence can vary between subject and object location depending on whether the verb relation in the sentence unites the two nouns positively or negatively (p<.001).     

Elementary Polyhedral Mereotopology

A region-based model of physical space is one in which the primitive spatial entities are regions, rather than points, and in which the primitive spatial relations take regions, rather than points, as their relata. Historically, the most intensively investigated region-based models are those whose primitive relations are topological in character; and the study of the topology of physical space from a region-based perspective has come to be called mereotopology. This paper concentrates on a mereotopological formalism originally introduced by Whitehead, which employs a single primitive binary relation C(x,y) (read: x is in contact with y). Thus, in this formalism, all topological facts supervene on facts about contact. Because of its potential application to theories of qualitative spatial reasoning, Whitehead's primitive has recently been the subject of scrutiny from within the Artificial Intelligence community. Various results regarding the mereotopology of the Euclidean plane have been obtained, settling such issues as expressive power, axiomatization and the existence of alternative models. The contribution of the present paper is to extend some of these results to the mereotopology of three-dimensional Euclidean space. Specifically, we show that, in a first-order setting where variables range over tame subsets of R ³, Whitehead's primitive is maximally expressive for topological relations; and we deduce a corollary constraining the possible region-based models of the space we inhabit.     

Hume’s Principle and Axiom V Reconsidered: Critical Reflections on Frege and His Interpreters

In this paper, I shall discuss several topics related to Frege’s paradigms of second-order abstraction principles and his logicism. The discussion includes a critical examination of some controversial views put forward mainly by Robin Jeshion, Tyler Burge, Crispin Wright, Richard Heck and John MacFarlane. In the introductory section, I try to shed light on the connection between logical abstraction and logical objects. The second section contains a critical appraisal of Frege’s notion of evidence and its interpretation by Jeshion, the introduction of the course-of-values operator and Frege’s attitude towards Axiom V, in the expression of which this operator occurs as the key primitive term. Axiom V says that the course-of-values of the function f is identical with the course-of-values of the function g if and only if f and g are coextensional. In the third section, I intend to show that in Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884) Frege hardly could have construed Hume’s Principle (HP) as a primitive truth of logic and used it as an axiom governing the cardinality operator as a primitive sign. HP expresses that the number of Fs is identical with the number of Gs if and only if F and G are equinumerous. In the fourth section, I argue that Wright falls short of making a convincing case for the alleged analyticity of HP. In the final section, I canvass Heck’s arguments for his contention that Frege knew he could deduce the simplest laws of arithmetic from HP without invoking Axiom V. I argue that they do not carry conviction. I conclude this section by rejecting an interpretation concerning HP suggested by MacFarlane.     

Heidegger the Metaphysician: Modes‐of‐Being and Grundbegriffe

Modes‐of‐being (Seinsarten) figure centrally in Heidegger's masterwork Being and Time. Testimony to this is Heidegger's characterisation of two of his most celebrated enquiries—the Existential analytic and the Zeug analysis—as investigations into the respective modes‐of‐being of the entities concerned. Yet despite the importance of this concept, commentators disagree widely about what a mode‐of‐being is. In this paper, I systematically outline and defend a novel and exegetically grounded interpretation of this concept. Strongly opposed to Kantian readings, such as those advocated by Taylor Carman and Cristina Lafont, I interpret a mode‐of‐being as a universal that defines a district (Bezirk)—that is, a natural class of entities that ought to be conceptualised in a special way. As such, every mode‐of‐being plays an important metaphysical and epistemic role: serving both to unify a natural class of a high degree of generality and as the interpretandum of an act yielding the basic‐concepts (Grundbegriffe) pertaining to the entities therein. In explicating and arguing for this interpretation, I attribute a characteristically Aristotelian philosophical position to the early Heidegger, encompassing both metaphysical and epistemological realism and a conceptualist theory of universals.