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.     

Property Designators,Predicates, and Rigidity

The article discusses an idea of how to extend the notion of rigidity to predicates, namely the idea that predicates stand in a certain systematic semantic relation to properties, such that this relation may hold rigidly or nonrigidly. The relation (which I call signification) can be characterised by recourse to canonical property designators which are derived from predicates (or general terms) by means of nominalization: a predicate signifies that property which the derived property designator designates. Whether signification divides into rigid and non-rigid cases will then depend uponwhether canonical property designators divide into rigid and non-rigid ones. But, I shall argue, they do not, and so the only notion of rigidity gained this way is trivial. To show this, I first focus on the kind of canonical property designators which could be thought to be nonrigid, canonical designators such as having the colour of ripe tomatoes which themselves contain non-rigid property designators. An argument to the effect that such complex canonical designators are non-rigid is rebutted, five arguments to the effect that they are rigid are formulated, and finally an explanation of their rigidity based on the general nature of canonical property designators is presented.     

Tolerance and Mixed Consequence in the S’valuationist Setting

In a previous paper (see ??Tolerant, Classical, Strict??, henceforth TCS) we investigated a semantic framework to deal with the idea that vague predicates are tolerant, namely that small changes do not affect the applicability of a vague predicate even if large changes do. Our approach there rests on two main ideas. First, given a classical extension of a predicate, we can define a strict and a tolerant extension depending on an indifference relation associated to that predicate. Second, we can use these notions of satisfaction to define mixed consequence relations that capture non-transitive tolerant reasoning. Although we gave some empirical motivation for the use of strict and tolerant extensions, making use of them commits us to the view that sentences of the form ?? ${p {\vee} {\neg} p}$ ?? and ?? ${p {\wedge} {\neg} p}$ ?? are not automatically valid or unsatisfiable, respectively. Some philosophers might take this commitment as a negative outcome of our previous proposal. We think, however, that the general ideas underlying our previous approach to vagueness can be implemented in a variety of ways. This paper explores the possibility of defining mixed notions of consequence in the more classical super/sub-valuationist setting and examines to what extent any of these notions captures non-transitive tolerant reasoning.     

The over-generalization problem: predicates rigidly signifying the “unnatural”

According to the simple proposal, a predicate is rigid iff it signifies the same property across the different possible worlds. The simple proposal has been claimed to suffer from an over-generalization problem. Assume that one can make sense of predicates signifying properties, and assume that trivialization concerns, to the effect that the notion would cover any predicate whatsoever, can be overcome. Still, the proposal would over-generalize, the worry has it, by covering predicates for artifactual, social, or evaluative properties, such as ‘is a knife,’ ‘is a bachelor,’ or ‘is funny.’ In defense, it is argued that rigidity for predicates as characterized plays the appropriate theoretical role, and that the contention that “unnatural” properties are not to be rigidly signified is ungrounded.     

Semantic reasons

An analysis of a predicate normally takes the form of a condition that is both necessary and sufficient for the predicate's application. Here I consider the idea, due originally to Friedrich Waismann, that semantic analyses might include conditions that are defeasible, and so allow for exceptions. Analyses of this sort can be expressed in nonmonotonic logic, a post-Waismann development. I'll argue that defeasibility makes analysis tractable, without making it trivial. I'll also show that a defeasible account of vague predicates can predict our intuitions about particular cases (for instance, that a seven-foot person counts as tall) without drawing artificial boundaries.     

On the unification argument for the predicate view on proper names

The predicate view on proper names opts for a uniform semantic representation of proper nouns like ‘Alfred’ as predicates on the level of logical form. Early defences of this view can be found in Sloat (Language, vol. 45, pp. 26–30, 1969) and Burge (J. Philos. 70: 425–439, 1973), but there is an increasing more recent interest in this view on proper names. My paper aims to provide a reconstruction and critique of Burge’s main argument for the predicate view on proper names, which is still used by several current philosophers in defence of this view. I have called this argument the unification argument. I will present a stepwise interpretation and reconstruction of this argument, consider several possible responses to it and defend a specific response to it in detail.     

Capacity and Potentiality: Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ.6–7 from the Perspective of the De Anima

The notion of a capacity (dunamis) in the sense of a power to bring about or undergo change plays a key role in Aristotle??s theories about the natural world. However, in Metaphysics ?? Aristotle also extends ??capacity??, and the corresponding concept of ??activity?? (energeia), to cases where we want to say that something is in capacity, or in activity, such and such but not, or not directly, in virtue of being capable of initiating or undergoing change. This paper seeks to clarify and confirm a certain view of how Aristotle wishes us to see the relationship between the two uses of ??capacity?? and ??activity??. To that end, I consider also Aristotle??s employment of the terms in the De Anima, which sheds light on the key examples which direct the discussion in Metaph. ??.     

Interrogative Belief Revision Based on Epistemic Strategies

I develop a dynamic logic for reasoning about ??interrogative belief revision??, a new branch of belief revision theory that has been developed in a small number of papers, beginning with E. J. Olsson and D. Westlund??s paper ??On the role of the research agenda in epistemic change?? [12]. In interrogative belief revision, epistemic states are taken to include a research agenda, consisting of questions the agent seeks to answer. I present a logic for revision of such epistemic states based on the notion of an epistemic strategy, a stable plan of action that determines changes in the agent??s research agenda. This idea is a further development of an idea put forward in [6], that changes in the research agenda of an agent should be determined by stable, ??long term?? research interests. I provide complete axioms and a decidability result for the logic.     

The Rationale Behind Revision-Rule Semantics

According to Gupta and Belnap, the “extensional behavior” of ‘true’ matches that of a circularly defined predicate. Besides promising to explain semantic paradoxicality, their general theory of circular predicates significantly liberalizes the framework of truth-conditional semantics. The authors’ discussions of the rationale behind that liberalization invoke two distinct senses in which a circular predicate’s semantic behavior is explained by a “revision rule” carrying hypothetical information about its extension. Neither attempted explanation succeeds. Their theory may however be modified to employ a relativized notion of extension. The resulting contextualist semantics for ‘true’ construes circularity as a pragmatic phenomenon.     

Objects, events and "to be" verbs in Spanish--an ERP study of the syntax-semantics interface

In Spanish, objects and events at subject position constrain the selection of different forms of the auxiliary verb “to be”: locative predicates about objects require “estar en”, while those relating to events require “ser en”, both translatable as “to be in”. Subjective ratings showed that while the “object + ser + en” is considered as incorrect, the “event + estar + en” combination is also perceived as unacceptable but to a lesser degree. In an ERP study, we evaluated the impact of a purely semantic distinction (object versus events) on the subsequent processing of these auxiliary verbs followed by locatives in Spanish. For the “ser en” predicate, the P600 component was larger when the subject was an object than when it was an event. This P600 effect is consistent with an online repair of the defining predicate when it does not fit with the adequate semantic properties of the subject. On the other hand, for the “estar en” predicate, event subjects when compared to object subjects showed more positive ongoing amplitudes between 280 and 380 ms after the presentation of the “en” preposition, followed by a longer positive wave starting around 400 ms and lasting until 700 ms after the presentation of the following determiner, with central and frontal scalp distributions respectively. Thus, the different subject-predicate combinations, depending on the semantic features of the subjects, triggered syntactic reparatory processes at a structural level. These findings are consistent with an incremental interpretation of sentence meaning based on the interaction between syntactic and semantic information.     

Women’s anger, epistemic personhood, and self-respect: an application of Lehrer’s work on self-trust

I argue in this paper that the work of Keith Lehrer, especially in his book Self-Trust has applications to feminist ethics; specifically care ethics, which has become the leading form of normative sentimentalist ethics. I extend Lehrer??s ideas concerning reason and justification of belief beyond what he says by applying the notion of evaluation central to his account of acceptance to the need for evaluation of emotions. The inability to evaluate and attain justification of one??s emotions is an epistemic failure that leads one not to act on one??s own aspirations and desires and treat those desires as if they did not exist. I argue that this is a common condition among women in patriarchal societies because patriarchy can cause women to believe that they are not worthy of their trust concerning what they accept, specifically acceptance of their anger over their own mistreatment. As a result, many women are unable to realize the self-protective role of their anger. All of this reflects a lack of what I shall call epistemic personhood, a concept based on Lehrer??s theory concerning the keystone role of self-trust in the epistemic arch of rationality, justification and knowledge. Lastly, I use this concept of epistemic personhood to develop a care ethical account of self-respect that counters the Kantian account.     

Kierkegaard and the problem of special relationships: Ferreira, Krishek and the ‘God filter’

Kierkegaard??s Works of Love has often been accused of being unable to deal adequately with ??special relationships??. This debate has re-emerged in a fresh form in a recent disagreement in the secondary literature between M. Jamie Ferreira and Sharon Krishek. Krishek charges Ferreira with failing to acknowledge some important conflicts in Kierkegaard??s account of preferential love. In this article, I argue that some key passages are indeed insufficiently addressed in Ferreira??s account. Yet ultimately, I argue, Krishek ends up condemning the Kierkegaard of Works of Love unfairly. As a solution to Krishek??s concerns, I present a defence of Kierkegaard??s position centred round the image of God as a ??filter?? through which our loves must pass. Also, while acknowledging that Krishek raises some important questions for Ferreira??s account, I outline a possible response, based in part on Kierkegaard??s idea that neighbour love is only a ??sketch?? until brought to fruition in any given manifestation of concrete love. Ultimately, I claim, Kierkegaard??s position in Works of Love can indeed be defended from Krishek??s critique.     

John Buridan on the Possibility of Defining Definition

The study of the medieval reception of Aristotle’s Topics has largely been oriented toward debates on dialectical argumentation. And this is surely right. Nonetheless, I wish to approach John Buridan’s commentary on the Topics from another perspective, which highlights some semantic features of the set of predicates around which the work is organized. Thus, in my paper I will first reconstruct Buridan’s account of the identification of the predicates discussed in the Topics. I will argue that, for him, they are different in that they reflect one or more features of the way in which definiens and definiendum relate. By doing this, I will shed light on the role the notion of definition plays in Buridan’s commentary, so that an interpretation of it as a work on definition becomes promising. In the second part of the paper, I will offer an analysis of Buridan’s first move in his commentary toward a theory of definition. It concerns the problem of whether there is a definition of definition. In examining Buridan’s answer, I will argue for the close connection between his treatment of definitions and his theory of supposition, so that distinctions among the different modes of supposition help him to disambiguate statements in their possible meanings, and thus to clarify the difficulty related to the definability of definition.     

Keith Lehrer on the basing relation

In this paper, we review Keith Lehrer??s account of the basing relation, with particular attention to the two cases he offered in support of his theory, Raco (Lehrer, Theory of knowledge, 1990; Theory of knowledge, (2nd ed.), 2000) and the earlier case of the superstitious lawyer (Lehrer, The Journal of Philosophy, 68, 311?C313, 1971). We show that Lehrer??s examples succeed in making his case that beliefs need not be based on the evidence, in order to be justified. These cases show that it is the justification (rather than the belief) that must be based in the evidence. We compare Lehrer??s account of basing with some alternative accounts that have been offered, and show why Lehrer??s own account is more plausible.     

Logical consequence: A defense of Tarski

In his classic 1936 essay “On the Concept of Logical Consequence”, Alfred Tarski used the notion of satisfaction to give a semantic characterization of the logical properties. Tarski is generally credited with introducing the model-theoretic characterization of the logical properties familiar to us today. However, in his book, The Concept of Logical Consequence, Etchemendy argues that Tarski's account is inadequate for quite a number of reasons, and is actually incompatible with the standard model-theoretic account. Many of his criticisms are meant to apply to the model-theoretic account as well. In this paper, I discuss the following four critical charges that Etchemendy makes against Tarski and his account of the logical properties:

1. Tarski's account of logical consequence diverges from the standard model-theoretic account at points where the latter account gets it right.
2. Tarski's account cannot be brought into line with the model-theoretic account, because the two are fundamentally incompatible.
3. There are simple counterexamples (enumerated by Etchemendy) which show that Tarski's account is wrong.
4. Tarski committed a modal fallacy when arguing that his account captures our pre-theoretical concept of logical consequence, and so obscured an essential weakness of the account.
5. Tarski's account depends on there being a distinction between the “logical terms” and the “non-logical terms” of a language, but (according to Etchemendy) there are very simple (even first-order) languages for which no such distinction can be made. Etchemendy's critique raises historical and philosophical questions about important foundational work. However, Etchemendy is mistaken about each of these central criticisms. In the course of justifying that claim, I give a sustained explication and defense of Tarski's account. Moreover, since I will argue that Tarski's account and the model-theoretic account really do come to the same thing, my subsequent defense of Tarski's account against Etchemendy's other attacks doubles as a defense against criticisms that would apply equally to the familiar model-theoretic account of the logical properties.

     

Truthmaking without necessitation

I propose an account truthmaking that provides truthmakers for negative truths. The account replaces Truthmaker Necessitarianism with a ??Duplication Principle??, according to which a suitable entity T is a truthmaker for a proposition p just in case the existence of an appropriate counterpart of T entails the truth of p, where the counterpart relation is cashed out in terms of qualitative duplication. My account captures an intuitive notion of truthmakers as ??things the way they are??, validates two appealing principles about entailment and containment proposed by David Armstrong, and invalidates the controversial Disjunction Thesis.     

Vagueness: Why Do We Believe in Tolerance?

The tolerance principle, the idea that vague predicates are insensitive to sufficiently small changes, remains the main bone of contention between theories of vagueness. In this paper I examine three sources behind our ordinary belief in the tolerance principle, to establish whether any of them might give us a good reason to revise classical logic. First, I compare our understanding of tolerance in the case of precise predicates and in the case of vague predicates. While tolerance in the case of precise predicates results from approximation, tolerance in the case of vague predicates appears to originate from two more specific sources: semantic indeterminacy on the one hand, and epistemic indiscriminability on the other. Both give us good and coherent grounds to revise classical logic. Epistemic indiscriminability, it is argued, may be more fundamental than semantic indeterminacy to justify the intuition that vague predicates are tolerant.     

Relative truth and the first person

In recent work on context-dependency, it has been argued that certain types of sentences give rise to a notion of relative truth. In particular, sentences containing predicates of personal taste and moral or aesthetic evaluation as well as epistemic modals are held to express a proposition (relative to a context of use) which is true or false not only relative to a world of evaluation, but other parameters as well, such as standards of taste or knowledge or an agent. I will argue that the sentences that apparently give rise to relative truth should be understood by relating them in a certain way to the first person. More precisely, such sentences express what I will call ‘first-person-based genericity’, a form of generalization that is based on an essential first-person application of the predicate. The account differs from standard relative truth account in crucial respects: it is not the truth of the proposition expressed that is relative to the first person; the proposition expressed by a sentence with a predicate of taste rather has absolute truth conditions. Instead it is the propositional content itself that requires a first-personal cognitive access whenever it is entertained. This account, I will argue, avoids a range of problems that standard relative truth theories of the sentences in question face and explains a number of further peculiarities that such sentences display.