Talking About a Universalist World |
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Authors: | David Braddon-Mitchell Kristie Miller |
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Institution: | (1) David Braddon-Mitchell, 2/245 Elizabeth St. North Hobart, Hobart, Tasmania, 7000, Australia;(2) Kristie Miller, 2/245 Elizabeth St. North Hobart, Hobart, Tasmania, 7000, Australia |
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Abstract: | The paper defends a combination of perdurantism with mereological universalism by developing semantics of temporary predications
of the sort ’some P is/was/will be (a) Q’. We argue that, in addition to the usual application of causal and other restrictions
on sortals, the grammatical form of such statements allows for rather different regimentations along three separate dimensions,
according to: (a) whether ‘P’ and ‘Q’ are being used as phase or substance sortal terms, (b) whether ‘is’, ‘was’, and ‘will
be’ are the ‘is’, ‘was’, ‘will be’ of identity or of constitution, and (c) whether ‘Q’ is being used as a subject or predicate
term. We conclude that this latitude is beneficial, as it conforms with linguistic reality (i.e., the multiple uses actually
in place) and also enables one to turn what is ordinarily perceived as a problem for universalist perdurantism viz., a commitment
to all sorts of weird and gerrymandered temporally extended entities, into an advantage, for the richness in questions allows
us to make sense of the many different readings of sentences of the same grammatical form. |
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Keywords: | four-dimensionalism gerrymandered objects past tense statements perdurantism persistence semantics universalism |
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