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32Word and objectsNoûs 36 (3). 2002.The aim of this essay is to show that the subject-matter of ontology is richer than one might have thought. Our route will be indirect. We will argue that there are circumstances under which standard first-order regimentation is unacceptable, and that more appropriate varieties of regimentation lead to unexpected kinds of ontological commitment.
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24On Specifying Truth-ConditionsPhilosophical Review 117 (3): 385-443. 2008.This essay is a study of ontological commitment, focused on the special case of arithmetical discourse. It tries to get clear about what would be involved in a defense of the claim that arithmetical assertions are ontologically innocent and about why ontological innocence matters. The essay proceeds by questioning traditional assumptions about the connection between the objects that are used to specify the truth-conditions of a sentence, on the one hand, and the objects whose existence is requir…Read more
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31Nominalism, Trivialism, LogicismPhilosophia Mathematica 23 (1). 2015.This paper extracts some of the main theses in the philosophy of mathematics from my book, The Construction of Logical Space. I show that there are important limits to the availability of nominalistic paraphrase functions for mathematical languages, and suggest a way around the problem by developing a method for specifying nominalistic contents without corresponding nominalistic paraphrases. Although much of the material in this paper is drawn from the book — and from an earlier paper — I hope t…Read more
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23Beyond PluralsIn Agustín Rayo & Gabriel Uzquiano (eds.), Absolute generality, Oxford University Press. pp. 220--54. 2006.I have two main objectives. The first is to get a better understanding of what is at issue between friends and foes of higher-order quantification, and of what it would mean to extend a Boolos-style treatment of second-order quantification to third- and higherorder quantification. The second objective is to argue that in the presence of absolutely general quantification, proper semantic theorizing is essentially unstable: it is impossible to provide a suitably general semantics for a given langu…Read more
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15A puzzle about de rebus beliefsAnalysis 60 (4). 2000.George Boolos (1984, 1985) has extensively investigated plural quantifi- cation, as found in such locutions as the Geach-Kaplan sentence There are critics who admire only one another, and he found that their logic cannot be adequately formalized within the first-order predicate calculus. If we try to formalize the sentence by a paraphrase using individual variables that range over critics, or over sets or collections or fusions of critics, we misrepresent its logical structure. To represent plural…Read more
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30PluralsPhilosophy Compass 2 (3). 2007.Forthcoming in Philosophical Compass. I explain why plural quantifiers and predicates have been thought to be philosophically significant.
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1Field on revengeIn J. C. Beall (ed.), Revenge of the liar: new essays on the paradox, Oxford University Press. 2007.
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181Fragmentation and information accessIn Cristina Borgoni, Dirk Kindermann & Andrea Onofri (eds.), The Fragmented Mind, Oxford University Press. 2021.In order to predict and explain behavior, one cannot specify the mental state of an agent merely by saying what information she possesses. Instead one must specify what information is available to an agent relative to various purposes. Specifying mental states in this way allows us to accommodate cases of imperfect recall, cognitive accomplishments involved in logical deduction, the mental states of confused or fragmented subjects, and the difference between propositional knowledge and know-ho…Read more
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18Reply to CriticsInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 57 (4): 498-534. 2014.Cameron, Eklund, Hofweber, Linnebo, Russell and Sider have written critical essays on my book, The Construction of Logical Space (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Here I offer some replies
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38Ontological commitmentPhilosophy Compass 2 (3). 2007.I propose a way of thinking aboout content, and a related way of thinking about ontological commitment. (This is part of a series of four closely related papers. The other three are ‘On Specifying Truth-Conditions’, ‘An Actualist’s Guide to Quantifying In’ and ‘An Account of Possibility’.).
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Philosophy of Language |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |