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243Essence Without FundamentalityTheoria : An International Journal for Theory, History and Fundations of Science 30 (3): 349-363. 2015.I argue for a conception of essence that does not rely on distinctions of metaphysical fundamentality.
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134I develop an account of the sorts of considerations that should go into determining where the limits of possibility lie. (This is part of a series of four closely related papers. The other three are ‘On Specifying Truth-Conditions’, ‘Ontological Commitment’ and ‘An Actualist’s Guide to Quantifying-In’.).
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Plural PredicationDissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2000.My thesis consists of three self-contained but interconnected papers. In the first one, 'Word and Objects', I assume that it is possible to quantify over absolutely everything, and show that certain English sentences containing collective predicates resist paraphrase in first-order languages and even in first-order languages enriched with plural quantifiers. To capture such sentences I develop a language containing plural predicates . ;The introduction of plural predicates leads to an extension …Read more
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25Nota Crítica Sobre La Paradoja de Orayen (review)Critica 37 (109). 2005.La Paradoja de Orayen es dos cosas en una. Primeramente, es un homenaje al filósofo argentino Raúl Orayen (1942–2003). Pocos filósofos hispanoamericanos han gozado de la solidez intelectual y agudeza filosófica de Orayen, y pocos han sido tan queridos. Se trata, pues, de un homenaje bien merecido y que mucho agradecemos los que tuvimos la fortuna de interactuar con Raúl y aprender de él. En segundo lugar, el libro es una contribución a la filosofía hispanoamericana. Alberto Moretti y Guillermo Hurtad…Read more
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373A Plea for Semantic LocalismNoûs 47 (4): 647-679. 2011.The purpose of this paper is to defend a conception of language that does not rely on linguistic meanings, and use it to address the Sorites and Liar paradoxes
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199Reply to Florio and ShapiroMind 123 (489): 175-181. 2014.Florio and Shapiro take issue with an argument in ‘Hierarchies Ontological and Ideological’ for the conclusion that the set-theoretic hierarchy is open-ended. Here we clarify and reinforce the argument in light of their concerns.
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189Word 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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221On 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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206Nominalism, 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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129Beyond PluralsIn Agust\’in 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
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Philosophy of Language |
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |