•  106
    Ontology and objectivity
    Dissertation, Stanford University. 1999.
    Ontology is the study of what there is, what kinds of things make up reality. Ontology seems to be a very difficult, rather speculative discipline. However, it is trivial to conclude that there are properties, propositions and numbers, starting from only necessarily true or analytic premises. This gives rise to a puzzle about how hard ontological questions are, and relates to a puzzle about how important they are. And it produces the ontologyobjectivity dilemma: either (certain) ontological ques…Read more
  •  28
    Intellectual Humility and the Limits of Conceptual Representation
    Res Philosophica 93 (3): 553-565. 2016.
    This paper investigates the connection of intellectual humility to a somewhat neglected form of a limitation of human knowledge—a limitation in which facts or truths we human beings can in principle represent conceptually. I consider some arguments for such a limitation, and argue that, under standard assumptions, the sub-algebra hypothesis is the best hypothesis about how the facts we can represent relate to the ones that we can not. This hypothesis has a consequence for intellectual humility i…Read more
  •  56
    Encuneral noun phrases
    with Jeff Pelletier
    The semantics of noun phrases (NPs) is of crucial importance for both philosophy and linguistics. Throughout much of the history of the debate about the semantics of noun phrases there has been an implicit assumption about how they are to be understood. Basically, it is the assumption that NPs come only in two kinds. In this paper we would like to make that assumption explicit and discuss it and its status in the semantics of natural language. We will have a look at how the assumption is to be u…Read more
  •  96
    Cardinality Arguments Against Regular Probability Measures
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 3 (2): 166-175. 2014.
    Cardinality arguments against regular probability measures aim to show that no matter which ordered field ℍ we select as the measures for probability, we can find some event space F of sufficiently large cardinality such that there can be no regular probability measure from F into ℍ. In particular, taking ℍ to be hyperreal numbers won't help to guarantee that probability measures can always be regular. I argue that such cardinality arguments fail, since they rely on the wrong conception of the r…Read more
  •  6
    Un enigma per l’ontologia
    Rivista di Estetica 32 41-69. 2006.
    1 Ontologia L’ontologia è la disciplina filosofica che cerca di scoprire che cosa c’è: quali entità costituiscono la realtà, di che materia è fatto il mondo? Dunque l’ontologia è parte della metafisica ed infatti sembra rappresentare all’incirca la metà della metafisica. Essa cerca di stabilire quali (generi di) cose ci siano, l’altra metà cerca di scoprire quali siano le proprietà (generali) di queste cose e quali relazioni (generali) intercorrano fra esse. La risoluzione di questioni nell’a...
  •  46
    An under-explored intermediate position between traditional materialism and traditional idealism is the view that although the spatiotemporal world is purely material, minds nonetheless have a metaphysically special place in it. One such intermediate position is that minds must exist, by metaphysical necessity, in any material world, and thus a mindless material world is impossible. This position, labeled The Subjectivity Thesis by Anton Friedrich Koch, was defended by him with an intriguing, pu…Read more
  •  43
    Hyperreal-Valued Probability Measures Approximating a Real-Valued Measure
    Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 57 (3): 369-374. 2016.
    We give a direct and elementary proof of the fact that every real-valued probability measure can be approximated—up to an infinitesimal—by a hyperreal-valued one which is regular and defined on the whole powerset of the sample space.
  •  53
    Extraction, displacement, and focus: A Reply to Balcerak Jackson (2013)
    Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (3): 263-267. 2014.
    On the one hand they seem to be quite obviously truth conditionally equivalent, but on the other hand they seem to be about different things. Whereas (1) is about Jupiter and its moons, (2) is about numbers. In particular, the word ‘four’ appears in (1) in the position of an adjective or determiner, whereas it seems to be a name for a number in (2). Furthermore, (2) appears to be an identity statement claiming that what two number terms stand for is the same thing. Several authors have propo…Read more
  •  66
    An under-explored intermediate position between traditional materialism and traditional idealism is the view that although the spatiotemporal world is purely material, minds nonetheless have a metaphysically special place in it. One way this can be is via a special role that subjects have in the metaphysics of material objects. Some metaphysical aspect of material objects might require the existence of subjects. This would support that minds must exist if material objects exist and thus that a m…Read more
  •  16
    A Subject with No Object (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3): 723-727. 2001.
  •  74
    Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics
    Oxford University Press UK. 2016.
    Many significant problems in metaphysics are tied to ontological questions, but ontology and its relation to larger questions in metaphysics give rise to a series of puzzles that suggest that we don't fully understand what ontology is supposed to do, nor what ambitions metaphysics can have for finding out about what the world is like. Thomas Hofweber aims to solve these puzzles about ontology and consequently to make progress on four metaphysical debates tied to ontology: the philosophy of arith…Read more
  •  184
    Inexpressible properties and propositions
    In Dean W. Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics, Oxford University Press. pp. 155-206. 2008.
    Everyone working on metaphysical questions about properties or propositions knows the reaction that many non-philosophers, even nonmetaphysicians, have to such questions. Even though they agree that Fido is a dog and thus has the property (or feature or characteristic) of being a dog, it seems weird, suspicious, or confused to them to now ask what that thing, the property of being a dog, is. The same reservations do not carry over to asking what this thing, Fido, is. There is a substantial and l…Read more
  •  133
    In “Tense and Reality”, Kit Fine () proposed a novel way to think about realism about tense in the metaphysics of time. In particular, he explored two non-standard forms of realism about tense, arguing that they are to be preferred over standard forms of realism. In the process of defending his own preferred view, fragmentalism, he proposed a fragmentalist interpretation of the special theory of relativity, which will be our focus in this paper. After presenting Fine's position, we will raise a …Read more
  •  162
    Schiffer’s New Theory of Propositions (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (1). 2006.
    Every fifteen years or so Stephen Schiffer writes a state of the art book on the philosophy of language, with special emphasis on belief ascriptions, meaning, and propositions. The latest is his terrific new book The Things we Mean. It is again full of ideas, insights, arguments, expositions, and theories. For us, however, who believe that that-clauses are first and foremost clauses, not referring expressions, and that they thus do not refer to propositions or anything else, The Things we Mean b…Read more
  •  39
    Précis of Ontology and the Ambitions of Metaphysics
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 94 (2): 463-465. 2017.
  •  271
    Logic and ontology
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2005.
    A number of important philosophical problems are problems in the overlap of logic and ontology. Both logic and ontology are diverse fields within philosophy, and partly because of this there is not one single philosophical problem about the relation between logic and ontology. In this survey article we will first discuss what different philosophical projects are carried out under the headings of "logic" and "ontology" and then we will look at several areas where logic and ontology overlap.
  •  30
    Extraction, displacement, and focus: A Reply to Balcerak Jackson
    Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (3): 263-267. 2014.
  •  5
    Un enigma per l’ontologia
    Rivista di Estetica 32 (32): 41-69. 2006.
    1 Ontologia L’ontologia è la disciplina filosofica che cerca di scoprire che cosa c’è: quali entità costituiscono la realtà, di che materia è fatto il mondo? Dunque l’ontologia è parte della metafisica ed infatti sembra rappresentare all’incirca la metà della metafisica. Essa cerca di stabilire quali (generi di) cose ci siano, l’altra metà cerca di scoprire quali siano le proprietà (generali) di queste cose e quali relazioni (generali) intercorrano fra esse. La risoluzione di questioni nell’a...
  •  8
    A Subject with No Object (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 62 (3): 723-727. 2001.
  •  5
  •  173
    Inferential Role and the Ideal of Deductive Logic
    The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 5
    Although there is a prima facie strong case for a close connection between the meaning and inferential role of certain expressions, this connection seems seriously threatened by the semantic and logical paradoxes which rely on these inferential roles. Some philosophers have drawn radical conclusions from the paradoxes for the theory of meaning in general, and for which sentences in our language are true. I criticize these overreactions, and instead propose to distinguish two conceptions of infer…Read more
  •  79
    forthcoming in Meanings and other Things: essays on Stephen Schiffer Gary Ostertag (ed.) MIT Press 2007. Schiffer substantially changed his view about propositions and that-clauses somewhere between his two most recent books: Remnants of Meaning and The Things We Mean. I look at what problems his earlier view had, and what reason Schiffer gives for giving it up in favor of his more recent view. I argue that Schiffer’s reasons are not very good reasons, and that instead the problems for Remnants …Read more
  •  72
    The relevant alternatives approach in epistemology1 arose some years ago partly out of the hope to be able to reconcile our ordinary claims of knowledge with our inability to answer the skeptic. It was supposed to give rise to an account of knowledge according to which our ordinary claims of knowledge are true, even though the claims about our lack of knowledge that the skeptics make in one of their more persuasive moments are also true. To know, according to such an account, is to have evidence…Read more
  •  362
    The Meta-Problem of Change
    Noûs 43 (2). 2009.
    The problem of change plays a central role in the metaphysics of time and material objects, and whoever does best in solving this problem has a leg up when it comes to choosing a metaphysics of time and material objects. But whether this central role of the problem of change in metaphysics is legitimate is not at all clear. This is so in part since it is not clear what the problem of change is, and why it is a problem in metaphysics. We will investigate what metaphysical problem the problem of c…Read more