Pleonastic entities are entities whose existence is secured by something-from-nothing transformations, these being conceptually valid inferences that take one from a statement in which no reference is made to a thing of a certain kind to a statement—often a pleonastic equivalent of the first statement—in which there is a reference to a thing of that kind. The possibility of pleonastic entities is further explained in terms of the notion of one theory being a conservative extension of another. Pr…
Read morePleonastic entities are entities whose existence is secured by something-from-nothing transformations, these being conceptually valid inferences that take one from a statement in which no reference is made to a thing of a certain kind to a statement—often a pleonastic equivalent of the first statement—in which there is a reference to a thing of that kind. The possibility of pleonastic entities is further explained in terms of the notion of one theory being a conservative extension of another. Propositions are pleonastic entities, and the way in which they are individuated shows how pleonastic propositions are both fine-grained and unstructured.
