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48Intensional Transitives and PresuppositionsCritica 40 (120): 129-139. 2008.My commentators point to respects in which the picture provided in Reference without Referents is incomplete. The picture provided no account of how sentences constructed from intensional verbs can be true when one of the referring expressions fails to refer. And it gave an incomplete, and possibly misleading, account of how to understand certain serious uses of fictional names, as in "Anna Karenina is more intelligent than Emma Bovary" and "Anna Karenina does not exist". In the present response…Read more
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578Scott Soames, philosophical analysis in the twentieth century: Volume 1: The dawn of analysis (review)Philosophical Studies 129 (3). 2006.The review praises the philosophical quality, but is less enthusiastic about the scholarship and historical accuracy.
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324Fiction and FictionalismRoutledge. 2009.Are fictional characters such as Sherlock Holmes real? What can fiction tell us about the nature of truth and reality? In this excellent introduction to the problem of fictionalism R. M. Sainsbury covers the following key topics: what is fiction? realism about fictional objects, including the arguments that fictional objects are real but non-existent; real but non-factual; real but non-concrete the relationship between fictional characters and non-actual worlds fictional entities as abstract art…Read more
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RussellIn Ted Honderich (ed.), The Philosophers: Introducing Great Western Thinkers, Oxford University Press. 1999.
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1963Concepts without boundariesIn Rosanna Keefe & Peter Smith (eds.), Vagueness: A Reader, Mit Press. pp. 186-205. 1996.
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7Option negation and dialetheiasIn Graham Priest, Jc Beall & Bradley P. Armour-Garb (eds.), The Law of Non-Contradiction : New Philosophical Essays, Oxford University Press. pp. 85--92. 2004.
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115
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86Benevolence and evilAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 58 (2). 1980.This Article does not have an abstract
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42Tolerating VaguenessProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 89. 1989.R. M. Sainsbury; III*—Tolerating Vagueness, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 89, Issue 1, 1 June 1989, Pages 33–48, https://doi.org/10.1093/arist.
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3Semantic Theory and Grammatical StructureAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 54 (1): 133-172. 1980.
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10Indexicals and Reported SpeechIn T. J. Smiley & Thomas Baldwin (eds.), Studies in the Philosophy of Logic and Knowledge, Published For the British Academy By Oxford University Press. pp. 209. 2004.
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457'Of course there are fictional characters'Revue Internationale de Philosophie 262 (4): 615-40. 2012.There is no straightforward inference from there being fictional characters to any interesting form of realism. One reason is that “fictional” may be an intensional operator with wide scope, depriving the quantifier of its usual force. Another is that not all uses of “there are” are ontologically committing. A realist needs to show that neither of these phenomena are present in “There are fictional characters”. Other roads to realism run into difficulties when negotiating the role that presuppos…Read more
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English speakers should use "I" to refer to themselvesIn Anthony Hatzimoysis (ed.), Self-Knowledge, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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1Philosophical LogicIn Dermot Moran (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy, Abingdon, Routledge 2008: 347–81., . 2008.
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2Review of Simon Blackburn: Spreading the Word: Groundings in the Philosophy of Language (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 36 (2): 211-215. 1985.
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98Names, fictional names, and 'really'Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 73 (1). 1999.[R. M. Sainsbury] Evans argued that most ordinary proper names were Russellian: to suppose that they have no bearer is to suppose that they have no meaning. The first part of this paper addresses Evans's arguments, and finds them wanting. Evans also claimed that the logical form of some negative existential sentences involves 'really' (e.g. 'Hamlet didn't really exist'). One might be tempted by the view, even if one did not accept its Russellian motivation. However, I suggest that Evans gives no…Read more
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128Vagueness, ignorance, and Margin for error (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 46 (4): 589-601. 1995.
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55Is There Higher-order Vagueness?Philosophical Quarterly 41 (163): 167-182. 1991.I argue against a standard conception of classification, according to which concepts classify by drawing boundaries. This conception cannot properly account for "higher-order vagueness." I discuss in detail claims by Crispin Wright about "definitely," and its connection with higher-order vagueness. Contrary to Wright, I argue that the line between definite cases of red and borderline ones is not sharp. I suggest a new conception of classification: many concepts classify without drawing boundarie…Read more
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597The essence of referenceIn Ernest Lepore & Barry Smith (eds.), he Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Language, Oxford University Press. 2008.People use words and concepts to refer to things. There are agents who refer, there are acts of referring, and there are tools to refer with: words and concepts. Reference is a relation between people and things, and also between words or concepts and things, and perhaps it involves all three things at once. It is not just any relation between an action or word and a thing; the list of things which can refer, people, words and concepts, is probably not complete ; and a complete account would nee…Read more
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113Review: Crispin Wright: Truth and Objectivity (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (4). 1996.This belongs to a symposium about Crispin Wright's Truth\nand Objectivity. Wright entertains the "possibility of a\npluralist view of truth." I suggest that this should not\nentail ambiguity in the word "true." For truth to amount to\ndifferent things for different kinds of subject matter no\nmore entails ambiguity than does the fact that existence\namounts to different things for different kinds of entity.\nTurning to cognitive command, I argue that it is trivially\nsatisfied: if I judge that p…Read more
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