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30Bradley's Regress and Ungrounded Dependence Chains: A Reply to CameronDialectica 63 (3): 333-341. 2009.A version of Bradley's regress can be endorsed in an effort to address the problem of the unity of states of affairs or facts, thereby arriving at a doctrine that I have called fact infinitism. A consequence of it is the denial of the thesis, WF, that all chains of ontological dependence are well‐founded or grounded. Cameron has recently rejected fact infinitism by arguing that WF, albeit not necessarily true, is however contingently true. Here fact infinitism is supported by showing that Camero…Read more
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5About the authorsIn Vincenzo Fano, Francesco Orilia & Giovanni Macchia (eds.), Space and Time: A Priori and a Posteriori Studies, De Gruyter. pp. 273-276. 2014.
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8Metaphysical Realism and Castañeda’s Minimal Transcendental RealismIn Adriano Palma (ed.), Castañeda and His Guises: Essays on the Work of Hector-Neri Castañeda, De Gruyter. pp. 97-106. 2014.
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28Type-free Property Theory, Bradley's Regress and Meinong and Russell ReconceiledGrazer Philosophische Studien 39 (1): 103-125. 1991.The type-free property-theoretic system EC, based on the mediation view of predication, is presented. According to the mediation view, the copula or exemplification is a necessary component of every proposition. It is explained how the system EC relates to Bradley's Regress regarding predication. Finally, the system EC is applied to the Meinong-Russell debate on non-existent objects and it is shown how EC allows us to preserve some important intuitions of both Meinong and Russell
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145Dynamic events and presentismPhilosophical Studies 160 (3): 407-414. 2012.Dynamic events such as a rolling ball moving from one place to another involve change and time intervals and thus presumably successions of static events occurring one after the other, e.g., the ball’s being at a certain place and then at another place during the interval in question. When dynamic events are experienced they should count as present and thus as existent from a presentist point of view. But this seems to imply the existence of the static events involved in them. This in turn seems…Read more
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46The property-theoretical, performative-nominalistic theory of proper namesDialectica 54 (3). 2000.This paper embeds a theory of proper names in a general approach to singular reference based on type‐free property theory. It is proposed that a proper name “N” is a sortal common noun whose meaning is essentially tied to the linguistic type “N”. Moreover, “N” can be singularly referring insofar as it is elliptical for a definite description of the form the “N” Following Montague, the meaning of a definite description is taken to be a property of properties. The proposed theory fulfils the major…Read more
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52Armstrong’s Supervenience and Ontological DependenceIn Francesco Federico Calemi (ed.), Metaphysics and Scientific Realism: Essays in Honour of David Malet Armstrong, De Gruyter. pp. 233-252. 2016.
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305Stati di cose, esemplificazione e regresso di BradleyRivista di Filosofia 97 (3): 349-386. 2006.This paper examines the challenge that the argument known as "Bradley's regress" poses to the friends of states of affairs (facts), in its requesting an explanation of the existence of a fact as a unitary whole in addition to its constituents. All the main theoretical options, short of denying that there are facts, are considered. It is argued that only two of them are viable, namely a "Brute fact approach", according to which the existence of a fact cannot be explained with the typical tools of…Read more
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25Natural Language Semantics and Guise TheoryDissertation, Indiana University. 1986.I assume that the task of natural language semantics is to provide an unambiguous logical language into which natural language can be translated in such a way that the translating expressions display a structure which is isomorphic to the meaning of the translated expressions. Since language is a means of thinking and communicating mental contents, the meanings of singular terms cannot be the individuals of the substratist tradition, because such individuals are not cognizable entities. Thus I p…Read more
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62Argument deletion, thematic roles, and Leibniz's logico-grammatical analysis of relationsHistory and Philosophy of Logic 21 (2): 147-162. 2000.I present a formal framework historically faithful to Leibniz's analysis of relational sentences, which: (i) engrafts thematic roles and the non-truth-functional connective insofar as (quatenus) into the monadic fragment of first-order logic; (ii) suggests a plausible ontological picture of thematic roles and relational facts; (iii) supports argument deletion and related inferential patterns that are not taken into account by standard first-order logic
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Logica e teologia: l'argomento ontologico di Kurt GoedelNuova Civiltà Delle Macchine 12 (4): 95-104. 1994.
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2Considerazioni ontologiche e semantico-pragmatiche sulle prodizioniAnnali Della Facoltà di Lettere E Filosofia. Università di Macerata 38 413-420. 2005.
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37The Eightfold Ambiguity of Oratia Obliqua SentencesGrazer Philosophische Studien 47 (1): 197-205. 1994.Sentences such as "Holmes believes that the leader of the London gang is about to be incriminated" are commonly understood to have two readings: de re and de diclo. On the basis of the way which the de relde dicto distinction is customarily conveyed, it is shown that such sentences have not just two but eight readings. It is suggested that intensional entities - such as senses, guises or denoting concepts - are the most natural way to account for this variety of readings.
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61Quantum-mechanical Statistics and the Inclusivist Approach to the Nature of ParticularsSynthese 148 (1): 57-77. 2006.There have been attempts to derive anti-haeccetistic conclusions from the fact that quantum mechanics (QM) appeals to non-standard statistics. Since in fact QM acknowledges two kinds of such statistics, Bose-Einstein and Fermi-Dirac, I argue that we could in the same vein derive the sharper anti-haeccetistic conclusion that bosons are bundles of tropes and fermions are bundles of universals. Moreover, since standard statistics is still appropriate at the macrolevel, we could also venture to say …Read more
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46Metaphor and Truth-MakersJournal of Philosophical Research 26 103-129. 2001.This paper builds on Lakoff’s and Johnson’s theory of metaphorical concepts to propose that our conception of truth as correspondence with reality is metaphorically based on our conception of perceptual fields. In particular, it is argued that parts of reality, as metaphorically understood in terms of parts of perceptual fields, can play the role of objective truth-makers for sentences with empirical content; for instance, they meet the constraints on correspondence put forward by Barry Smith. F…Read more
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11Type-free Property Theory, Bradley's Regress and Meinong and Russell ReconceiledGrazer Philosophische Studien 39 (1): 103-125. 1991.The type-free property-theoretic system EC, based on the mediation view of predication, is presented. According to the mediation view, the copula or exemplification is a necessary component of every proposition. It is explained how the system EC relates to Bradley's Regress regarding predication. Finally, the system EC is applied to the Meinong-Russell debate on non-existent objects and it is shown how EC allows us to preserve some important intuitions of both Meinong and Russell.
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54A theory of fictional entities based on denoting conceptsRevue Internationale de Philosophie 262 (4): 577-592. 2012.There are many data suggesting that we should acknowledge fictional entities in our ontological inventory, in spite of the paraphrasing strategies that Russell’s theory of descriptions can offer. Thus the realist attitude toward fictional entities of Meinongian and artifactualist accounts may seem well-motivated. Yet, these approaches infringe the Russellian “robust sense of reality.” A different realist account is proposed here, one that is compatible with the Russellian “robust sense of realit…Read more
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47States of affairs: Bradley vs. MeinongIn Venanzio Raspa (ed.), Meinongian issues in contemporary Italian philosophy, Ontos. pp. 213--238. 2006.In line with much current literature, Bradley’s regress is here discussed as an argument that casts doubt on the existence of states of affairs or facts, understood as complex entities working as truthmakers for true sentences or propositions. One should distinguish two versions of Bradley’s regress, which stem from two different tentative explanations of the unity of states of affairs. The first version actually shows that the corresponding explanation is incoherent; the second one merely point…Read more
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54Type-free property theory, exemplification and Russell's paradoxNotre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 32 (3): 432-447. 1991.This paper presents a type-free property-theoretic system in the spirit of a framework proposed by Menzel and then supplements it with a theory of truth and exemplification. The notions of a truth-relevantly complex (simple) sentence and of a truth-relevant subsentence are introduced and then used in order to motivate the proposed theory. Finally, it is shown how the theory avoids Russell's paradox and similar problems. Some potential applications to the foundations of mathematics and to natural…Read more
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20Goodman e i segni iconiciRivista di Estetica 38 165-180. 2008.1. Introduzione In questo lavoro cercherò di tratteggiare nelle sue linee essenziali la teoria dei segni iconici che emerge da quello che è forse il capolavoro di Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art, del 1968. Quest’opera è degna di essere considerata il locus classicus della reazione all’approccio tradizionale alla natura di tali segni, basato sulla nozione di somiglianza e tipicamente attribuito a Peirce. Infatti, in primo luogo, Goodman è particolarmente radicale nel contrapporsi a esso. a so...
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79Definite descriptions and existence attributionTopoi 6 (2): 133-138. 1987.The hierarchical analysis of existence attribution is Fregean in its endorsement of senses, understood as guises. Furthermore, the hierarchical analysis makes an essential use of the Russellian analysis (9′) as a means to understand what it is for a sense to present a given entity (cf. biconditional (11) above). The hierarchical analysis, on the other hand, is more general than the Russellian one and hence - in accordance with natural language usage - allows for a wider range of applications
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13The Eightfold Ambiguity of Oratia Obliqua SentencesGrazer Philosophische Studien 47 (1): 197-205. 1994.Sentences such as "Holmes believes that the leader of the London gang is about to be incriminated" are commonly understood to have two readings: de re and de diclo. On the basis of the way which the de relde dicto distinction is customarily conveyed, it is shown that such sentences have not just two but eight readings. It is suggested that intensional entities - such as senses, guises or denoting concepts - are the most natural way to account for this variety of readings.
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20A Note on Analysis and Circular DefinitionsGrazer Philosophische Studien 54 107-113. 1998.Analyses, in the simplest form assertions that aim to capture an intimate link between two concepts, are viewed since Russell's theory of definite descriptions as analyzing descriptions. Analysis therefore has to obey the laws governing definitions including some form of a Substitutivity Principle (SP). Once (SP) is accepted the road to the paradox of analysis is open. Popular reactions to the paradox involve the fundamental assumption (SV) that sentences differing only in containing an analysan…Read more