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7Metaphysical 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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42Type-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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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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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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78Definite 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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124Relational Order and Onto-Thematic RolesMetaphysica 12 (1): 1-18. 2011.States of affairs involving a non-symmetric relation such as loving are said to have a relational order, something that distinguishes, for instance, Romeo’s loving Juliet from Juliet’s loving Romeo. Relational order can be properly understood by appealing to o-roles, i.e., ontological counterparts of what linguists call thematic roles, e.g., agent, patient, instrument, and the like. This move allows us to meet the appropriate desiderata for a theory of relational order. In contrast, the main the…Read more
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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
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120Moderate presentismPhilosophical Studies 173 (3): 589-607. 2016.Typical presentism asserts that whatever exists is present. Moderate presentism more modestly claims that all events are present and thus acknowledges past and future times understood in a substantivalist sense, and past objects understood, following Williamson, as “ex-concrete.” It is argued that moderate presentism retains the most valuable features of typical presentism, while having considerable advantages in dealing with its most prominent difficulties
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37Diego Marconi, lexical competence, language, speech and communication seriesMinds and Machines 10 (3): 452-455. 2000.
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2Termini singolare, figure e co-referenzialitàAnnali Della Facoltà di Lettere E Filosofia. Università di Macerata 35 487-506. 2002.
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322Truth and Circular Definitions (review)Minds and Machines 6 (1). 1996.This original and enticing book provides a fresh, unifying perspective on many old and new logico-philosophical conundrums. Its basic thesis is that many concepts central in ordinary and philosophical discourse are inherently circular and thus cannot be fully understood as long as one remains within the confines of a standard theory of definitions. As an alternative, the authors develop a revision theory of definitions, which allows definitions to be circular without this giving rise to contradi…Read more
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199Bradley'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 Camer…Read more
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76Positions, Ordering Relations and O‐RolesDialectica 68 (2): 283-303. 2014.This paper first discusses how Russell and Hochberg have addressed some phenomena of relatedness, notably relational order, in a similarly ‘positionalist’ way, yet by appealing to different sorts of formal relations: “positions” in Russell's case and “ordering relations” in Hochberg's. After pointing out some shortcomings of both approaches, the paper then proposes an alternative view based on ‘o-roles’, which are, roughly speaking, ontological counterparts of the thematic roles postulated in li…Read more
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72A description theory of singular referenceDialectica 57 (1). 2003.According to the received view, descriptivism is a dead end in an attempt to account for singular reference by proper names, indexicals and possibly even incomplete descriptions, for they require referentialism. In contrast to this, I argue for an application of the former to all kinds of singular terms, indexicals in particular, by relying on a view of incomplete descriptions as elliptical in a pragmatic sense. I thus provide a general analysis of singular reference. The proposed approach is in…Read more
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8Logical rules, principles of reasoning and russell's paradoxIn Timothy Childers & Ondrej Majer (eds.), Logica Yearbook 2002, Filosofia. pp. 179--192. 2003.
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Guise TheoryIn Hans Burkhardt & Barry Smith (eds.), Handbook of metaphysics and ontology, Philosophia Verlag. pp. 338--341. 1991.
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15This moment and the next momentIn Giovanni Macchia, Francesco Orilia & Vincenzo Fano (eds.), Space and Time: A Priori and a Posteriori Studies, De Gruyter. pp. 171-194. 2014.This paper outlines a version of instantaneous presentism, according to which the present is a point-like instant, and defends it from two prominent objections. The first one has to do with the difficulty of accounting, from the point of view of instantaneous presentism, for the existence of events that take time, dynamic events, which cannot be confined to a single instant. The second objection is of a Zenonian nature and arises once time is viewed as a continuum that can be subdivided ad infi…Read more
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32Analytic Philosophy of Fiction: Editor's IntroductionRevue Internationale de Philosophie 262 (4): 481-482. 2012.
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9Metaphysical Realism and Castañeda’s Minimal Transcendental RealismIn Guido Bonino, Greg Jesson & Javier Cumpa (eds.), Defending Realism: Ontological and Epistemological Investigations, De Gruyter. pp. 235-246. 2014.
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46A Contingent Russell's ParadoxNotre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 37 (1): 105-111. 1996.It is shown that two formally consistent type-free second-order systems, due to Cocchiarella, and based on the notion of homogeneous stratification, are subject to a contingent version of Russell's paradox
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I sintagmi nominali incompleti da un punto di vista cognitivoAnnali Della Facoltà di Lettere E Filosofia. Università di Macerata 36 241-248. 2003.
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198Do We Really Need a New B-theory of Time?Topoi 34 (1): 1-14. 2015.It is customary in current philosophy of time to distinguish between an A- (or tensed) and a B- (or tenseless) theory of time. It is also customary to distinguish between an old B-theory of time, and a new B-theory of time. We may say that the former holds both semantic atensionalism and ontological atensionalism, whereas the latter gives up semantic atensionalism and retains ontological atensionalism. It is typically assumed that the B-theorists have been induced by advances in the philosophy o…Read more
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30Tradition and innovation in ontology: the case of propositions and states of affairsPhilosophical News 5. 2012.I shall explain the notions of propositions and states of affairs as they are understood in the current ontological debate and I shall briefly relate them to similar notions in Aristotle and some Medieval authors. In contrast with the point of view of some philosophers who identify propositions and states of affairs, I shall argue that they need to be sharply distinguished. I shall then move on to a problem for propositions and, above all, states of affairs, known as Bradley’s regress, and hint …Read more
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57Belief representation in a deductivist type-free doxastic logicMinds and Machines 4 (2): 163-203. 1994.Konolige''s technical notion of belief based on deduction structures is briefly reviewed and its usefulness for the design of artificial agents with limited representational and deductive capacities is pointed out. The design of artificial agents with more sophisticated representational and deductive capacities is then taken into account. Extended representational capacities require in the first place a solution to the intensional context problems. As an alternative to Konolige''s modal first-or…Read more
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88Property theory and the revision theory of definitionsJournal of Symbolic Logic 65 (1): 212-246. 2000.Russell’s type theory has been the standard property theory for years, relying on rigid type distinctions at the grammatical level to circumvent the paradoxes of predication. In recent years it has been convincingly argued by Bealer, Cochiarella, Turner and others that many linguistic and ontological data are best accounted for by using a type-free property theory. In the spirit of exploring alternatives and “to have as many opportunities as possible for theory comparison”, this paper presents a…Read more